Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Last week, Newt Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond told reporters that the disgraced former House Speaker — who has only won South Carolina and his home state of Georgia so far — needs to carry both Alabama and Mississippi to remain a credible candidate. Oops!
As I posted previously, Newt Gingrich has nowhere else he can win outside of the Deep South, and after Tuesday's losses in Alabama and Mississippi to a Yankee carpetbagger from Pennsylvania, his "Southern Strategy" lies smoldering in ruins like Atlanta after General Sherman.
Newt is now irrelevant. The only question is whether his "Big Casino" sugardaddy Sheldon Adelson continues to piss away his millions on Newt to drain away votes from Rick "man on dog" Santorum to aid his second choice, Willard "Mittens" Romney. (Santorum would be sweeping these primaries without Newt draining away votes that otherwise would have been his margin of victory in states like Michigan and Ohio).
The Washington Post reports that one of Gingrich’s top allies is basically saying the game is over:
"This is pretty important,” said Rick Tyler, a longtime Gingrich aide who is now running a super PAC that has poured millions of independent expenditures into supporting the former speaker’s candidacy. “The PAC always felt we needed to win both of these states to change the narrative.”
The question now is whether other leading conservatives will increase the pressure on Gingrich to get out of the race.
It was a bad night for Willard "Mittens" Romney as well, who last week told reporters it would "take an act of God" to deny him the GOP nomination. Well, the Evangelical Christians who comprise the base of "God's Own Party" (GOP) rejected Romney, with more than two-thirds of the GOP base voting for a "Not-the-Romney" candidate. It is a truth that the media villagers are uncomfortable reporting, but the fact is that the Evangelical base of the GOP will not vote for a Mormon out of religious bigotry.
I have said from the very beginning that Willard "Mittens" Romney will not be the nominee, and I am sticking with that prediction. It's a long road to Tampa Bay.
The GOP primary should now be a two man race between the patrician old money establishment fiscal conservatives of Wall Street, and the Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists who have hijacked the Republican Party apparatus to wage social conservative culture wars. It is a classic intra-party civil war. We may be witnessing the final death throes of the "Party of Lincoln" as it devolves into a religion-based political party.
The possibility of a brokered GOP convention or an independent candidate, or even a new political party emerging, grows stronger every day that this GOP intra-party civil war continues.