CPAC: Romney Wants Extremist Love (9 comments )
Updated below
I've been highly critical of Romney's campaign for the last four months. I find it tremendously hard to believe that a candidate who was fundraising and voting for Democrats fifteen years ago and arguing that he was to the left of Ted Kennedy would ever be able to secure support from the activist Republican base.
His history and image makes him a ripe target for opposition research and there are just too many videos on YouTube of Romney contradicting himself to believe that people will buy him as a conservative. Frankly, I've been ready to call Romney's candidacy dead for quite some time (the Fox News poll showing him at 3% nationally definitely furthered my thinking on that point).
I didn't expect a very positive response to Romney at CPAC. This audience is made up of some of the most informed voters in the conservative coalition (a fact that will come up later in this post) and information isn't Romney's friend. News had already broke that Romney was paying to bring dozens of students to come to CPAC to get them to get to vote for him in the conference straw poll.
All of that set me up to be proved wrong by the audiences' response to Romney and I was. Romney fed the audience a steady diet of red meat: pledges to cut taxes and reduce the size of the government, anti-immigrant rhetoric, anti-abortion lines, and promises to continue to block efforts to legalize gay marriage.
Despite loud applause on many of the tax lines, the purchased student fans were pretty much invisible. Not much sign waving or foam mitt waving, even though Romney paid to bring them to the event. But the rub of that is that the applause he was getting seemed very organic and not canned. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/matt-browner-hamlin/cpac-romney-wants-extrem_b_42516.html
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