Skipping Super PAC, Santorum backer Friess spends on his own
By Alina Selyukh and Alexander Cohen
Republican Rick Santorum’s main financial backer has gone rogue on the pro-Santorum “Super PAC” with his own, personal spending in support of the U.S. presidential hopeful.
Wyoming millionaire investor Foster Friess has given $1.6 million to the independent political action committee (PAC) backing Santorum – the Red, White and Blue Fund – as its largest donor.
Now he has bypassed the Super PAC and spent $1,176 on a pro-Santorum radio ad entirely on his own, according to a report with the Federal Election Commission posted online on Thursday.
The radio spot went up in Friess’ hometown of Rice Lake in Wisconsin, a state that’s hosting the next contest in the race for the Republican party nomination.
“It’s not a Super PAC, it’s just me doing an independent expenditure,” Friess told Reuters. “I wanted to tell my hometown folks what I know about Rick Santorum and my lawyers said I should report it.”
He said the move did not mean he would stop supporting the Red, White and Blue Fund, calling that financial connection “open-ended.”
Santorum swears while chewing out reporter
Republican hopeful Rick Santorum cursed during an angry exchange with a New York Times reporter on Sunday, casting a shadow on the image he’s crafted as a social conservative and Christian candidate, and giving fodder to critics who are calling it the “the latest tantorum” meltdown.
At a rally in Wisconsin, a reporter questioned Santorum about calling his rival, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, “the worst Republican” to run against Democratic President Barack Obama. In an earlier speech Santorum equated health care legislation enacted during Romney’s governorship of Massachusetts with Obama’s 2010 health care overhaul.
Visibly annoyed, Santorum asked the reporter, “What speech did you listen to?” and told him to “stop lying.” After accusing the reporter and the media in general of disregarding the truth, Santorum cursed before shaking his head and walking away.
Santorum won the Louisiana primary handily over the weekend with backing from the state’s many Christian evangelicals. A former footnote in the primary race, Santorum has found momentum from evangelical Christians who suspect Romney’s record and his Mormon religion. Santorum has staked his campaign on his image as a devout Catholic.
Watch the video here from CBS News:
Photo credit: REUTERS/Darren Hauck (Santorum speaks to supporters at the Ledgeview Center in the Ledgeview Bowling Lanes in Fond du Lac Wisconsin)
I hate people that ignorantly act like there the victim or they are always right. That reporter was acting professional
Romney’s small dollar disconnect
After his win in Illinois on Tuesday, Mitt Romney is looking to convince Republicans around the country that he’s their ultimate nominee.
But despite his lead in the delegate count, Romney continues to lag behind his rivals in raising money from so-called small-dollar donors, supporters who donate less than $200. Donations from people who contributed less than $200 — often viewed as a gauge of popular appeal — are filed as “unitemized” donations with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
FEC filings on Tuesday showed Romney’s campaign has so far raised $7.5 million from small donors, which comprises only 10 percent of his fundraising. That proportion has roughly remained the same throughout the campaign.
Rick Santorum, who is struggling to undermine Romney’s lead, has by contrast received $8.1 million, or 52 percent of his fundraising, from donors who gave less than $200.
Santorum, who campaigns as a conservative alternative to Romney, often seeks to contrast his popularity among rural, blue-collar voters with Romney’s appeal to urban Republicans and the business community.
Rival Republican presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have both relied on small donors for 48 percent of their fundraising. Gingrich’s campaign has brought in $10 million from small-check donors, and Paul’s campaign has received $16.1 million.
There is not much of a difference, so I don’t see any disconnect. One also has to look at the number of times for each large or small donations.
Washington Extra – Etch A Sketch
Ah, if life were only like an Etch A Sketch, a little shake would allow us to erase those mistakes and messy parts. But to invoke the magical toy to explain Mitt Romney’s presidential hopes might have been a mistake, one worth erasing with a shake.
It seems that every Romney win is followed by a Romney gaffe. This time, after his Illinois victory last night, it was not the candidate who stepped in it, but rather his adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, who wanted to talk about what Romney would be like in a general election against President Obama.
“I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again,” Fehrnstrom told CNN.
Conservatives quickly jumped on the flawed analogy, telling voters that Romney would soon revert to his moderate ways. Rick Santorum told a Louisiana crowd that Romney “is going to be a completely new candidate.” His campaign even handed out Etch A Sketches to people. Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, tweeted that Etch A Sketch is “a great toy but a losing strategy.”
Romney called a brief news conference, the kind in which he takes only one question, where he said: “I’m running as a conservative Republican. I was a conservative Republican governor. I will be running as a conservative Republican, at that point, hopefully, nominee for president.”
Etch A Sketch is fleeting, but campaign gaffes, they are forever.
Newt’s home field advantage was among the weakest
Newt Gingrich faces some do-or-die primary contests in Dixie, his supposed home turf, over the next few days. Alabama and Mississippi hold their respective Republican primaries on Tuesday with Gingrich, the former U.S. House Speaker, and former Senator Rick Santorum expected to compete for, and potentially split, the conservative/evangelical vote.
Gingrich, though, didn’t do that well on his actual home turf – Georgia – during the Super Tuesday contests. Sure, the former history and geography professor at the University of West Georgia and 20-year representative of the state’s 6th Congressional district won 47.2 percent of the Republican vote in the Peachtree State. But according to political scientist Eric Ostermeier, that was one of the worst home-state primary performances by a Republican in decades.
Ostermeier, from the Humphrey School’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, writes the blog Smart Politics, which plumbs the political data for noteworthy facts and trends.
“Gingrich – who admittedly won Georgia on Super Tuesday by a comfortable margin of 21.3 points over Mitt Romney – fared quite poorly when stacked up against the record of most Republican White House hopefuls over the last 11 cycles,” Ostermeier wrote. The only candidate to do worse than Gingrich in a home-state primary was television evangelist Pat Robertson, who pulled just 15.3 percent of the vote in Virginia in 1988.
Gingrich tied with John McCain, who also won 47.2 percent of the vote in his home-state Arizona primary in 2008, narrowly beating Romney and, of course, kicking on to win his party’s nomination.
“Overall, the average Republican White House hopeful has averaged 63.6 percent of the vote in their home state since 1972 – some 16.4 points better than Gingrich,” said Ostermeier. Romney’s 72.1 percent of the vote in Massachusetts on Tuesday was in the top one-third of outcomes for Republican candidates during that time, although it paled next to the 95.8 percent landslide that Bob Dole engineered in Kansas in 1988.
Rick Santorum makes appeal to women, new campaign strategy?
Presidential candidate Rick Santorum hailed the influence of strong, independent women on Tuesday night, a turnaround from his past statements that critics have called sexist or anti-women.
In a concession speech given just as rival Mitt Romney won the Republican presidential primaries of Arizona and Michigan, Santorum took the chance to tell voters “a little more about who Rick Santorum is” and sang the praises of his 93-year-old grandmother, his wife Karen, a former lawyer who gave up work to raise their family, and their daughter Elizabeth who campaigns for her dad on her own.
“I grew up with a very strong mom, someone who was a professional person who taught me a lot of things about… balancing work and family, and doing it well, and doing it with a big heart and commitment,” he said.
In his excitement, Santorum also mistakenly referred to the “men and women” who signed the Declaration of Independence.
“I’ve been very, very blessed, very blessed with great role models for me, as someone who goes out and tries to do the job I’m doing right now, to balance the rigors of running a campaign and trying to maintain a good and strong family,” he said.
Santorum has seen a surge in support from women since winning nominating contests in Iowa, Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota. But in Michigan, he failed to rally that support from married and unmarried women.
Santorum’s attempt to involve women in his vision for America could be motivated by the fact that he needs to appeal to a broader swathe of women that includes moderates and independents as well as those further to the right.
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Economy should be focus of 2012 election, GOP governors say
By Samson Reiny
As the battle for the Republican presidential nomination rages on between front-runner Mitt Romney and a resurgent Rick Santorum, governors from their party today said that economic recovery – not social issues – would be the main concern among voters heading to the ballot box in November.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, speaking after the National Governor’s Association’s annual meeting at the White House, said the divergent fiscal beliefs between Republicans and Democrats would be decisive for voters this election season.
“This president, President Obama, believes in a larger centralized government,” Jindal said, underscoring three straight years of trillion-plus dollar deficits undertaken under the current administration. “You’re going to contrast that with the Republican philosophy of limited government, of lower spending, of balancing our budgets, of growing the private sector economy.”
Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell, a Romney supporter, stressed that while people want to know where the candidates stand on abortion and religious freedom – hot-button topics that have gained Santorum, a devout Catholic, traction among the religious right – job creation remains critical for most of the voting public. “They’re going to vote on jobs, spending, the economy, taxes, transportation,” he said, “and whether or not Johnny graduating from college is going to be able to get a good job.”
Acknowledging that primaries are “always a messy process, democracy is messy,” Jindal said he was confident Republicans would unite around their eventual nominee. “The reality is that at the end of the day, we will have a candidate that we will all get behind.”
Why Romney’s parents are buried in Brighton, Michigan
Kalamazoo, Michigan – Sometimes one story leads to another for Mitt Romney.
At Western Michigan University, the Republican presidential candidate told a packed house his parents, George and Lenore Romney, had campaigned in the same conference room when George ran for Michigan governor and Lenore ran for a U.S. Senate seat decades ago.
This reminded him that his campaign bus had taken him past Brighton, Michigan, where his parents are buried, on the way to Kalamazoo.
Which reminded him why his parents were actually buried in Brighton.
“My dad was a very frugal man,” said Romney as the crowd laughed. “He checked all over for the best deal on a gravesite. I asked him, ‘How’d you pick Brighton, Dad?’ and he said, ‘Well, best place I could find in the whole state.’”
Romney gets a little punchy as the days grow longer ahead of Michigan’s Tuesday primary contest.
When a German man stood up and asked why presidential debates don’t focus on serious issues, Romney told him, “I think it’d be wonderful if you’d be willing to moderate the next debate.”
Santorum explains “phony theology” comment
Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says he wasn’t questioning Barack Obama’s faith on Saturday when he said the Democratic president’s agenda was based on “some phony theology.”
Santorum explained his comments during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday, saying he was questioning the president’s world view — not his faith.
“I accept the fact that the president’s Christian,” Santorum said. “I just said that when you have a world view that elevates the earth above man says that, you know, we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the earth by things that are frankly just not scientifically proven.”
A devout Roman Catholic and social conservative, Santorum brought up the theology issue a day earlier in Columbus, Ohio, as he addressed supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement. (Here’s the story from Reuters’ Sam Jacobs)
On ABC’s “This Week,” Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama’s re-election campaign said Santorum’s “phony theology” comment crosses a line and was dragging the presidential campaign down.
“I can’t help but think that those remarks are well over the line,” Gibbs said. “It’s wrong. It’s destructive. It makes it virtually impossible to solve the problems that we all face together as Americans.”
Here’s Santorum on “Face the Nation”
All these so-called “social conservatives” screamed bloody murder when it was rumored that Muslims were being granted a religious exemption to the individual mandate on PPACA. (Even though that was nothing more than a chain-email rumor.) Now these same wingnuts insist that if Obama doesn’t grant Catholics a religious exemption that he’s somehow violating the constitution. Which is it Republicons? Do your religious beliefs exempt you from following the law or don’t they? Or is it just YOUR religious beliefs that garner special privilege?
Santorum: backer’s contraceptives comment was bad joke
“It was a stupid joke,” Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum says about a wealthy backer’s “aspirins for contraceptives” comment.
Whatever it was, Santorum — a staunch social conservative – said he’s not going to be responsible for what his supporters say.
“I’m not going to play that game,” the former Pennsylvania senator told Fox News host Greta Van Susteren Thursday night when asked about what Foster Friess said earlier in the day.
Friess, the chief donor to the pro-Santorum SuperPAC, was asked whether he had any concerns about the candidate’s views on social issues. Part of his response raised eyebrows.
“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly,” he told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.
Here’s video from the MSNBC interview:
I don’t know what is more scary. The fact that Santorum is running for president or the fact that he actually won 3 states so far.
