Slouching Toward Super Tuesday

++Nate Silver says that Romney will win half the delegates today. All the candidates will win some primary. The question is whether Santorum can pull out Ohio since his lead has dwindled under the Romney media blitz.

++The Republican strategy for 2012 is becoming clearer. They are going to run as if President Obama never won the last election and that George W. Bush never existed. Take Breibart's last offerings to the world called "Vetting". It dregs up Obama attending a play for Saul Alinsky. The second piece is supposed to be photos of Obama with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn. The third will be video tapes from when Obama was at Harvard. And birtherism will make a comeback. And Willard will run for war with Iran, saying he would do--well, what President Obama is doing, but tougher. There was no economic collapse or Al Qaeda or the war in Iraq. It's morning in America--circa 1950s.

++El Problemo--The Los Angeles Times reports that President Obama would take 84% of the Hispanic vote against 14% of his Republican rival. This tracks with yesterday's Fox News poll. Today, 67% of Hispanics identify as Democrats, while only 20% with Republicans and even they are going for the nominee. Compare to 2004, 28% of Hispanics identified as Republicans and only 49% as Democrats. Since Republicans are hyping Marco Rubio, the Senator from Florida as the Vice President candidate, 25% of Hispanics would consider voting Republican if he were on the ticket. The problem is that would leave the Republicans with less Hispanic votes than the McCain-Palin ticket. And this is the fastest growing voter bloc in the United States.

++The other large voting bloc is the 51% of the electorate who happen to be women. Before the Rush Limbaugh kerfluffle and the contraceptive mandate issue, women preferred Obama by 55% over 37% for Romney. He should get a bounce to over 60%. In the last election, women voted overwhelmingly for him. Republicans noticed a sub-set of women--single women--which they successfully targeted in 2010, winning 50% of them. But the advice in 2010 was not, repeat not, get into social issues. Since then, Republicans at every level of government have waged the War against the Uteri. Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist, warned that the GOP would be dead if it emphasized "sex". "The American people like sex," he proclaimed. As of this morning, Rush Limbaugh has lost 13 sponsors and his show has been tossed off several stations. What he did was light the match to the built-up frustrations of women over the past two years' of the reduction in reproductive rights. The eruption of a new wave of feminism isn't going to die down so quickly.

++As if on cue, the Laurens County South Carolina Republican Party made members sign a pledge that they have never had pre-marital sex and once you signed the pledge you agreed never to look at porn again. Officials said that having pre-marital sex was incapable with being a Republican. And this will go unnoticed, I am sure.

++There is much smoke going out about how the prolonged Republican primary process is simply a repeat of the Democrats in 2008. But not quite. In the last Democratic contest, you had two candidates with appeal to the general population running--that created the excitement and tension. As it is, Mitt Romney will be the weakest nominee of a major party in a generation, with an approval rating almost the same as George W. Bush, who, of course, doesn't exist. Once you are in the low 20s, it is close to impossible to bring yourself up. His only alternative--which we have seen during the primaries--is to bring his competitors' rating down through negative advertising. Since he has the team who brought you Willie Horton ads, expect that to be his M.O. for the general election.