New Hampshire. Tonight.

Tonight, I'll be waiting for a flight (home!!!) at the airport... So no worries, I'll be here with you for at least the first 90 minutes of New Hampshire primary results. It seems we all know the "winner" already, but there may yet be some real intrigue as we see who actually "wins" the expectations game and following media cycle.

Oh, and later this week we'll be talking more about how the series of events and political theatrics since Iowa and New Hampshire affect this guy. So stay tuned here at Nevada Progressive. Tonight should be fun.

Maybe Nevada Does Matter, After All?

Now that Mitt Romney's real record of "job cremation" has come to the forefront...

“I would not put the cart before the horse and define him as an unambiguous frontrunner,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told TPM in an interview at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He’s coming off what at some point probably won't even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state. [...]

“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”

The other Republican candidates are ready to pounce. Apparently, some in the G-O-TEA are already getting sick and tired of a certain someone's "pious baloney"...



While others are, strangely enough, getting sick and tired of the media. For all his desperate pleas for media attention, Jon Huntsman rejects it when he finally gets some.

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So what's going on here? The state of the race is in flux yet again. Mitt Romney still can't seal the deal, or even break 20% (!!!!), nationally. And in New Hampshire, the state where he now owns a house and next door to where he was once Governor, he can't even break 40%. The Republican Party faces a weird dilemma where it has a "clear frontrunner" (Romney) who's also simultaneously a "weak frontrunner". But because no single "anti-Romney" has yet emerged, he's been able to skate by with minority support.

Is this about to change?



Enter Sheldon Adelson. Apparently, he's Newt Gingrich's BFF. And apparently, he's just as mad as Newt about Romney trying to steal his "true conservative" thunder. So now, he's about to hit Romney right on his proverbial Achilles' Heel: Bain Capital. And what makes this even worse for Mittens is that "King Adelson of Macau" is about to target Romney in what may be his weakest early primary state: South Carolina, where Romney now clings to a fragile lead that may very soon evaporate once the "tea party" folks coalesce around one of their own.

So apparently, "we matter" again... Just not in the way Jon Ralston had originally imagined/desired. Amy Tarkanian may still be a complete joke who allowed the "tea party" loons to take over the Nevada GOP madhouse, but Sheldon Adelson is the local righties' top "money man" who can have more of an impact on the Republican primary war than any of the "Tark Sharks" could ever dream of. The Nevada GOP Caucus itself still looks to be a total train wreck in the making, but Adelson's emergence as Mitt Romney's worst nightmare ensures ensures that The Silver State will make some sort of impact on this increasingly weird primary fight.

And what really intrigues me here is that Sheldon Adelson indeed plans to hit Mitt Romney on his record of destroying American jobs at Bain Capital. Just as I had suspected last week, the Bain issue isn't just one that Democrats are now testing against Romney. It can also hurt him on the right side of the aisle, since "tea partiers" seem to hate slick "Wall Street elite" shipping American jobs overseas (even if they're all too often tricked into supporting these very policies that lead to the loss of American jobs) as much as all the rest of us. And Adelson clearly knows this, which is why he's targeting Romney's Achilles Heel in the exact state (South Carolina) where it can cause the most damage.

And funny enough, Mittens is playing right into Sheldon Adelson's hands.



So perhaps this G-O-TEA battle royale really isn't over just yet... And maybe Nevada really will play a significant role in it (just not in the way that benefits the Tarkanians or the state party).

Frothy Irrelevance?

Right now, everyone is asking what kind of role Nevada's GOP Caucus will have in this primary season. Apparently, there's a good chance it won't mean a hill of beans. We don't know yet how hard Rick Santorum really will be campaigning here, but now the $64,000,000 question is whether Santorum will be able to amass the kind of money he will need to take on Romney in bigger, more expensive, and more media dominant states like Florida and Ohio.

So what is to come in this primary season? That's what we still have to figure out. After all, there must be a reason why John McCain can't even remember Mitt Romney's name.



As we talked about earlier this week, a growing number of Republicans are realizing that they face a major "image problem" with Bain Capital "vulture capitalist" Mitt Romney leading their charge this fall... But how do they stop this speeding train? Can Rick Santorum amass enough money to stay competitive? Or is there enough time for some magical "dark horse" to emerge and stop this?

Nevada Republicans now look to face the ultimate "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" dilemma. If Romney looks to be wrapping up the nomination by the end of this month, then their caucus really will be irrelevant and they will end up with a whole lot of egg in their faces for caving into New Hampshire's Secretary of State and the RNC so quickly. But if Romney somehow stumbles in the next few days, loses the expectations game in New Hampshire, and allows someone else to gain momentum in South Carolina, then Romney will be under extra pressure to prevent a total meltdown here in Nevada along with a painfully prolonged primary season. So Nevada Republicans now have to pick their poison: either they stay irrelevant by letting Romney coast, or they risk more bruising battles ahead by giving Santorum, Paul, and Co. another look.

But then again, this may mostly be out of their hands. It's all on New Hampshire right now. And regardless of what happens here on the GOP side, the cards will be dealt on Tuesday night... Only for South Carolina and Florida to play those cards out and ultimately determine when Republicans will get a nominee. Perhaps Nevada Republicans have already become irrelevant?

Is It Over Just Yet?

Mitt Romney may be trying hard to crown himself as "the chosen one", but it may really not be over just yet. Rick Santorum is now hiring Nevada staff, and he's making noise about staying in the race for more primary and caucus contests to come. I guess that's why he's turning up the TEA-nuttery in New Hampshire and repeating the odious radical right lie about how much the working poor pay in taxes (and staying mum on how little big multinational corporations pay).



But wait, isn't Mitt "the establishment pick" with all the money and all the resources to lock this up and do so quickly? Perhaps so, but the G-O-TEA base won't let him.

Romney, who is expected to win in New Hampshire, still remains the leading candidate — but not a candidate with groundswell support from Republicans, said Eric Herzik, the chairman of the political science department at the University of Nevada, Reno.

“I’m not the only person saying this, but he (Romney) started the race (in Iowa) with 25 percent of the vote, and he ended the race with 25 percent of the vote,” said Herzik, a registered Republican. “That says Republicans have not warmed up to Mitt. And that is why Santorum is the next and probably last of the great evangelical conservative challengers.”

The fractured vote in Iowa showed that the Republican Party has issues, Herzik said.

“This is a party that is split among social conservatives, fiscal conservatives and those with antigovernment feelings, so the message of the Republican Party is not clear coming out of Iowa,” he said.

Unfortunately for Romney, Herzik is right. The G-O-TEA base is just not that into Mittens. No matter how hard his campaign tries to spin it into something else, that's what the Iowa results revealed.

How else could a candidate like former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who nearly beat the alleged frontrunner Romney in Iowa, actually compete after being in the single digits at the beginning of December? Voters have to really know they don’t want the conventional pick if they’ll go with someone who they really just heard about in the last few weeks of campaigning, even if Santorum did commit to retail politicking in the state.

The main idea seems to be that the GOP fractioning seen over the life of the Obama administration, from the real beginnings of the Tea Party movement, is really showing. If the same percentage of Republicans would be enthusiastic about Paul as they would be about Romney, then the field has reached a sort of ideological parity within the party — the proponents of the conventional choice no longer outnumber the rabble rousers. Of course, the idea would be to find a candidate that can unite the two, but as 2012 has shown, that candidate isn’t in the running.

And already, the same looks to be emerging in New Hampshire as well.

The "enthusiasm gap" has returned... But this time, it's the Republican Party that's suffering from it. They're still wrestling over what to do about Mitt. They know he's the "favorite son" of the Wall Street elite, but they also know he's hiding some deep, dark secrets in his tax returns that could come back to bite all of them later this fall. Oh, and there's that little "vulture capitalist" firm by the name of Bain Capital.

Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of layoffs at companies it bankrupted, such as American Pad & Paper, Dade International, and LIVE Entertainment, which Romney’s stat completely leaves out. He’s also taking credit for jobs created long after he left the firm to launch his political career. To sum it up, the stat Romney uses [to claim he's a "job creator"] is incredibly dishonest, like much of his jobs rhetoric.

One of Romney’s Bain business partners has said that he “never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors,” he added. And Bain has certainly done that, maximizing earnings “by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.” Due to a lucrative retirement deal, Romney is still making millions from Bain, as he goes across the country calling himself “middle class” and joking about being “unemployed.”

Despite Rick Santorum's constant attacks on the 99%, he's now seen by conservatives as "the blue collar guy" who's more relatable to "Middle America" than that white-collar, coastal, Bain Capital elitist. And that's telling. I guess some of these Republicans are starting to publicly admit they will have a major image problem if Romney emerges as their nominee. In an election when not just the nebulous, overarching theme of "the economy", but also the specific worries about income inequality and the slow decay of America's middle class, will be front and center, it just won't look right for the Republican nominee to be boasting of how much money he made while laying off American workers and shipping their jobs overseas.

One big mistake I've noticed in most "mainstream media" coverage of the Republican primary is the dismissal of Rick Santorum as a "One Issue Wonder" who's only claim to fame/infamy is his extreme religious right zeal. Now yes, that really is a big part of who he is as a politician. However, don't "misunderestimate" Santorum's ability to cut through the cultural divide on the right and appeal to those G-O-TEA "culture warriors" looking not just for someone who hates women and gays and people of color, but also someone who seems "populist" and in touch with them (even if Santorum's actual economic policies are just as pro-Wall Street-elite as Romney's). And no matter what ultimately happens to Santorum in the coming weeks, Romney's "99% problem" isn't going away any time soon.