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¿Le falta hambre a Perry?

Es lo que cree Erick Erickson:

The problem for Rick Perry is that his campaign is now based on luck. If Newt Gingrich implodes, Rick Perry may get another look.

That’s not a winning strategy. That’s wishing on a star. But it still may happen.

Ultimately — and I am friends with a number of these guys but I won’t mince any words here — I believe Rick Perry will get a second look by primary voters and I believe the Perry campaign will not be ready for that second look.

Here’s the problem for Team Perry — they are not hungry. If Rick Perry loses tomorrow, all of his top people go back to the Governor’s Mansion in Texas and govern Texas. They all view that as equally awesome to the White House, so they are not hungry for a win. They have nothing to lose so they don’t mind losing. And I think that goes for the candidate too.

Reporters routinely tell me that Perry has perhaps the nicest of campaign staffs, but they also tell me that the Perry campaign is full of hubris and really does convey the attitude that it doesn’t matter because they’ll still have jobs the day after Perry drops out.

It is a psychological problem for Team Perry and I don’t know that they get it. They are about to get a second look from a lot of voters in Iowa and elsewhere who are about to be scared to death over Newt Gingrich’s social conservative record or lack thereof. And if the Perry campaign is yet again found wanting, and I sadly think it will be, we may just see the rise of Jon Huntsman.

Again though, right now, the second look depends on luck and it should not. The Perry camp is resting on a belief Newt will implode. They should be making their own luck as best they can. There are rumors of a staff shake up and a concentration in Iowa. They better do something. They’ve got a good staff in Iowa and a good ground game. They have the money, but they are running out of time.

Governor Perry, get ready for your second close up. You are just about to lose so make it count. One thing that could help you is if evangelicals in Iowa decide to unite behind you. That’s a real possibility right now.

Gingrich da instrucciones de no atacar a Romney

RealClearPolitics:

New GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich, anticipating an attack from fellow contender Mitt Romney, has instructed his campaign staff and advisers not to respond in kind to the former Massachusetts governor, RCP has learned.

According to Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond, “In response to the dynamics over the last 24 hours about the attacks coming our way, his instructions to us were to not say anything bad about Mitt Romney.”

Hammond explained that the campaign has received inquiries about how it will respond to attacks on Gingrich, given the searing Web ad Ron Paul’s operation has released and a reading of the “tea leaves” regarding Romney. And so, in the course of the campaign’s regular morning conference call Thursday, Gingrich told his staff and advisers to keep the focus on a forward-looking campaign and President Obama.

In essence, that means Gingrich will be stealing from longtime putative front-runner Romney’s own playbook: Act like the nominee for the general election; don’t engage intraparty rivals; and prepare to be seen as the next president.

"What's That Line Again?"

Rick Perry bromea sobre su lapsus en el debate de CNBC en este anuncio que se emitirá en Iowa.

Rasmussen: Gingrich abre una ventaja sin precedentes

Rasmussen:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has surged to the largest national lead held by any candidate so far in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters finds Gingrich on top with 38% of the vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a distant second at 17%. No other candidate reaches double-digits.

The national survey of 1,000 Likely Republican Primary Voters was conducted on November 30, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

"Energy Jobs"

Nuevo anuncio de tv de Perry.

PRESIDENTE CARTER: "Esta intolerable dependencia del petróleo extranjero."

PRESIDENTE OBAMA: "Debemos acabar con esta dependencia del petróleo extranjero."

GOBERNADOR PERRY: "Es casi 2012. Y todavía somos adictos al petróleo extranjero. ¿El Presidente Obama y Washington? Todo palabrería. Nada de acción. Yo soy un outsider, así que pisaré algunos callos si es necesario para abrir nuestros campos de petróleo y gas. Eliminemos las regulaciones excesivas. Eso creará más de un millón de puestos de trabajo."

ARG: Gingrich 50%, Romney 19% en Florida

The Corner:

Results from an American Research Group poll of likely GOP primary voters in Florida: Newt Gingrich (50 percent), Mitt Romney (19 percent), Herman Cain (10 percent), Jon Huntsman (3 percent), Rick Perry and Ron Paul (2 percent), Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Buddy Roemer (1 percent).

Team Romney se toma muy en serio el ascenso de Gingrich

The Washington Post:

All along, everything has gone according to Mitt Romney’s plan. His strategists didn’t believe that Tim Pawlenty would catch on. They were confident that Michele Bachmann would fade. They were prepared for Rick Perry. They never thought Herman Cain would pass the commander in chief test.

But they didn’t count on a late and strong rise by Newt Gingrich.

Once left for dead, the former House speaker has suddenly emerged as Romney’s most durable opponent yet — in part because he has performed well in the debates and, unlike the others, he is viewed by many in the Republican Party as a plausible president.

For this unexpected turn in what has been a steady and sure campaign, the Romney team has no road map. With just five weeks until the Iowa caucuses, the former Massachusetts governor and his advisers are trying to figure out what to do. Will they stick to their tried-and-true playbook and hope Gingrich falls on his own, just like the others? Or will Romney engage Gingrich directly and aggressively, either through ads or in a pair of upcoming debates?

“Is there enough time for Gingrich to self-destruct on his own before Jan. 3, or do you have to help it along? It’s a tough call,” said a GOP strategist who informally advises Romney’s campaign and, like other advisers interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal thinking.

Romney’s strategists are gaming out scenarios. They say they understand the risk that, in a multi-candidate field, any attack they make against Gingrich could boomerang to hurt Romney and help a third candidate.

Taking on Gingrich is “going to be a process,” one adviser said. “It’s not going to be an overnight kind of a thing, unless he steps in it. But he seems less likely than the others to do that.”

(...) The informal Romney adviser said he recently urged top campaign aides to take a more aggressive posture, telling them: “You’ve got to get out and fight for it. The shot’s been fired, and you’ve got to go.”

A campaign spokeswoman declined to comment.

Across the country, many of Romney’s donors and political supporters said there is no sense of panic over Gingrich. Romney’s network takes comfort in the great financial and organizational advantages that he has amassed to help him survive a potentially grueling nomination fight.

“Newt’s having his moment, but I think it’s nothing more than that,” said New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, Romney’s national finance co-chairman, who added that he knows and respects Gingrich.

Johnson said he is confident in Romney’s strategy and has been impressed by his performance. “Romney has been very restrained and focused really on Obama and the task at hand rather than the other candidates,” he said.

Florida state Sen. John Thrasher, a member of Romney’s advisory committee, said he also feels confident in the candidate’s structural advantages, but he thinks the campaign needs to respond to Gingrich’s rise with vigor.

“There’s going to be some need to explain his positions,” Thrasher said, noting that Gingrich’s past views on global warming “won’t sit well with the base.”

This is a pivotal time for Romney, whose campaign has projected a sense of inevitability even as he has struggled to build on his support. Now begins an intense period of testing for the candidate, who will have to win over some skeptical voters if Gingrich succeeds in consolidating support as the conservative alternative in an ostensible two-man race.

“His chief opponent is now known,” said GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, who managed the campaign of 2008 nominee John McCain. “And his chief opponent is an extremely gifted communicator who’s rising on the basis of his incredibly strong debate performances, who has become legitimized as an aspirant for president of the United States.”

(...) A Gallup poll released Tuesday showed Gingrich’s “positive intensity score” surging among Republicans as Romney’s score dropped to his lowest level of the year. Gingrich’s score, however, has not reached the levels achieved earlier by Cain, Bachmann and Perry before they quickly fell from front-runner status.

The question looming over the race is whether Gingrich will suffer the same fate. Increasingly, Romney’s advisers believe he will not. They are calculating that primary voters will overlook Gingrich’s rocky career in public life — including ethics charges, extramarital affairs and a decade of trading his influence to enrich himself.

Voters “know all that, and they’ve discounted those things,” said a third Romney adviser. “The leadership of the campaign recognizes that Gingrich has got staying power, that he’s a very serious candidate.”

This adviser said that the campaign considers Gingrich’s rise “absolutely” different from Cain’s or Perry’s, in part because they cannot count on him withering under his new spotlight.

“Clearly there is a very strong, clear view that it’s a real contest,” the adviser said. “But Romney is doing the right things to win it. It’s not slipping away. Romney’s got to fight for it. He always was going to have to fight for it. It’s just now clear who the fight is with.”

Una escena retrospectiva

Aquí vemos a Mitt Romney haciendo campaña puerta a puerta en Massachusets durante su primera campaña electoral, en 1994. Era candidato al Senado y se enfrentaba a Ted Kennedy.

Romney, muy fuerte entre los votantes suburbanos

Hofstra University:

A majority of independent voters in the suburbs disapprove of President Obama’s job performance and favor Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney by a large margin in a head-to-head race with the Democratic incumbent, according to a new National Suburban Poll.

The fifth poll for the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University® found that 58 percent of suburban independents – the critical swing vote that helped Obama win the White House – are unhappy with his job performance, compared to 44 percent in 2010. Sentiment among suburban Democrats and Republicans remains largely unchanged from a year ago.

Suburban voters overall – and especially suburban independents – would back former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney over Obama in a head-to-head race, the poll found. Among all suburban voters, Romney beats Obama 48 percent to 40 percent in a head-to-head race. Among suburban independent voters, the margin for Romney is even larger, 54 percent to 29 percent.

“When we asked independents questions about policy, they often fell midway between the Democrats and Republicans,” said Dr. Christopher Niedt, Academic Director of the NCSS. “But they seem to have little faith in Obama, Congress, and the federal government to steer the country in the right direction, and may be poised to reject both the President and their representatives in 2012.”

Matemática electoral de Obama

CNN:

They know that the 2012 election will likely be decided by a razor-thin margin. It will be a battle for every vote.

(...) Team Obama is focused on finding multiple ways to get to 270 electoral votes.

First, the president is aiming to win all the states John Kerry won in 2004. That would bring him to 246 electoral votes -- including Pennsylvania's mother lode of 20. Add in New Mexico, which the president won in 2008, and that's five more electoral votes. Now he's at 251.

Then it gets hard. The final 19 electoral votes would come through a process of mix and match.

The scenario getting the most buzz inside the beltway: locking in Virginia -- 13 electoral votes -- and North Carolina -- 15 electoral votes -- which would get him to 279.

Democratic operatives like the demographics of these states because they see an influx of the young, highly educated workers who tended to be Obama voters in 2008.

But some Republicans doubt Obama can take North Carolina, in particular, pointing to its high unemployment rate -- currently around 10.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- and voting history -- Obama only won the state by 14,000 votes in 2008 (or 1%) and it went for the Republican candidate in seven out of the past eight elections. Before Obama, Jimmy Carter in 1976 was the last Democrat to win North Carolina.

A win in Florida -- with its 29 electoral votes -- would also do the trick. But if Florida's popular junior Sen. Marco Rubio is on the Republican ticket, the state could suddenly be out of reach. Even without Rubio, it will be a tough battleground state.

There are other paths to the 19 electoral votes they need.

Ohio has 18 electoral votes (yes, they still plan to campaign there) plus any of these other states: Nevada (6), Iowa (6), Colorado (9) or even Arizona (11), which, thanks to its growing Latino population, could now be in play.

(...) However, the Obama team has alternate routes to 270 if they lose some of the Kerry states.

For example, if he loses Pennsylvania -- which would take him down to 226 -- but wins North Carolina (15), Virginia (13) and Colorado (9), and adds two of the following three states -- Iowa (6), New Mexico (5), Nevada (6) -- he crosses 270.

Or he could lose Pennsylvania -- down to 226 -- and Wisconsin -- down to 216 -- but pick up Florida (29), North Carolina (15) and Virginia (13) and he crosses the finish line. Add Ohio (18) and Arizona (11) to the list of options and the possibilities grow.

Of course one wonders whether the president could sweep other battleground states if he can't prevail in Pennsylvania and hold the Kerry map.

Any road map to victory requires one big dose of reality: the president will have to fight hard to win votes in any battleground state -- old or new -- given the state of the economy.

And that won't be easy.

En qué ha fallado Huntsman

The New York Times:

Huntsman is branded as the Republican field’s lonely moderate, of course, which is one reason why he’s current languishing at around 3 percent in the polls. But as Michael Brendan Dougherty noted in a summertime profile for the American Conservative, Huntsman’s record as Utah’s governor isn’t “just to the right of other moderates, it is to the right of most conservatives.”

Huntsman has none of Romney’s health care baggage, and unlike the former Massachusetts governor, he didn’t spend the last decade flip-flopping on gun rights, immigration and abortion. Meanwhile, on many of the highest-profile issues of the primary season (the individual mandate, Paul Ryan’s House budget, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), he has arguably been more consistently conservative than Gingrich.

At the same time, because Huntsman is perceived as less partisan than his rivals, he has better general election prospects. The gears and tumblers of my colleague Nate Silver’s predictive models give Huntsman a 55 percent chance of knocking off the incumbent even if the economy grows at a robust 4 percent, compared to Romney’s 40 percent.

In theory, then, Huntsman seems like he could occupy the sweet spot that Gingrich claims to have all to himself. In practice, though, his campaign to date has been an unmitigated disaster.

This isn’t for want of substance. On issues ranging from foreign affairs to financial reform, Huntsman’s proposals have been an honorable exception to the pattern of gimmickry and timidity that has characterized the Republican field’s policy forays.

But his salesmanship has been staggeringly inept. Huntsman’s campaign was always destined to be hobbled by the two years he spent as President Obama’s ambassador to China. But he compounded the handicap by introducing himself to the Republican electorate with a series of symbolic jabs at the party’s base.

He picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight to save the Republican Party from a “bunch of cranks.” And he embraced his identity as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.

This was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he likes them. Imagine a contender for the Democratic nomination introducing himself to liberal voters by attacking Planned Parenthood, distancing himself from “left-wing nutjobs” and giving a series of interviews on Fox News, and you have the flavor of how Huntsman’s opening act was perceived on the right. The substance mattered less than the symbolism, which screamed: I want your vote, but I don’t particularly care to be associated with your stupidities.

The campaign hasn’t repeated these mistakes, and Huntsman’s debating style — initially unctuous and tone-deaf — has improved with time. (His to-and-fro with Romney over Afghanistan in last week’s foreign policy debate was his best moment yet.) He’s polling at 11 percent in New Hampshire, his make-or-break state, which is much better than his national numbers. And every so often, a prominent conservative activist or blogger will write a “second look at Huntsman?” post: There was one from RedState’s Erick Erickson a few weeks ago, and one from HotAir’s pseudonymous Allahpundit last week.

In a sense, Huntsman’s best hope may be his relative invisibility. With name recognition numbers that lag his rivals by almost thirty percent, there’s still time for him to introduce himself to primary voters afresh.

Romney decide lanzar anuncios en Iowa

Associated Press:

Shifting his Iowa campaign into a more aggressive final phase, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is launching his first TV ads in the state with a spot in which he declares, "I've learned something about how it is that economies grow."

"The right answer for America is to stop the growth of the federal government and to start the growth of the private sector," Romney says in the 30-second spot set to run Friday.

The former Massachusetts governor's decision to start spending money on paid advertising in Iowa five weeks before the Jan. 3 caucuses signals a belief that he can fare well in Iowa even though the state tripped up his 2008 bid.

The move comes as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has emerged as the chief GOP challenger to Romney nationally and in Iowa.

In the spot, which is also set to run in New Hampshire, Romney emphasizes his private-sector experience and casts himself as a can-do candidate on voters' top issue, the economy.

(...) While advisers say Romney's increasing Iowa presence is part of a long-planned effort to surge heading into the must-win New Hampshire primary, the ad and a more aggressive December campaign schedule in Iowa come as the race for the caucuses has remained fluid.

Perry en modo populista

The Daily Caller:

In a speech to New Hampshire legislators Wednesday morning, GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry took a hard line on Wall Street, reaping thunderous applause from Republican representatives, near silence from the Democratic minority and a clamorous mixture of boos and cheers from an activist-filled gallery.

“We must no more tolerate an America in which Main Street is allowed to crumble while Wall Street financiers and beltway profiteers bill the taxpayers,” Perry declared.

“What is wrong in this country can be diagramed on a map,” Perry continued, “with one straight line connecting two dots: Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.

“Wall Street high rollers hatched get-rich schemes while they profited from betting against America,” he fumed. “And when the market crashed, those on Wall Street, they saw it coming and they made millions. Those that didn’t see it coming, they got the bailouts.”

“We shouldn’t be rewarding taxpayer funded bonuses to Wall Street executives who defrauded those very same taxpayers. We ought to be locking them up!” Perry insisted.

With a call for no more bailouts, a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution and a part-time citizen legislature, Perry concluded by asking the New Hampshire legislature for its support in his presidential run.

Gingrich en Greenville, Carolina del Sur

Bachmann en Waverly, Iowa

Una joven le pregunta cómo piensa proteger al colectivo de gays, lesbianas, bisexuales, y transexuales.

Gingrich en Hannity (Fox News)

Continúa: Parte 2 / Parte 3

Ron Paul en Piers Morgan Tonight (CNN)

Herman Cain en Your World (Fox News)