In baseball, five for five is considered an excellent night for a hitter. It's a pretty good night in politics as well.

Mitt Romney won all five Republican primaries held last Tuesday, and won them in convincing fashion.  His march to the GOP nomination is proceeding steadily ahead, as is demonstrated by the way his campaign has begun to smartly shift toward it's general election posture.

One piece of old business I want to mention before we move on is that since the last time I wrote about politics here, former Senator Rick Santorum has departed the race.  His fine announcement speech is here.  As we often see with these exit speeches, it was one of his best.  I think knowing they're getting out takes the pressure off of these men and women, and that allows them to speak a little more from the heart.  We wish the Senator and particularly his little daughter Bella, our best.  She's spent her whole short life struggling with a major illness.  Bella's daddy accomplished some impressive things with his campaign, and the smart money says he'll be a force in his party for a long time to come. 

Moving forward, word around the campground is that our favorite, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, will announce he's dropping out shortly as well.  Ah, what might have been!  But we live in the moment here, so on to what's next. 

What's next is that Governor Romney is in surprisingly good shape.  Several national polls show him tied or ahead.  Not a position one would expect him to be in, at least not yet.  Considering the hyper-competitive primary process he's just emerging from, and that his opponent is an incumbent who is running unopposed for his nomination, the Romney campaign is well ahead of where they hoped to be at this point.  Clearly the Republican Party is moving rapidly to consolidate behind it's presumptive nominee. 

Mr. Romney brings some considerable strengths to this process, several of which are outlined in this article Hugh Hewitt posted right here on Townhall.  Just one example is this quote from John McCain's 2008 campaign manger, Steve Schmidt: "I thought he was a very scary opponent looking from the other side of the table in that he was almost like a learning organism at the end," Schmidt said about the former Massachusetts governor. "He just kept getting better week by week by week, and kept becoming stronger."  Impressive compliment from a former opponent.

Another plus for Team Romney is the strange campaign strategy the President is rolling out.  Pete Wehner writes about this over at Commentary.  Jay Cost gives us his takes on the same subject with this piece from The Weekly Standard.  Essentially what both men are pointing out is the President is not choosing a broad, centrist approach, but rather a narrow, hyper-partisan one.  Many Americans, especially the independents that both sides need to win, dislike hyper-partisanship, so this strategy is risky.

More and more I get the feeling that many on our side of this contest believe that the cake is almost baked and that Barack Obama is a goner.  Not that I sense any complacency.  Far from it.  Everyone I know who's involved plans on sprinting right through the tape on November 6.  It's just that we all think the stage is set for a substantial blowout if Mitt Romney has the right plan and executes it well.  This view, and this plan, is summarized well by William Kristol, also writing at The Weekly Standard.   He believes Mitt Romney can win, and win big. 

I agree.

 

The comments caught on an open mic last week between President Obama and Russian President Medvedev should give all Americans pause.  As Charles Krauthammer points out with his typical insight in this column from the Washington Post, it isn't often we see an American President cutting a deal with the leader of a hostile country, telling him essentially: I'll be able to play ball with you guys just as soon as I get past this annoying American custom we call an election. 

In the aftermath of this public misstep, The President and his staff have been doing their best to downplay it's importance, while their willing accomplices in the mainstream news media ignore the story to the degree they can. 

This administration has already been a foreign policy disaster.  From it's weak support of friends, to it's shameless coddling of foes, to it's apologies, to it's outright and aggressive hostility toward Israel, one can only imagine, with a genuine shudder, what an unaccountable Obama will try and pull off in a second term.  If our economy was humming along in perfect health, which it is far from doing, these dangerous and naive blunders would be enough reason to replace him in 2012.

 

....for all of us to accept that Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee for President in 2012.  If it wasn't certain before, last week's Illinois primary pretty much locked it up.  It might not be done mathematically, but as a practical matter I think he's in.

I will always believe that Newt Gingrich, with his broad vision for the future of the country, would've made the better President.  But last time around I thought Rudy Giuliani would've been better and a lot of good that did!

Word around the campground is Newt is out of money and his staff isn't getting paid, so it's probably time for him to shut it down.   I hope he gets a great speaking slot at the convention and some serious VP consideration (more on that later.)  But barring something truly weird happening, it's time to start talking about the fall campaign.  Who will be Gov. Romney's running mate be?  Marco Rubio?  Mitch Daniels?  Paul Ryan?  What states are critical to a Republican victory?  Most of all, it's time to start accentuating the many good reasons why Mitt will make a terrific President.  Of course, the most prominent of these is that he's not Barack Obama.

To these ends, I bring you these two videos. 

First we have this speech Gov. Romney gave at the University of Chicago a couple days before the primary.  It's about the economy and it is excellent.  This issue is clearly the Governor's' wheelhouse and he hits all the key themes precisely: 

 

 

I know, Duh. 

Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner penned this article about the new CBO projections for the cost of President Obama's central legislative achievement: the destruction of the American healthcare system. 

Two years ago, as the debate over health care reform raged on Capitol hill, it was that same pesky CBO that released it's first rough projections of the cost of the proposed law.  They estimated that it would set us back nearly a trillion dollars over it's first 10 years.  As we recall, the President had actually sold this turkey as saving money (I know, it's astounding that anyone believed him.)  The CBO report back then changed everything.  It was at that point that public opinion turned against the President and his party.  In the first poll conducted after the CBO report, Rasmussen found that those who responded that they were either 'strongly opposed' or 'somewhat opposed' to Obamacare totalled 55%.   That number has not gone up or down by more than 3% in polls Rasmussen has conducted nearly every week since. 

 

I believe that immovable 55% is the most important number in American national politics today.

 

That number gave us Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts. 

 

That number gave us the Tea Party movement. 

 

That number gave us the sweeping repudiation of the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections.

 

And if it has any juice left, and I think it does, it can deliver a bigger majority in the House, a new majority in the Senate, and the defeat of President Obama later this year. 

 

 

Robert Costa is one of the very best young political writers on the scene today.  Robert has done a lot of very good reporting on Newt Gingrich's campaign over at the National Review.  In this piece, he talks about how things are going out on the stump for the former Speaker (the short version is he's having a ball.)  He also breaks down Newt's grand strategy for trying to gain enough delegates so that he, along with Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, deny Mitt Romney the 1144 he'll need to gain a first ballot nomination at the convention in August.  If that happens, Newt's hope would be that he can convince a deadlocked convention to turn to him. 

As I've written here before, it's the longest of long shots.  But fun stuff to contemplate for Gingrich fans like me.

 

 

You may have noticed posters like this one popping up around your town: