Joe McQuaid en America's Newsroom (Fox News)

El editor del Union Leader explica su apoyo a Gingrich.

National Poll Position: Gingrich 32%, Romney 23%

Poll Position:

Una escena retrospectiva

Pat Buchanan se dirige a sus seguidores en Nashua en la víspera de la primaria de New Hampshire de 1996. Con el apoyo del Union Leader y con la oposición al NAFTA (Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte) como tema central de su campaña, el populista Buchanan causará un tremendo shock en el GOP y en el mundo de los negocios afín al partido, cuando al día siguiente derrote por escasos 3,000 votos al favorito Bob Dole.

Faltan 5 semanas para que todo empiece

First Read:

*** Five weeks to go: Here’s where we stand in the GOP presidential race with five weeks (36 days!!!) to go until the Iowa caucuses: 1) Mitt Romney remains the overall favorite -- with his money, campaign staff, and poll position -- but he hasn’t been able to pull away from the field, and he’s a TV ad away from being all-in in Iowa; 2) Newt Gingrich, fresh off from his New Hampshire Union Leader endorsement, has emerged as the latest Romney alternative, but the question is whether he can survive the next 36 days; (none of the OTHER anti-Romneys has lasted longer); 3) Rick Perry’s campaign appears stuck in neutral, though he did receive an endorsement from controversial Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio; 4) Ron Paul keeps on doing his thing, and is enlisting college students to help out his Iowa ground game; 5) Herman Cain is trying to bounce back from his foreign-policy stumbles and those sexual-harassment allegations; and 6) with all the twists and turns that we’ve seen so far, the next five weeks (and beyond) promise to be a wild ride. Bottom line: We don’t know how Romney is denied the nomination, but we also don’t know how he gets there, yet.

Récord de visitas presidenciales a estados decisivos

The Wall Street Journal:

When President Barack Obama jets to Scranton, Pa., Wednesday to promote his jobs package, he'll log his 56th event in a presidential battleground state this year, putting him well ahead of President George W. Bush's record-breaking swing-state travel in 2003.

Mr. Obama's extensive travels this year have opened the president to criticism from Republicans that he is intertwining campaigning and governing at a time when he has called for bipartisanship on intractable national problems. Most of the cost is typically born by taxpayers.

Between Jan. 1 and Nov. 17 of his third year in office, Bill Clinton held 40 events over 24 days in the battlegrounds of his time, according to data compiled by Brendan Doherty, a U.S. Naval Academy assistant professor who is widely viewed among political scientists as an expert on presidential travel. Over that same stretch, George W. Bush held 49 events in 34 days, drawing complaints from Democrats.

Mr. Obama has surpassed his predecessors in both categories; as of Nov. 17, he attended 54 events in 11 battleground states over 42 days. "Obama has certainly ramped up the volume," said Mr. Doherty, author of a forthcoming book called "The Rise of the President's Permanent Campaign."

De tal padre...

The Washington Post:

The candidate speaks about his beacon in the incandescent terms that sons reserve for idolized fathers.

“He’s the real deal,” Mitt Romney says, his use of the present tense indicative of how his late father’s legacy lives on for him.

The lessons handed down by the mentor included everything from a near-ascetic discipline to a low-key approach for defusing skeptics’ suspicions about their religion to the political principles that would shape the younger Romney’s life.

“He has been my greatest influence,” Romney says with a soft solemnity.

A popular Michigan governor, an evolving critic of the Vietnam War and a 1968 presidential candidate who led his Republican rivals in early polls until political catastrophe struck, George Romney often brought his youngest son along while campaigning. Former advisers admit to being stunned by how much Mitt looks like their old boss, marveling over the same square jaw and the thick, swept-back hair. But the memory of their relationship is complicated nowadays in Mitt Romney’s case, because his dad was a moderate with occasionally liberal fiscal positions, and Mitt Romney is trying to convince his Republican base that he likes none of those things.

At this moment, over the telephone, he is momentarily a son making the point that he is not his father’s clone. With some of his father’s old advisers arguing that he lacks his dad’s steadfast convictions, Mitt Romney tries to turn the force of their criticism to his advantage in a bit of political jujitsu. It speaks to his campaign’s pressures, and to his skeptics’ persistent doubts about his conservative bona fides, that Romney sometimes distances himself from his father’s political philosophy.

“I’d say that my positions are not identical to those of my dad,” he explains. “I learned a lot from my dad. But I did not always agree with him.”

Nor does Romney still tout the pro-choice sentiments of his late mother, Lenore, in helping to explain the underpinnings of his own support for abortion rights during the 1990s, a position he has long since abandoned. He has settled now on an issue illustrative of a fundamental difference with his dad. “My father fought [successfully] to introduce a state income tax [to Michigan],” he says. “That’s not something I would have done. I am more conservative. But he’s the person I have admired most in political life. He’s the real deal, yes.”

McQuaid defenderá a su candidato a diario

POLITICO.com:

Patrick Griffin, another unaligned New Hampshire Republican consultant, noted the paper doesn’t hold back when it comes to advancing the interests of its chosen candidate.

“If and when Mitt attacks Newt, they will protect him,” said Griffin. “They smell blood and on top of their interest in asserting the paper’s ideology, they see this as a chance to deny Romney a coast to the nomination.”

While the endorsement itself made no mention of Romney and allowed that Gingrich was imperfect, Union Leader publisher Joe McQuaid suggested Sunday that they would reprise their tradition of near-daily editorials that reiterate full-throated support for their favored candidate and equally robust opposition toward his challengers.

“I think we will be sticking with our traditional approach,” McQuaid wrote in an email.

El impacto del Union Leader

Nate Silver:

What I’ve done, therefore, is compare how the Republican candidate endorsed by The Union Leader finished in each of the past six competitive New Hampshire primaries compared with how he was polling at the time of the endorsement. By default, I use an average of all statewide polls conducted in the three weeks before the endorsement, although there were no polls within this window in the 1980 and 1996 cycles, so I use the first poll just after the endorsement instead. I do not consider races before 1980, as we have no New Hampshire polls for those years in our database.

As it happens, although only three of the six Republicans endorsed by The Union Leader during this period won their primary, all six outperformed their polling. Mr. du Pont, for instance, finished with a fairly meager 11 percent of the vote in 1988 — but this was better than his 4 percent standing in the polls at the time of the endorsement.



On average, the candidates endorsed by The Union Leader finished with 29 percent of the vote in New Hampshire — an 11-percentage-point improvement from the 18 percent they averaged in the polls when the endorsement was made.

(...) This is a pretty good sign for Mr. Gingrich. If you do take the results of the regression analysis to be tantamount to a prediction, they imply that New Hampshire could be quite close, with Mr. Romney finishing with 36 percent of the vote and Mr. Gingrich at 30 percent. What I think is fair to say is that Mr. Gingrich would at least have a shot at winning New Hampshire if he also wins Iowa, a result that could be devastating to Mr. Romney’s campaign.

Huntsman en Fox News Sunday

Sentado al calor de un fuego de chimenea.

Herman Cain en State of the Union (CNN)

Habla sobre aborto e inmigración.



Sobre economía y seguridad nacional.

Por qué es tan importante el endorsement del Union Leader

Primary Insider:

New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News, has announced it will back Newt Gingrich in the Republican presidential nominating race, according to photos provided by the former House speaker’s campaign. The endorsement appears above the fold on doorsteps across the Granite State on Sunday morning.

And it is expected to appear on the paper’s front pages for the remaining six weeks until the New Hampshire primary. Part of what makes this endorsement so powerful — arguably the most important endorsement in this early primary state — is that the publisher is a relentless and prominent advocate for the chosen candidate, regularly pasting a nod to the candidate above or below the front page fold.

(...) When the paper endorses, it goes all in.

“We endorse every damn day,” publisher Joe McQuaid told The Washington Post in 1999. “We started endorsing Reagan in 1975 and never stopped.”

In 2008, The Union Leader endorsement of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s post-Christmas rise up to, and then above, former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts in statewide polls.

The paper went to bat for McCain in part by slamming Romney in a series of editorials that caused some to wonder if the paper’s endorsement this season was always out of his reach.

This year, his campaign has reportedly worked to build bridges between the candidate and the paper. Romney joined the publisher at a charity even this month; even though Romney was not on the speaking schedule, the implication was that Romney would go out of his way to woo McQuaid. “Don’t tell me I have to sit next to Joe McQuaid,” Romney joked, according to reports.

For months prior, reportedly as early as March, Romney was aided in the effort by former Gov. John H. Sununu, who arranged meetings between Romney and McQuaid.

Union Leader: Gingrich tiene experiencia, cualidades de líder, y visión

CNN nos resume lo más destacado del editorial del Union Leader:

The New Hampshire Union Leader's Sunday editorial says the former House speaker "is by no means the perfect candidate" but calls him "the best candidate who is actually running."

"Republican voters too often make the mistake of preferring an unattainable ideal to the best candidate who is actually running," writes the paper's publisher, Joe McQuaid. "In this incredibly important election, that candidate is Newt Gingrich. He has the experience, the leadership qualities and the vision to lead this country in these trying times."

(...) In the editorial, McQuaid praises Gingrich's "forward-thinking strategy" and the "positive leadership" he showed as House speaker.

"A lot of candidates say they're going to improve Washington," he writes. "Newt Gingrich has actually done that, and in this race he offers the best shot of doing it again."

Portada del Union Leader

El Union Leader apostará por Gingrich

Según Fox News:

Fox News has learned that former speaker of the U.S. House and current GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich will receive the coveted endorsement of the highly-influential New Hampshire newspaper "The Manchester Union Leader," an endorsement Republican rival Mitt Romney has adamantly sought.

The endorsement of the conservative newspapers' editorial board places an exclamation point on Gingrich's impressive surge from has-been GOP contender to front-runner, and sets him apart as the new anti-Romney candidate amongst his competitors.

Gingrich has now fully reached a pinnacle as a front-runner. He shares this title with Romney, who has established himself as the consistent man to beat by the amorphous GOP field.

The endorsement suggests Gingrich has the potential to beat Romney in the New Hampshire primary. This "first in the nation" primary is considered to be a must-win for Romney.

El Union Leader publicará su endorsement en la portada de mañana

Lo anuncia en twitter:

Which primary candidate will get the Union Leader's endorsement? Find out in this week's NH Sunday News.

¿Quién será el afortunado?

El Union Leader de Manchester, de línea editorial conservadora, ha sido históricamente un factor de relevancia en la primaria republicana de New Hampshire.

Es el único periódico estatal capaz de llevar a un candidato tan improbable como Pat Buchanan a ganar contra pronóstico la primaria, o a un candidato insurgente como Reagan a quedar a sólo un punto de un Presidente en ejercicio como Ford. Hace cuatro años, su endorsement a McCain dinamitó definitivamente las opciones de Romney.

Los endorsements del UL en los últimos 30 años:

2008: John McCain
2000: Steve Forbes
1996: Pat Buchanan
1992: Pat Buchanan
1988: Pete du Pont
1980: Ronald Reagan
1976: Ronald Reagan
1972: John Ashbrook

David Frum se decide por Huntsman

David Frum:

I’m looking for two chief things in a candidate for 2012:

1.The temperament, judgment, deftness and largeness of spirit required in the presidential office; and

2.The creativity and intellect to respond to the global economic crisis — a crisis threatening to actually get worse if (or when) the euro implodes.

Those conditions obviously and categorically exclude the clownish Herman Cain, the daffy Ron Paul, the dim Rick Perry and the firebrand congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

A step up from those four is former U.S. senator Rick Santorum. Santorum, who is the only candidate in the race to talk about the stagnation of wages and the slowing of upward mobility in the United States. Unfortunately, Santorum — a fierce social conservative — speaks for too narrow a slice of modern America. Santorum has also never held any administrative responsibility. It’s not enough for a president to say “do this” or “do that.” Issuing the orders is the easy part. The president must ensure that “this” and “that” actually happen. If you have never had such a responsibility before, the White House is a bad place to learn — as President Obama (who also lacked any prior administrative experience) proves on a daily basis.

The Republican flavour of the month, Newt Gingrich, likewise flunks condition one. As Speaker of the House, Gingrich was notorious for his indiscipline. Where he does excel is in the use of rhetoric to divide and provoke. Take, for example, his musing last September in front of reporters: “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behaviour, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? … That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behaviour.”

(...) So that leaves us with the two governors, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman. Romney has the better record as an administrator. I still think that his Massachusetts health-care plan showed creative leadership on an important problem — even if he himself now declines to defend his own accomplishment.

Romney has spoken well and firmly about the need to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He has a keen understanding of the debt and financial problems of the U.S. and Europe.

Yet it’s also true that Romney has reversed so many of his positions so abruptly that voting for him is like taking a random walk. We can be sure that a Romney White House will be well-run. But what will it do? That’s anybody’s guess.

Huntsman, by contrast, has bravely challenged the Republican party’s strident, uncompromising radical style. I also like Huntsman’s willingness to re-examine the Afghanistan commitment and to focus more on the economic challenge from China. On the other hand, Huntsman’s economic platform is pure Wall Street Journal editorial page: Big tax cuts for the highest-income earners, radical cuts in retirement benefits for people now under 55. The more supple Romney has carefully avoided any such radical commitment.

The Washington, D.C., primary is set for April 3. I’ll probably cast a vote that day for Huntsman, if only to show support for a brave and independent-minded candidate — and in hope that a strong Huntsman showing will be interpreted as a call for a more modern and inclusive Republican party.

If Mitt Romney emerges as the ultimate nominee, I’ll place my hope that the Romney who enters the Oval Office will be the innovative, solutions-oriented Romney 1.0 — and not the placate-every-GOP-interest-group Romney 3.0 we’ve seen on the 2011 campaign trail.

Any other nominee would gravely test my commitment to the political party I’ve supported since I entered the United States as a college student in the fall of 1978.

Habla la gurú de las encuestas de Iowa

The Atlantic entrevista a J. Ann Selzer, que lleva un cuarto de siglo haciendo encuestas del Caucus de Iowa para el Des Moines Register.

When did you start polling the Iowa caucuses?

I came to the Des Moines Register in December of 1987. I was on their staff when it had a complete polling unit inside the newspaper. The '88 caucuses were in that February, and they had put in place a technique of trying to save some money by recontacting people from previous polls. And I said, well, let's take a look. We have fresh numbers here, we have recontacts here. We were publishing that George Bush was going to win the Republican caucuses, and I went to the editors and I said, 'I don't think that's true. I think Bob Dole is going to win.' They said, 'What?' So I showed them the data, and they said, 'What would this take to fix?' I said, 'Money.' They said, 'OK.' So I very early had a chance to prove my credibility, because Bob Dole did win the caucuses.

I understood the urge to do the recontacting, because finding likely caucus-goers is very difficult. There are not many of them. But for whatever reason that I still don't know, [the recontacts] were more inclined to be George Bush supporters. We didn't have an explanation for it, but it didn't matter -- there was distortion.

Were there other times when your data picked up things people weren't seeing?

In 2004, Kerry had just been sitting -- he was kind of like the Romney of 2004, his numbers wouldn't move. And then in our last poll we showed that surge, showed John Edwards [up], showed Howard Dean [down]. And I still keep this graph, because everybody thought Howard Dean would win. I call it the 'Howard Dean graph of doom' because he was plummeting in the final days. Edwards, if the caucus had been two or three more days out, he could have surpassed Kerry. He was the one that was on fire.

(...) Has there been a time you missed the mark?

With the caucuses, we've been very fortunate. In 2004, we had Kerry taking Iowa [in the general election] and it killed me, it just killed me. [George W. Bush won the state by less than a percentage point.] Des Moines University was my client and [current and former Iowa Gov.] Terry Branstad was president at the time, and he happened to walk by a room where I was meeting with one of his vice presidents the Thursday after the election. And he came in and he said, 'You couldn't have gotten it. You finished interviewing Friday night. The things that happened Saturday at that [Bush] rally in Sioux City, that changed the vote in the 5th District, and you couldn't have gotten it.' It took another six months for me to go, OK, I couldn't have gotten it. It still feels terrible.

Things happen at the very end. We have to stop polling at some point. We'll finish polling this time around Dec. 30, because Dec. 31 they're going to write the story for publication on the 1st. There's still two more days until the caucuses. So there's a lag time when things will still be happening -- I worry about that. I'm a big worrier, can you tell?

What happened in 2008, and what can we learn from it to apply to this year's caucuses?

In 2008, our final poll came out New Year's Eve night. Within half an hour both the Edwards campaign, but more vociferously the Hillary Clinton campaign, had memos out saying, 'Pay no attention to this poll. She's assumed this, she's assumed that, this is crazy, her turnout model is unlike anything we've ever seen before, she should be fired.'

I had Obama by 8 points. We had had Obama in the previous poll. But this poll also said that 60 percent were going to be first-time caucus attenders. That was high by historic standards. Forty percent were going to be independents -- that's high by historic precedent. And that afternoon one of the key people in the Clinton campaign called me up, a friend of mine, and said, 'I've always trusted your polls -- until now. I've knocked on 99 doors and I don't find this lurking Obama support.' And I said, well, tell me about the doors you've knocked on. 'Previous caucus attenders and registered Democrats.' Well, you're not going to find it there.

And so flash forward to now: What an interesting lesson to learn about Iowa. The caucuses will be what the candidates make of it.

[This year,] the national media and I think some of the candidates want Iowa to just replay what happened in 2008. Some of the candidates are in this race because they thought they could be the next Mike Huckabee. I think that's Rick Santorum, I think that's Michele Bachmann, I think that's Rick Perry to a certain extent. And I think they've misread Iowans in thinking that there would be that holdover wish for that kind of candidate. Really, times have changed, things have moved on. So I think you end up with candidates who aren't resonating because they're not talking about fiscal ideas to solve the economic problem. They're focusing on the social ideas they think Iowa caucus-goers would spark to. You have Romney not wanting to play here, you have Jon Huntsman saying he's not going to play here -- people who are potentially on the fiscal side who think they can't win in Iowa. And the data just say that's not true.

Huckabee won because he was really the only one -- he was the social conservative, and the rest fragmented the field, so he stood alone. Well, now you have all of these social conservatives who are fragmenting the field. Romney, Huntsman, had they decided to play, [could have had a good chance by mobilizing moderates].

What's different about the campaign this year?

What's different is -- and maybe this will change in the next month -- [in past cycles] you had this feeling of candidates here, kind of a pulse of their supporters, lots of public events. You felt things happening. I haven't felt that at all [this year]. You look at the number of candidate days here, it's really small. The way that they're campaigning is very different. We have all of these debates that have been very high-profile. It's a different campaign.

Only Rick Santorum is campaigning the way we would expect people to campaign. He's been to all 99 counties. He has increased his staff. He does all of these public events. It's not working for him, and you obviously have to have the right candidate for those techniques to work. But it's not working, and I think [that's] because people are really wishing for something else. People talk about these [last few elections] have been wave elections and I go, well, it's not that the electorate is swinging back and forth in such a partisan way. It's that they say, 'Not this,' 'not this,' and 'not this.' And that's why Herman Cain I think is so appealing. He's Mr. Not This.

In our Bloomberg poll we had an analysis of how many people had been contacted by each of the campaigns. Ron Paul was first, followed by Michele Bachmann. And the secondary analysis was to say, OK, if you've been touched by that campaign, who's your first choice? So we could kind of look and see the effectiveness of those touches. Santorum goes from 3 percent to 6 percent among people his campaign has touched, and that's double, but if you're a small number it's easy to double it.

Michele Bachmann gets a one-point lift [among voters her campaign has contacted]. It's not doing her any good. Who gets the lift is Gingrich. His campaign contact number is high 20s, low 30 percent. But he gets 32 percent first-choice votes among people his campaign has contacted. That's almost double the 17 percent he gets overall in the poll. That number is a very strong number for him. What [voters] have seen of him they liked, and what they have seen of other candidates didn't impress.

El 25% de Romney: ¿Síntoma de debilidad o de consistencia?

Businessweek:

With the Iowa caucuses just over a month away, Republican voters are still searching for a savior. The latest hope is Newt Gingrich, who now sits atop national polls. He’s be wise not to get too comfortable. At various points this year, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain have each surged to the front. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, while never dazzling, has been strikingly consistent—if also consistently unloved. Both in Iowa and nationally, he’s holding steady with a bit less than 25 percent of the vote, strong enough to make him competitive but not enough to pull away or generate excitement, despite performing well in debates and avoiding missteps. His own party seems determined to nominate anybody but him.

That may sound like a grim verdict. It isn’t, really. While Romney will never be a messiah candidate like Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, chances are he won’t need to be. “I don’t look at his being stuck at 25 percent as a weakness,” says Steve Schmidt, chief strategist for John McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign. “I see it as a show of strength in a very strange primary. As other candidates’ vote share falls away, I think he’ll get stronger.”

What about the staunch opposition to Romney, often cited on cable television and talk radio? It turns out that “Romney hatred” has been exaggerated. In a poll of Iowa and New Hampshire voters conducted for Bloomberg and released on Nov. 17, J. Ann Selzer, president of Des Moines-based Selzer & Co., sought to measure the intensity and causes of this supposed phenomenon. “We tried to identify why people hate Romney and discovered that they really don’t,” she says. “In fact, people think he’s smart, Presidential, and electable—but a significant minority don’t think he’s conservative enough. We found discomfort and unease, but not an ‘anybody but Romney’ sentiment.”

Selzer also found that, contrary to popular perception, Romney has attracted a substantial new following. Only 41 percent of Iowans who support him in the Bloomberg poll also backed him in 2008, meaning that a majority are newcomers. Many more rate him their second choice. This support has come despite Romney’s having mostly ignored Iowa, and appears to have convinced him to start competing in earnest. His first headquarters opened in Des Moines just before Thanksgiving. In New Hampshire he is well ahead, with more than twice the support of his nearest rival, Representative Ron Paul of Texas. Were he to carry both states, his national numbers would quickly improve.

Romney’s opponents could exploit his weaknesses—and he has many. Nearly half of Iowans and 40 percent of New Hampshirites believe he’ll say anything to get elected. The health-care law he signed as Massachusetts governor prompted 58 percent of likely caucus-goers to rule out supporting him. His Mormonism presents another obstacle. Asked directly, most voters claim it won’t influence their decision. But Selzer discovered that while Romney leads comfortably among Iowans who consider Mormonism “part of the Christian tradition,” he rated a distant fourth among those who consider it “something else.” Then there is the makeup of his constituencies, which include some of the least influential groups in the Republican base. The liberals and moderates strongly for him are vastly outnumbered by skeptical conservatives. He performs best among the elderly; but in Iowa the percentage of seniors planning to caucus next year has mysteriously fallen by half. That would benefit Paul—who is the most popular among younger voters—at Romney’s expense.

The best news for Romney is that no one has been able to turn these vulnerabilities against him. Even in the debates, the other candidates have largely gone after each other. In the unlikely event that Gingrich or someone else does take aim, Romney is still well positioned to withstand the attack. “Presidential campaigns end when they run out of money,” Schmidt says. Money—and luck—may be Romney’s greatest assets. From his policies to his poll numbers, little about him sets Republican hearts alight. But for now, 25 percent could be a good enough number, and Romney a good enough candidate, to end up with the nomination.

(...) As the Bloomberg poll makes clear, even Romney’s detractors acknowledge his competence. In fact, the only issue upon which Republicans more readily agree is whether Obama deserves a second term. Both answers are good news for Romney.

El Mejor Hombre

Un poco de cine.

'El mejor hombre' (1964) de Franklin J. Schaffner.

William Russell (Henry Fonda) y Joe Cantwell (Cliff Robertson) son dos candidatos que luchan por la nominación presidencial de un partido sin especificar (el demócrata) en una convención abierta.

Hay paralelismos con la vida real: el veterano y reflexivo William Russell está inspirado en Adlai Stevenson; Joe Cantwell es una especie de joven y ambicioso Richard Nixon; el ex Presidente por cuyo endorsement luchan ambos candidatos está cosntruido a imagen y semejanza de Harry Truman; y el hermano y campaign manager de Cantwell es un guiño a Bobby Kennedy, que fue campaign manager de su hermano en 1960.

Podéis descargar la película completa en español gratuitamente en este enlace, pulsando en el botón Descarga Normal.

¿Hacia una convención abierta? (II)

Jonathan Bernstein refuta la tesis de la convención abierta:

The good news is that we're finally past the "new candidate will jump in" season. The bad news is that we're now entering prime "we'll get a brokered convention" season. So as long as we keep getting these arguments, I might as well keep knocking them down. Don't worry, there won't be a deadlocked convention. Not going to happen. Really, truly.

The latest is from Howard Megdal over at Salon (via Goddard). It's based, to a large degree, on a complete misunderstanding of the latest reform to the nomination process, which claims that Republican delegates in early states will be apportioned by proportional representation. But that reform, or at least that interpretation of it, is simply a myth, as Josh Putnam has explained. Only some delegates in early states will be chosen using p.r. A lot of them will still be winner-take-all -- not by state, but by congressional district. Meglal uses Missouri as an example, but in fact only half of Missouri's delegates will be chosen by p.r.

Megdal also puts a lot of weight on the possibility that winnowing won't work this time around. Of course, that ignores the fact that the field has already been winnowed. But of the remaining candidates, only Ron Paul has a seriously dedicated base that gives him the capacity to keep going and taking a non-trivial share of the vote after the earlier states without having any chance to win. Megdal says that "The same will be true for Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry if they stay in the race — and the latter has plenty of cash still on hand." But that's just not how it works. Bachmann, of course, has already tanked in the polls; how is she going to revive after getting drubbed in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina? As for Perry, the cash on hand helps keep him viable in Iowa, but he's going to spend it all, and won't raise a cent more unless he starts showing something for it.

One more thing. Megdal supposes that a deadlocked convention would automatically turn to a blemish-free Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, or John Thune, who would exit the convention with momentum to spare and an easy path to victory. This is wrong on both counts. First of all, there are no brokers; most delegates are loyal to the candidate who they were chosen to vote for, and aren't likely to go along with the Bush or Thune plan. Chaos is a far more likely outcome.

And then, post-convention? A totally unprepared candidate chosen in a back-room deal would suddenly have to face the national press in full campaign mode. It's not impossible that could work out well, but ask Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin, and others how it's worked out. Oh, if you think they were just the wrong people, look at what happened to nomination contest overnight hits such as Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Michele Bachmann in this cycle, or a long list of others going back at least to Gary Hart in 1984 and John Anderson in 1980. About the best you can say is that it doesn't always end in complete disaster.

At any rate, it's not going to come to that. I increasingly think that the contest will be over by South Carolina, and could well be essentially decided sooner than that, but regardless of that there's just nothing at all so far in this cycle to indicate that there's a reasonable chance of a deadlocked convention.

Habla el peluquero de Romney

The New York Times:

Nobody has a more complicated and intimate relationship with Mr. Romney’s hair than the man who has styled it for more than two decades, a barrel-chested, bald Italian immigrant named Leon de Magistris.

For years, Mr. de Magistris said in an interview, he has tried to persuade Mr. Romney, 64, to loosen up his look by tousling his meticulous mane.

“I will tell him to mess it up a little bit,” said Mr. de Magistris, 69. “I said to him, ‘Let it be more natural.’ ”

The suggestion has not gone over well. “He wants a look that is very controlled,” Mr. de Magistris said. “He is a very controlled man. The hair goes with the man.”

Mr. Romney’s is a restrained, classic look: short at the neck, neat on the sides and swept back off the forehead. “It is not something stylish,” Mr. de Magistris noted. “It is clean and conservative.”

The cut is so recognizable that men in this well-heeled suburb of Boston ask for it by name. “The Mitt,” they whisper to Mr. de Magistris from the red vinyl chairs in his upscale salon, Leon & Co., a few blocks from the sprawling home where Mr. Romney raised his family.

Mr. de Magistris, who gave Mr. Romney a $70 trim three weeks ago, agreed to share some of the secrets behind his most famous client’s coiffure in between haircuts the other day.

No, he said, Mr. Romney does not color his hair. Any such artificial enhancement, Mr. de Magistris said, “is not — what do you call it? — in his DNA.”

Despite holding its shape under all but the most extreme conditions, it is gel and mousse-free. “I don’t put any product in there,” he avowed.

And there is this: Sometimes, during long spells on the campaign trail, Mr. Romney trims his own hair, much to the dismay of his stylist. “It doesn’t make me happy,” Mr. de Magistris said, “but what can I do?”

Despite his reservations about Mr. Romney’s ultraconservative look, Mr. de Magistris is extremely protective of the former Massachusetts governor.

A few weeks ago, when he tuned in to watch a Republican presidential debate, he was startled to see that somebody else had cut Mr. Romney’s hair.

“It was just O.K.,” Mr. de Magistris said. “It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.”

He paused. “It was not as nice as it would have been if I’d done it,” he concluded.

Mr. de Magistris began cutting Mr. Romney’s hair at the suggestion of the governor’s wife, Ann, a longtime client. Before that, Mr. de Magistris said, Mrs. Romney had occasionally trimmed her husband’s hair at home, despite the family’s growing wealth from Bain Capital, the private equity business that Mr. Romney founded and ran.

Mr. Romney quickly took to Mr. de Magistris: between snips, the men bonded over their passion for politics and their large broods of sons (Mr. Romney has five; Mr. de Magistris has four).

“We talk about everything but hair,” Mr. de Magistris said.