Hemorrhaging support because of right-wing antagonism to Mormonism and because of his quick slide to the far-right the Romney campaign is busing people into CPAC on Thursday in order to stuff CPAC’s straw poll.
The straw poll at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference beginning here Thursday has never played a pivotal role in a Republican presidential primary. But the Mitt Romney campaign nonetheless is paying for three vans, scores of registration fees and at least a half-dozen hotel rooms to pack collegiate supporters into the event.
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All the campaigns encourage their supporters to turn out for the conference and other straw polls. But organizers of the conservative political action conference said reports from students indicated that Mr. Romney’s was the only campaign providing transportation or hotel rooms. The campaign has provided small buses or vans for students from Michigan and Boston, two strongholds of support for Mr. Romney.
The young cons are apparently willing to support whomever pays their bus trip out to DC for CPAC.
“I would expect Romney will do pretty well in the straw poll because his campaign is the one we are seeing investing so much money and energy into it,” Mr. Hall, who said he was not affiliated with any primary campaign, wrote in an e-mail message. “The response we’ve seen from students in Michigan is that regardless of who they are supporting for president, they are more than willing to take a free trip to the conference if all they have to do in return is wear a shirt and vote for him in a straw poll.”
As I’m sure most readers suspect, this tactic has been tried before and helped launch the careers of such conservative stalwarts as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, George Allen, Gary Bauer.
Organizers of the annual conservative conference said that another concerted effort to get student supporters to the event was organized in early 2000 by Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative candidate for the Republican nomination. Mr. Bauer said in an interview that he had organized the effort to help prove he was a viable candidate and considered his strong showing a success. But he dropped out early in the primaries nonetheless.
Will Romney even make it to the early primaries? Even Chuck Todd thinks Romney’s in trouble. For the record, we started the Romney Campaign death watch on December 22nd.
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11 Responses to “Romney’s CPAC Band-Aid”
With Romney pumping all this money into the CPAC Straw Poll, and it being known to the press, he has to perform very well or it can be a devastating blow to his already rickety campaign.
The straw poll is really a four way race now: Romney, Gingrich, McCain, & Giuliani.
McCain and Giuliani will almost certainly fill two of the top three spots.
If Gingrich slips into the top three, let alone wins it (he’s doing tons of SMS networking with students for this), he will get a huge bump. But because he doesn’t even have a PEC, the stakes are very low for him.
If Romney comes in 4th, he’s done. Even a 3rd place finish might kill his campaign, particularly if it’s behind McCain & Giuliani.
[...] 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. [...]
[...] It should also be noted that Romney paid for supporters to come to CPAC and vote for him in the straw poll. I wouldn’t be shocked if other candidates did the same thing, but Romney’s efforts to buy the straw poll were documented in the New York Times. [...]
[...] The more than 6,000 conservatives just got together in Washington D.C. for a three day Conservative Political Action Conference, C.PAC They spent a bit of time blasting President Bush for not being conservative enough like their late hero Ronald Reagan. Among the speakers were Rudy Guiliani, Mitt Romney, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Tom Tancredo, V.P. Dick Cheney, Sean Hannity, Tom Delay, Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, and others. The one major candidate not present was John McCain. Duncan Hunter talked about building fences, because according to him immigration is the most important issue in 08. He also spoke about unfair trade policies, mostly with China, and the Iraq war. Hunter said this about the war, and America’s interest in the world “If the Democrat leadership in the United States House of Representatives wants to cut off reinforcements or cut off supplies for our troops in need on the battlefield, our troops will never forgive them and the American people will never forgive them.”….”There can be no debate about the fact that it is in our interest to expand freedom around the world.” Mike Huckabee tried to win the crowd over with humor by calling CPAC the, “Conservative Presidential Anxiety Conference,” with all it’s members saying, “Dude, where’s my candidate?” Huckabee also said, “I hear people say that, well, the only thing that’s going to matter in this election is celebrity and money — who has the most familiar name and who’s raised the most money,” he said. “My dear friends, may I say to you that if celebrity and money are the criteria to be President of the United States, then Paris Hilton might be our next president.” Huckabee pointed out that he was different from the other candidates. He also spoke about the Islamic terrorist for a bit, saying, “There can be no negotiation with radical Islamic fascists…They are not interested in detente, they are not interested in some type of peaceful coexistence. They are solely interested in…our absolute annihilation and destruction.” Mitt Romney was there too, and he brought along a handful of paid college students to cheer and vote for him. Bringing the kids along helped Romney because he won the straw poll. He fed the CPAC faithful a good dose of cutting taxes, stopping abortions, anti-immigration, and reducing the size of government. He introduced columnist Ann Coulter, who spoke after him, by saying, “I’m happy to learn that after I speak you’re going to hear from Ann Coulter. That’s a good thing. I think it’s important to get the views of moderates.” So that means he thinks he is right of little miss Coulter. Strangely enough he doesn’t include the Coulter remarks on his websight where he has his CPAC speech. Miss Coulter’s comments actually garnered more attention than any of the Presidential candidates. In one of her common hate speeches Coulter was talking about Democratic candidate John Edwards. Coulter said, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” Coulter has in the past called other Democrats gay, once saying she would put even money on Hillary Clinton “coming out of the closet” in 08, she said Bill Clinton showed “some level of latent homosexuality,” and has called Al Gore “a total fag.” Coulter also endorsed Romney as the next best candidate for conservatives, saying, “Romney is the best candidate we have,”……”He tricked liberals into voting for him. I like a guy who hoodwinks the voters so easily.” That is a good quality? Newt Gingrich spoke about how republicans were smarter that democrats. He wants to make English the official language. He also talked about Hurricane Katrina a bit and blamed the people of New Orleans 9th ward for their distress by saying, “How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.” Rudy Guiliani spent some time invoking Reagan. He used Reagan’s “peace through strength,’’ when talking about combatting terrorist. He tried to adress the issue of his changing policies by saying, “You and I have a lot of common beliefs that are the same and some that are different. … We don’t all agree on everything. I don’t agree with myself on everything.’’ Guiliani had this to say about Iraq, “Our desire right now is to have peace, and maybe we made a mistake in calling this the war on terror. This is not our war on them. This is their war on us”.…“This war is over when they stop planning to come here and kill us. When that ends, the war is over.’’ It is a shame that Ann Coulter’s remarks overshadowed this whole event. They knew her hate when they invited her though, and they applauded and laughed when she said it. It just like the old saying goes, if you lay with dawgs, you might get fleas. Alan Cosgrove [...]
[...] The Right’s Field has a snarky take on a NYT article. Both TRF and NYT compare Romney to Gary Bauer. Ouch. Money quote: “The response we’ve seen from students in Michigan is that regardless of who they are supporting for president, they are more than willing to take a free trip to the conference if all they have to do in return is wear a shirt and vote for him in a straw poll.” [...]
Sour grapes.
Something to say?
Agreed. Romney should be trying to deemphasize the importance of CPAC straw polls rather than trying to raise the stakes on them. Also, the oppo work that been done on Romney has been absolutely devastating (I wonder if we’ll see something similar soon on the Dem side).
I actually disagree with the Hotline guys on Romney going on TV. Romney’s planning to raise $50-$75 million and he has a personal fortune of over $500 million. Who’s to say that he doesn’t have plans to simply go up and stay up on TV through at least the Ames straw poll? Iowa TV isn’t that expensive.
Left by Expo
March 1, 2007 at 2:07am