DeSantis Squeezes Money from Lobbyists

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses campaign finance.

Matt Dixon and Jonathan Allen at NBC:

Officials who work for Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration — not his campaign — have been sending text messages to Florida lobbyists soliciting political contributions for DeSantis' presidential bid, a breach of traditional norms that has raised ethical and legal questions and left many here in the state capital shocked.

NBC News reviewed text messages from four DeSantis administration officials, including those directly in the governor's office and with leadership positions in state agencies. They requested the recipient of the message contribute to the governor’s campaign through a specific link that appeared to track who is giving as part of a “bundle” program.

“The bottom line is that the administration appears to be keeping tabs on who is giving, and are doing it using state staff,” a longtime Florida lobbyist said. “You are in a prisoner’s dilemma. They are going to remain in power. We all understand that.”

In 2011, Rich Galen explained how Texas Governor Rick Perry raised so much in-state money for his doomed presidential campaign:

• We do know that more than half Perry's money came from the donors in the State of Texas. As a very wise Texan told me when Perry first announced:

We are a Texas business. Perry is either going to be President of the United States or he's going to be Governor of Texas for the next three years. In either case, our name is going to be on that first finance report.

• We also know that about $13.5 million of Perry's money (nearly 80 percent) has come from donors who gave $2,500 which is the maximum amount. They can't give again in this primary season so we can assume the Perry campaign has been ramping up its small-donor program - the folks who give more modest amounts, but can be hit up again and again.

 

The State of Play

At RealClearPolitics, David Brady and Douglas Rivers analyze polls about Trump and the GOP nomination race, reaching these conclusions:

• First, that most of his support comes from candidates already in the race and not from newly inspired voters. 
• Second, his campaign drew from both the front-runners and the second-tier candidates and hurt Ted Cruz among the front-runners and Rick Perry among the second-tier candidates the most.
• Third, his support comes from across the full range of Republican identifiers but is slightly higher among those who are less well educated, earn less than $50,000 annually and are slightly older.
• Fourth, Tea Party respondents supported Trump at slightly lower levels than the totals for Cruz and Fiorina but higher than for the rest of the field.
• Fifth, if his candidacy falters or he quits the race, no single candidate benefits in more than the low double digits, and those he hurt the most—Cruz and Perry—probably do not make up their losses, notwithstanding Cruz’s machinations

Charles Cook writes at National Journal:

Clearly, something pro­found is hap­pen­ing in the usu­ally staid and or­derly party. Don­ald Trump is in first place not only in Iowa and New Hamp­shire, but in na­tion­al polling as well, av­er­aging more than a quarter of the vote. Ben Car­son, the re­tired neur­o­lo­gist, is now in second place in Iowa and na­tion­wide, and in a stat­ist­ic­al tie in New Hamp­shire with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a more tra­di­tion­al can­did­ate. That Jeb Bush is av­er­aging single-di­git per­form­ances in both cru­cial states and na­tion­ally is just as per­plex­ing.

Should we see this as a re­bel­lion against ca­reer politi­cians and the GOP es­tab­lish­ment? Or, is roughly 40 per­cent of the GOP elect­or­ate throw­ing a tem­per tan­trum? The an­swer is: both.

...
Not all Re­pub­lic­ans are rebels, however. Na­tion­ally, al­most 60 per­cent of Re­pub­lic­ans are still the philo­soph­ic­al and styl­ist­ic des­cend­ants of the party that pro­duced Pres­id­ents Eis­en­hower, Nix­on, Re­agan, and both Bushes—the GOP that once ap­proved of Ger­ald Ford, Bob Dole, John Mc­Cain, and Mitt Rom­ney. Even Re­agan, not to men­tion the Bushes, would have trouble meet­ing the GOP’s new lit­mus tests.

...
Among the tra­di­tion­al Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ates, the Bush cam­paign is start­ing to air tele­vi­sion ads—and he had bet­ter hope they work. Con­ven­tion­al Re­pub­lic­an voters are still win­dow-shop­ping, but they don’t seem prone to linger be­fore Bush’s win­dow; they just keep mov­ing on. Kasich has shown signs of get­ting trac­tion, par­tic­u­larly in New Hamp­shire; he has already out­per­formed the ex­pect­a­tions that his late start would doom his cam­paign. It was Bush’s poor per­form­ance, the Kasich camp ex­plains, that drew the Ohio gov­ernor in­to the race.

Trump, Perry, a Turncoat, and The Wild Bunch

Jennifer Jacobs reports at The Des Moines Register:

Leaked emails show that the Iowan who is Donald Trump’s new national co-chairman was throwing bombs at him as recently as last month, expressing grave misgivings about the authenticity of Trump's religious faith and his conservatism.

“(Trump) left me with questions about his moral center and his foundational beliefs. ... His comments reveal no foundation in Christ, which is a big deal,” evangelical conservative activist Sam Clovis said in an email just 35 days before he quit his job as Republican Rick Perry’s Iowa chairman and signed on with Trump’s campaign.

In the emails, shared by Perry backers Wednesday with The Des Moines Register, Clovis castigated Trump for his past liberal positions and admission that he has never asked for God’s forgiveness for any wrongdoing.

In The Wild Bunch, William Holden said:

When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can't do that, you're like some animal, you're finished!

Perry at the National Press Club

At The National Press Club, Rick Perry became a born-again reform conservative.

From 2005 to 2007 more African-Americans moved to Texas than all but one
other state, that state being Georgia. Now many were coming from blue states, like New
York and Illinois and California. Many came from Louisiana, where they had lost their
homes due to Hurricane Katrina. But each one of those new residents were welcomed to
Texas with open arms. They came to a state with a booming economy. We kept taxes
low, regulations low. We kept frivolous lawsuits to a minimum. We worked hard to
educate every child.

Now let me be clear, we have not eliminated black poverty in Texas. But we have
made meaningful progress. In New York, the supplemental poverty rate for blacks is 26
percent. In California, it is 30 percent. In Washington, D.C. it is 33 percent. In Texas, it is just 20 percent. And here is how it happened. We curtailed frivolous lawsuits and
unreasonable regulations. It’s far cheaper to do business in Dallas or Houston than it is in
Baltimore or in Detroit. And those lower costs, they get passed down to consumers,
especially low income consumers in the form of lower prices.

There's a lot of talk in Washington about inequality, income inequality. But there
is a lot less talk about the inequality that arises from the high cost of everyday life. In
blue state coastal cities you have these strict zoning laws, environmental regulations that
have prevented buildings from expanding the housing supply. And that may be great for
the venture capitalist who wants to keep a nice view of San Francisco Bay. But it’s not so great for the single mother working two jobs in order to pay rent and still put food on the table for her kids.

 If he had been this good during the 2012 campaign,he would have been the nominee.

Perry, Running Under Indictment

Rebecca Berg writes at RealClearPolitics:

Rick Perry is bringing some baggage with him on the campaign trail.

The former Texas governor, who will announce his second bid for president Thursday at an airport in Addison, Texas, near Dallas, still faces criminal charges stemming from an indictment last year, and the legal proceedings could dog Perry for months to come.

Perry is charged with abusing his power as governor when he used a veto threat to try to force an official to resign. When a judge in January refused to dismiss the case, Perry’s legal team appealed.

Now, the ongoing legal drama threatens to cast a pall on Perry’s campaign launch and distract from his candidacy.

Jonathan Tilove writes:

But the bad news for Perry is that the field is large and fluid and his special virtues – leadership skills, executive experience and likabilty, which could make him broadly acceptable – aren’t necessarily unique. What is unique to him, not just in this field but it seems in the annals of American history, is that he is the first major candidate for president running for president while under indictment.

He and his team have done a very good job of presenting that fact in its best light, and making it almost an afterthought, if that, in most of what is now written about Perry. But, the fact remains that he is under indictment back in Austin, with no resolution in sight.

Cruz's Challenges

Katie Glueck reports at Politico:

When Ted Cruz officially launched his presidential bid on Monday, he joined the ranks of a group with a dismal recent track record. No other first-in candidate has won the presidency in the past 15 years, and only one, Al Gore, has even clinched a party nomination.
...
“It has nothing to do with getting in first. It has to do with, most of the time, the establishment candidates get nominated by both parties,” said Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor whose launch of an exploratory committee early two years before the 2004 election helped him lay the groundwork to achieve frontrunner status, even if it was short-lived. “It’s a function of the fact that those who get in first are usually fighting an uphill battle from the beginning.”

Anna Palmer writes at Politico:

After the theatrical launch of his presidential campaign Monday, Sen. Ted Cruz now faces a massive hurdle: raising the tens of millions of dollars it will take to mount a year-and-a-half long campaign.

The Texas Republican and tea party darling is months behind his competitors in recruiting the megadonors and bundlers essential to a credible GOP primary bid. He’s not well-liked among cash-flush lobbyists. And his uncompromising policy positions and role in forcing the government shutdown in 2013 didn’t exactly excite the financiers and business executives who make up the elite donor class. Those considerations, along with the need to capture attention in a crowded field of conservatives, contributed to the decision to become the first Republican to formally enter the race.

Manu Raju reports that John Cornyn is not endorsing Cruz, proving that the world is round.

“You know, we’ve got a lot of Texans who are running for president, so I’m going to watch from the sidelines,” Cornyn said when asked if he would back Cruz. (Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry is considering a run as well.)

Cornyn denied his position was retribution for Cruz’s refusal to back him during his Senate primary last year.

Four GOP Brackets

Charles Cook identifies four brackets in the GOP nomination contest:

First there is the establishment bracket, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and possibly former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney competing for that semifinal slot. Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina would likely fit into this group. GOP nominees traditionally come from this bracket.

Then there is the conservative governor/former governor slot—with, potentially, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker competing, all seeking to be non-Washington and non-Congress candidates, but each with more conservative, or at least better conservative, credentials than Bush, Christie, or Romney. In this anti-Washington environment, being able to say that you effectively governed, in contrast with Congress and Washington, certainly has some advantages among the non-purist conservatives.

In the third bracket are the more identifiably tea-party candidates, principally Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, but also former Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, possibly former 2008 vice presidential nominee and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and even real-estate mogul Donald Trump (though both Palin and Trump are unlikely to make it past the first lap if they end up entering at all). This bracket is for the "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" conservatives.

Finally, there is the social, cultural, and religious conservative bracket, made up primarily of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, tapping into the same feelings as the third group but with a distinctly moral dimension.

Problems of the Legacy Candidates

At The Washington Examiner, Byron York lays out 12 keys to understanding the GOP presidential contest. Several involve the legacy candidates, who have either run before (Romney, Huckabee, Santorum) or, in Bush's case, have a family history.  It is hard to put the band back together:  times change, people move on.

Romney loyalists are deeply ambivalent about another run. A remarkable number of former Romney staff and supporters admire him tremendously and remain steadfastly loyal. They have told him as much on a number of occasions over the last few years. But now some worry that Romney has perhaps misinterpreted their heartfelt expressions of support as encouragement to run again in 2016. They still believe he would be a good president, but they do not think it will be possible for Romney to rid himself of 2012 baggage in order to get the clean start necessary to run a winning campaign.

The Bush family network isn't as strong as some believe. There has been much talk of the vaunted Bush political machine, which is said to give Jeb Bush a big advantage even before the 2016 race officially begins. Jeb Bush himself has been calling donors and has told some of them that he hopes they will again support "the family." But the fact is, it has been a while since the Bush machine was in operation here in Iowa. It was last up and running in 2004, for the re-election of George W. Bush, and last at work for the caucuses in 2000, for W's first run. For the 2016 race, that means the machine has been out of action for a long time. Many Bush donors from 2000 and 2004 became Romney donors in 2008 and 2012. They have conflicted loyalties, and not all of them will rejoin the family.
...
Rick Santorum is in very bad shape. One would think the former Pennsylvania senator, as the (narrow) winner of the 2012 caucuses, would have a lot of standing for another race. He doesn't. Many Republicans believe Santorum's earlier success was the result of a set of peculiar circumstances involving a weak and fragmented 2012 field. They admire how hard he worked that year, traveling around Iowa with a thoroughness and intensity that no other candidate could match. But they don't see it happening again with a stronger field in 2016. And they don't see Santorum surviving a loss in the state he won before.

York notes that Rick Perry has a slim chance.  Another point about Perry:  last time, much of his money came from Texas business interests eager to court the favor of the incumbent governor.  Now that he is out of office, a lot of that money will evaporate.

They Knew

The Washington Post reports that a team of experts visited a Brownsville Border Patrol site last year and saw the coming surge of young migrants.  

Thirty Border Patrol agents were assigned in August 2013 to drive the children to off-site showers, wash their clothes and make them sandwiches. As soon as those children were placed in temporary shelters, more arrived. An average of 66 were apprehended each day on the border and more than 24,000 cycled through Texas patrol stations in 2013. In a 41-page report to the Department of Homeland Security, the team from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) raised alarms about the federal government’s capacity to manage a situation that was expected to grow worse. 

The researchers’ observations were among the warning signs conveyed to the Obama administration over the past two years as a surge of Central American minors has crossed into south Texas illegally. More than 57,000 have entered the United States this year, swamping federal resources and catching the government unprepared. 

The administration did too little to heed those warnings, according to interviews with former government officials, outside experts and immigrant advocates, leading to an inadequate response that contributed to this summer’s escalating crisis. [emphasis added]

Federal officials viewed the situation as a “local problem,” said Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former Border Patrol station chief who led the UTEP study. The research, conducted last year, was funded by the Department of Homeland Security and published in March. A broader crisis was “not on anyone’s radar,” Manjarrez added, even though “it was pretty clear this number of kids was going to be the new baseline.”

 The story's revelations about congressional Democrats are just as politically hazardous:

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) said Democrats recognized the urgency but feared that if they raised too much of a public outcry, it would create political blowback for the Obama administration’s push to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul....
Democrats worried that the escalating border crisis would help Republicans make a case that the administration’s policies had failed, Roybal-Allard said. 

“That was always a concern of mine: How to address the issue in a way that did not detract from the need for comprehensive immigration reform,” she said.

Rick Perry, like Mitt Romney, is having a "See I Told You So" moment.  Over two years ago, The Texas Tribune reported:

Citing an unprecedented level of unaccompanied illegal-immigrant minors breaching the U.S.-Mexico border, Gov.Rick Perry sent a letter Friday asking the Obama administration to address the “humanitarian crisis.” 

Calling the issue a byproduct of Obama’s failed effort to secure the border, Perry citesrecent media reports that indicate 5,200 unaccompanied and illegal-immigrant minors crossed into the country during the first six months of the 2012 fiscal year, including 1,300 in March alone. It is unclear from the letter how many minors crossed into Texas. 

“To be clear, Texas has been working diligently to protect the immediate health and safety of our citizens and the unaccompanied minors now in our state. However, by failing to take immediate action to return these minors to their countries of origin and prevent and discourage others from coming here, the federal government is perpetuating the problem,” Perry wrote.

Christie and Walker

David Umhoefer writes at The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Will Gov. Scott Walker zoom past New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on his motorcycle thanks to the developing scandal related to creation of traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge?
So says John Hayward at Human Events.

"One of the little preliminary races that pundits have been placing some early bets on, years out from the 2016 presidential election, is whether the Establishment Guy in the GOP primary would be Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie," Hayward blogged. "The race may just have been settled..."

Not so fast, counters Peter Grier, Washington editor at the Christian Science Monitor.

"Does it show that Christie is a bully who at the least created an atmosphere where such vindictiveness could flourish? His opponents think that already, and in “Bridge-ghazi” will see confirmation of their view," writes Grier. "Is he a take-charge guy who is willing to break a little china to get stuff done? There are probably lots of Republican primary voters who do not believe that jamming up New York City’s intake routes is a bad thing."

Back in November, John Dickerson wrote in Slate that if governors have an edge over senators, Walker would be Christie's main competition.

That narrows the field down to the pool of leading current and former Republican governors: Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, Rick Perry, and Walker. All of those men have something to recommend them, but "no one checks as many boxes as Walker does," as an Iowa GOP strategist puts it. Walker has near hero status in the grassroots for taking on Wisconsin’s public sector unions. Cruz talks about taking stands on principle, but he lost his fight. Walker took a stand, was targeted by the full force of the Democratic machine, and stayed alive. He won a recall election with a larger margin than his original victory. He raised $30 million for that race, so he knows how to tap wealthy donors. Social conservatives also consider him one of their own for his pro-life views and his pedigree: His father was a Baptist minister.

Jindal and Perry have supporters in conservative circles, but Jindal can't match Walker's union-slaying story and Perry's accomplishments won't help him overcome the memories of his disastrous 2012 run. If the incentive is to pick a Christie alternative who can survive, it also helps if the candidate comes from a battleground state—even better if they come from a swing state in the Midwest. Walker also brings helpful connections to Iowa, that early caucus state. Besides governing in nearby Wisconsin, Walker grew up in Iowa. Right now GOP operatives describe the competition in the Hawkeye State as one between Rand Paul (whose forces control the state party) and Sen. Ted Cruz (who excites the base).

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush hails from a swing state, but he himself has admitted that he is out of step with the Republican Party on immigration. He may still be noodling a run, but he could easily be painted as a GOP moderate—and that space is already occupied by Christie. That leaves just John Kasich of Ohio. Like Walker, Kasich also took on the unions, but he lost. In the eyes of conservatives, he did something else that may be unpardonable: He took federal Medicaid money as a part of the Affordable Care Act. That robs Kasich of an issue he could have used to distinguish himself from Christie (who also took Medicaid money) and, say some conservatives, dismantles his ability to argue for smaller spending in Washington. Walker, on the other hand, refused the Medicaid money, and is launching his own state solution, which is receiving praise from conservatives.

The Twitter Primary

At The Washington Examiner, Hugh Hewitt writes about the Twitter power of potential GOP presidential candidates.

We won't know until three years from now what percentage of Twitter followings as of Dec. 13 turned into actual campaign activists or contributors, but there is no reason not to think that the "Twitter followers" number doesn't mean something given the importance the MSM talking heads pay to their own running totals. These totals are at least a measure of the potential candidates' online efforts.

Here's the Twitterific facts on the Twitter primary as of that day. Where the potential candidate has more than one account, I used the higher number of the two (or three). I have also rounded to the thousand. Their relative rank in "Twitter power" follows their actual number of "followers."

— Bolton: 108,000; 10
— Bush: 101,000; 11
— Christie: 420,000; 3
— Cruz: 234,000; 6
— Huckabee: 318,000; 5
— Jindal: 143,000; 9
— Kasich: 56,000; 13
— King: 17,000; 16
— Paul: 351,000; 4
— Perry: 210,000; 8
— Rubio: 475,000; 2
— Ryan: 561,000; 1
— Santorum: 222,000; 7
— Snyder: 30,000; 14
— Thune: 27,000; 15
— Walker: 73,000; 12

Perry Redux?

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that he will not seek reelection in 2014, leaving open the possibility of another presidential run in 2016.  Jay Root writes at The Texas Tribune:

Perry was at the top of his game as governor when he decided to throw himself into the 2012 presidential race. He entered the contest in August 2011, quickly raised millions and immediately shot to the top of the polls. But soon a series of missteps and gaffes began to drag down his once promising candidacy.

Then on Nov. 9, 2011, during a nationally televised debate in Michigan, Perry entered the political blooper hall of fame when he couldn’t remember the third of three federal departments he wanted to shut down if elected president.

“I would do away with the Education, the, uh, Commerce, and, let's see," Perry said toward the end of 53 seconds of campaign horror. “I can't. The third one I can't. Sorry. Oops.” (For the record, it was the Department of Energy.)

The embarrassment came as Perry’s campaign was struggling to revive a candidacy that had already become the stuff of late-night comedy routines. After the oops moment, he never recovered. Perry came in fifth in first-test Iowa, did not compete in New Hampshire and then withdrew before the South Carolina GOP primary — a southern state that had held promise for him — in January of last year.

Perry, who jumped into the race with almost no advance preparation, later pointed to his sudden entry in the contest and the health fallout from his July 2011 back surgery as major reasons why his candidacy faltered.

He’ll have a lot more time to prepare if he runs again as many expect, and analysts see a tough but not impossible road ahead for Perry should he get into the 2016 race.

Jim Henson, a Tribune pollster and head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said Perry has already made a first impression, and what voters saw was a gaffe-prone, shoot-from-the-hip Texan. Now the first order of business is dialing that back.

“The first task is not to establish an image, it’s to reset one,” Henson said. “That presents difficult, if not insurmountable problems.”

Reflecting on the Nomination Contest

The New York Times reports that Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades, acknowledged an error during a forum  at the Harvard University Institute of Politics.

When asked directly whether Mr. Romney regretted tacking to the right on immigration to appeal to conservative primary voters, the room fell silent.

Stuart Stevens, a senior strategist to Mr. Romney, shook his head no. But after pausing for several seconds, Mr. Rhoades said, “I regret that.”

He went on to explain that the campaign, in hindsight, had been too worried about a potential threat from Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who jumped into the race to challenge Mr. Romney as the jobs-and-economy candidate. For weeks in fall 2011, Mr. Romney hammered Mr. Perry on Social Security, particularly his calling the program a “Ponzi scheme” that should be overtaken by state governments.

In retrospect,” Mr. Rhoades said, “I believe that we could have probably just beaten Governor Perry with the Social Security hit.”

National Journal reports on Pawlenty and Perry:

 Pawlenty bet his campaign on the August 2011 Iowa straw poll, only to come in a distant third -- behind Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul – and drop out the next day. If he had skipped the straw poll, he might have gone all the way to the nomination or the White House. Until Perry got into the race, “we were most worried about Tim Pawlenty,” Rhoades said. He said Pawlenty’s retail campaign skills could have won him Iowa and New Hampshire, and “we had respect” for his jobs record as governor of Minnesota.

Phil Musser, a senior adviser to Pawlenty’s brief campaign, called the straw poll “a circus” and “a joke” and “a celebrity contest” that has run its course. “We made a fundamental strategic miscalculation about the level of investment that we chose to deploy there,” he said. One of the lessons of the 2012 campaign for top-tier candidates, he said, should be “don’t chase the shiny object.”

...
Strategist Dave Carney said that Perry expected to recover from what he considered minor back surgery in two weeks, but he was still having problems after four months. “It had a big impact” on his late-starting bid, Carney said. “The whole campaign was built upon a very aggressive, arduous schedule of travel in order to make up for lost time.” Perry’s discomfort affected his ability to stand, sleep, travel, study briefing materials, and pack his schedule with meetings, Carney said. If Perry had been pain-free and healthier, would he have given better speeches and been a better debater? And would that have made a difference? Hard to tell, given other problems such as Perry’s belated entry and lack of preparedness, but also hard not to wonder.

Time, Chance, and Mitt Romney

Tonight, Mitt Romney accepts the GOP nomination. One school of thought is that his nomination was more or less inevitable because Republicans pick the "next in line."  But although Romney had major advantages going into the race, there was nothing inevitable about his victory.

For one thing, Mike Huckabee won more delegates in 2008 than Romney, so he had as good a claim to the "next in line" title.  But he decided not to run.  Had Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbour gotten into the race, either could have raised serious money. Similarly, if Jon Huntsman had declined to serve in the Obama administration, he would have been much more credible to Republican primary voters and he would have had more opportunity to build his organization and warchest. By the time he actually ran, however, most Republicans knew little about him, and the rest thought he was tainted by the Obama connection.

Any of these three could have taken a big chunk of the traditional/establishment vote that went to Romney, thus making him more vulnerable to a credible challenge from the right.

That challenge could have come from Rick Perry -- if had started earlier and worked harder.  But Byron York nailed it back in October:

For Romney, debate preparation involves taking all the things he has already thought through and finding the most effective way to present them in one-minute answers. For Perry, debate preparation is trying to learn new stuff about national issues that he should have been thinking about a long time ago.

It's often pointed out that since Perry entered the Republican race late, on Aug. 13, he had little time to build a campaign organization and hone a campaign pitch. That's true, but the fact is, if Perry wanted to be president, he should have been thinking seriously about the substance of national issues -- not just money-raising and state chairmen -- years before he declared his candidacy.

Even before his famous "oops" moment, his campaign was heading south.

Bachmann, Cain, and Gingrich had moments in the sun, but none of them ever had a real chance of nomination.  Santorum, on the other hand, might have made life tougher for Romney if just a couple of things had gone differently.  If the Iowa GOP had produced an accurate vote count on caucus night, the story would have been "Santorum edges Romney in stunning upset."  If Santorum hadn't disrespected JFK, he might have carried the Catholic vote in the Michigan primary, which could have been enough for him to score yet another stunning upset.

In other words, "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." -- which is the Bible's way of saying "You didn't build that."

A Very Eventful Day

The Washington Post reports that Santorum won Iowa, sorta:

Former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) officially won the Iowa caucuses Thursday — 16 days after the last vote was cast — when state GOP officials said a final count showed him 34 votes ahead of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

That was a shift from the preliminary results announced after the Jan. 3 caucuses, which showed Romney winning Iowa by eight votes.

State officials said they still had not received any results from eight of the state’s 1,774 precincts. But now, they said, it was too late for the missing votes to count....

State GOP officials Thursday even seemed to cast doubt on their own final results: in a statement announcing the vote totals, state party chairman Matt Strawn avoided using the word “winner.” Instead, he simply “congratulated” Santorum and Romney “on a hard-fought effort during the closest contest in caucus history.”

CNN reports:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry suspended his struggling presidential campaign Thursday and threw his support to Newt Gingrich, a development that could alter the dynamics of the Republican race just two days before the tightening South Carolina primary.

"I believe Newt is a conservative visionary who can transform our country. We've had our differences, which campaigns will inevitably have, and Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?" Perry said at a press conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

It would have been a good day for Newt, except that his ex-wife filled in the details on the "not perfect" part. Brian Ross reports at ABC:

Newt Gingrich lacks the moral character to serve as President, his second ex-wife Marianne told ABC News, saying his campaign positions on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family values do not square with what she saw during their 18 years of marriage.

In her first television interview since the 1999 divorce, to be broadcast tonight on Nightline, Marianne Gingrich, a self-described conservative Republican, said she is coming forward now so voters can know what she knows about Gingrich.

CLICK HERE to see a preview of ABC News' exclusive broadcast interview with Marianne Gingrich and then catch the full interview tonight on ABC News' Nightline at 11:35 p.m. ET.

More from James Grimaldi at The Washington Post:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in 1999 asked his second wife for an “open marriage” or a divorce at the same time he was giving speeches around the country on family and religious values, his former wife, Marianne, told The Washington Post on Thursday.

Marianne Gingrich said she first heard from the former speaker about the divorce request as she was waiting in the home of her mother on May 11, 1999, her mother’s 84th birthday. Over the phone, as she was having dinner with her mother, Newt Gingrich said, “I want a divorce.”

Shocked, Marianne Gingrich replied: “Is there anybody else?” she recalled. “He was quiet. Within two seconds, when he didn’t immediately answer, I knew.”
The next day, Newt Gingrich gave a speech titled “The Demise of American Culture” to the Republican Women Leaders Forum in Erie, Pa., extolling the virtues of the founding fathers and criticizing liberal politicians for supporting tax increases, saying they hurt families and children.

“When a liberal talks about values, will he or she actually like us to teach American history?” Newt Gingrich told the women’s group. “Will they actually like young people to learn that George Washington was an ethical man? A man of standards, a man who earned the right to be father of this country?”

Why Romney is Ahead

At RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende offers two reasons for Romney's current lead:

• "The fact that Romney’s opponents have been vying for the same group of very conservative voters, combined with the fact that Romney has seldom been in first place, has kept the limelight off of him. "
• "The GOP has always preferred to nominate executives. Excluding sitting presidents running for re-election, nine of the 13 nominees since the 1932 election have either served as vice president, a governor, or been a four-star general. "  But for a variety of reasons, most other current and recent GOP governors are weak contenders.  (Jay Cost made a similar analysis in November.)

At The Weekly Standard, Cost compares Santorum's Iowa showing among various voter groups with Huckabee's.

Clearly, Huckabee did systematically better than Santorum, although a few of these are inside the margin of error. Romney’s advantage was that the rest of the 2008 Huckabee vote was spread across Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry.

Thus, Iowa is a metaphor for the whole 2012 Republican nomination campaign. It is not as though Mitt Romney has increased the breadth or depth of his support relative to 2012. At least not yet. Instead,his advantage is due primarily to the weakness of his opposition.

After all, not only did Romney lack a credible challenge from his right in Iowa, he is essentially unchallenged from his left, unlike in 2008 when he had to contend with Rudy Giuliani and John McCain. Next week in New Hampshire looks to be a total rout, in no small part because there is no John McCain-style candidate in the New Hampshire race.

Nobody to his left. No dominant figure to his right. Romney is in the catbird seat. That’s not an endorsement, just a statement of fact.  [See Cost's similar analysis in October.]

Perry and Romney: A Contrast in Campaign Quality

At Politico, Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman write that the Allbaugh team took over the Perry campaign from the much-touted Carney team and found incompetence:

"There has never been a more ineptly orchestrated, just unbelievably subpar campaign for president of the United States than this one,” said a senior Perry adviser. 

...

In a blistering indictment, sources close to the operation describe a new team that was stunned to arrive in October and find a campaign that wasn’t executing the most rudimentary elements of a modern presidential campaign: no polling or focus groups, no opposition research book on their own candidate to prepare for attacks and debate prep sessions that were barely worth the name.

Also at Politico, Reid J. Epstein paints a radically different picture of the Romney campaign:

The events start when they’re supposed to. The candidate says what he’s supposed to. The staff does what it’s supposed to.

To watch the Mitt Romney operation in action is to see Swiss precision applied to the campaign trail and it helps explain how he finds himself contending for victory in Iowa, a state he ignored for much of the campaign.

At CNN, former Romney adviser Alex Castellanos offers a backhanded compliment:

Whether Romney has run a brilliantly passive race or a fortunate one does not matter. Passionless, but not hollow, his campaign has been as buoyant as Styrofoam. Romney may continue to float downriver to the nomination, full of holes, on a rigid structure of air....

This gives us a preview of November 2012. Romney's noncampaign campaign may also be a brilliant strategy for the general election, the perfect way to receive a billion dollar's worth of negative bullets from Team Obama. Styrofoam is light but stronger than it looks. A few more holes won't sink it. And styrofoam runs neither hot nor cold: It is hard to love but, for the same reason, hard to hate. A Romney candidacy is more likely to make the general election a referendum on Obama's economy, not a choice between the candidates.

IN IA, 45% of Ads Are Anti-Newt

At CNN, Kevin Liptak reports:

Anyone seeking an explanation of GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's recent drop in Iowa polls may find answers in a new analysis of Iowa political advertising.

The survey, conducted by Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, finds 45% of all political ads in Iowa have been attack spots against Gingrich. Only 6% were supportive of the former House speaker.

 Gingrich's opponents were quick to pile on after he became the front-runner in December. A super PAC supportive of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney carried out a sustained assault on Gingrich's record, saying the former House speaker "has more baggage than the airlines."

Other candidates, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, produced ads that slammed Gingrich for being a Washington insider who was paid to influence votes after he left Congress. Gingrich has denied those charges.

Gingrich, Perry Fail to Make VA Ballot

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has failed to qualify for Virginia's presidential primary, the Republican Party of Virginia announced early Saturday.

The state GOP announced at 2:40 a.m. that Gingrich, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, had failed to amass the required 10,000 signatures of registered voters to qualify for the March 6 contest.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Rep. Ron Paul, certified earlier Friday by the state GOP, will be the only candidates on the ballot.

The stunning result means Gingrich — who lives in McLean, led among Virginia's GOP primary voters in the latest poll and is vying with Romney for national front-runner status — will not get a chance to compete with Romney in the state's primary.

Gingrich's list of Iowa supporters -- famously full of errors and inaccuracies -- foreshadowed his failure in Virginia. Sweating the details has never been his strength.

The Waves of the GOP Campaign

At The New York Times, Katherine Q. Seelye reports:

An analysis by The New York Times of more than 50 polls between June and last week shows a stark pattern of how voter sentiment shifted in defined blocks, first for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, then for Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, then to Herman Cain, the former business executive. Support for Mr. Romney and for Representative Ron Paul of Texas remained fairly static.

The Times charts the candates' rise and fall here.