Here Come the Real Fireworks
by Deacon Blues
Generally, the preferences of 110,000 Iowans towards the GOP field every four years aren’t predictive upon the eventual outcome. But the real drama with this year’s caucuses tonight isn’t so much about Iowa as it is for the next several weeks. It’s a hoot that the creator of modern GOP combat politics is now complaining about being taken out in Iowa by stealth PACs carpet bombing negative ads upon his noggin, but Newt Gingrich is doing exactly that.
Yes, Mitt Romney’s team has taken the Karl Rove playbook of a Tier One/Tier Two campaign and merged it with the Citizens United “corporations are people” BS that John Roberts codified into law, and run with it to destroy Newt in Iowa, perhaps because they really believe he’s the only thing standing between them and the nomination. Yes, the Mittster is using his stealth PACs to their full advantage. And yes, many of the mainstream talking heads are getting it wrong as evidenced by the talk fests on “Charlie Rose” and MSNBC when they state that Romney faces a clear path to the nomination once he gets past Iowa and New Hampshire, presumably because no one else has the money to stop him.
What these experts are overlooking is that Newt will be engaging in a typical mission of destruction against Romney every day between now and South Carolina. Newt has already started it today, and will hammer Romney as a lying, flip-flopping millionaire in every debate and every free media opportunity heading into South Carolina. The last time I checked, lying flip-flopping millionaires aren’t necessarily popular with the Tea Party base of the party. And if after hyping expectations and behaving like a lying flip-flopping millionaire hiding behind stealth PACs Romney doesn’t win Iowa by a decent margin, Rick Santorum gets another two weeks of life. If Romney then amplifies his problem by attacking the Roman Catholic Santorum over the coming weeks with more stealth PAC ads, then I can’t see how Romney does well in South Carolina.
I had to watch several pundit panels tell me yesterday, Charlie Cook and Matt Dowd among them, that Romney would have no problem using his organizational and stealth PAC advantages to stay far right and wipe out the field by Florida, and then pivot back to the middle and abandon everything he said to beat Obama in the fall as a moderate.
Really? Do these pundits think the GOP base will allow a man tagged repeatedly as a lying, flip-flopping millionaire hiding behind stealth PACs to sweep away real conservatives, only to then give their votes to him for the fall as he distances himself from all the video that Democrats will pound him with? The only reason conservatives would be expected to swallow their distaste for Romney is because he can get the black man out of the White House. But if Gingrich and others spend the next several weeks hammering in a new narrative that Romney is only using conservatives to get the nomination through deceit and stealth cash, only to abandon them in the fall, how willingly will the base go along?