Friday, January 6, 2012

Newt Is No Salamander

My son the statistician queried me on the Republican primaries as to which were winner-take-all and which were proportional. It is a very important aspect in counting up delegates as the Hillary advisers blew in 2008 (and they got skunked good by Obama). I looked for an all-encompassing website and haven't been fully successful yet, but Wikipedia, to the extent you trust it, may come closest.

Iowa was proportional so Romney gets one more delegate than Santorum, even if he topped him out (maybe) by his whopping eight votes. [Each state party has its own rules that get very complex. I prefer to comment on vague generalities as the rest of the media certainly does. But I'll try to check these out as it becomes necessary.]

While this delegate count is important to watch, I have no doubt that Romney is still the inevitable Republican nominee. Santorum has a best a few more weeks in the spotlight. He is destined for self-destruction on his policies and personality as much as Palin, Pawlenty, Trump, Backmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and (did I miss anybody?).

The main entertainment left is to watch Gingrich's self-immolation. The medieval legends were that it is the salamander, not the newt, that is a creature of fire. Gingrich's anger and hypocrisy blew him up in the 90's. He will do it again as he trains his flame-thrower on Romney and it will bend back on him where it belongs.

It's not that Romney may not deserve the withering criticism. He probably does. The irony for me is that the horrible sins Gingrich is using for his attack are those moderate things I used to like about Romney before his turn to the right. The more Gingrich turns up the heat and burns himself in the process, it will singe Romney with the extreme conservatives of the Republican party. And watch for the veiled, or not-so-veiled, attacks on Romney's religion especially as we move closer to South Carolina. And I still think that's all good to help get Mormons and Utahns away from the national Republican Party base--and the Republican base away from their party's eventual nominee.

As goes South Carolina, so goes the Confederacy. (I've been waiting to use that line. I may use it again. Get used to it.)

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