Our political Quote of the Day comes from Time’s Adam Sorenson who notes that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s two clear-cut wins yesterday mean he has re-seized control of the political narrative. Sort of:
Mitt Romney, the perpetually questioned front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, had a rough week. Three embarrassing losses to Rick Santorum in Tuesday’s non-binding contests led to questions about Romney’s conservative bona fides just in time for GOP activists, gathering at their annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, to collectively grumble about it. But in two narrow, largely symbolic victories on Saturday, Romney reclaimed the headlines. Never mind the details. He was winning again.
Romney won the non-binding Maine caucuses on Saturday night with 39% of the vote, edging out small government standard-bearer Ron Paul by 3 percentage points and fewer than 200 votes….
….Earlier in the day, Romney dethroned Paul in the CPAC’s straw poll, winning 38% of activists’ support to Santorum’s 31%.
….Neither victory moved Romney any closer to the nomination. Maine’s contest was merely a preference poll and did not allocate any delegates, which will be selected at a state convention in May. CPAC’s straw poll did not provide any accurate measure of national sentiment, and the national survey results actually showed a tightening race with Santorum. But both wins illustrated that Republicans are still able to get excited about Romney, albeit in crowds of just a few hundred in these cases, and put aside the narrative that he is struggling to close the deal. For now.
Yes the key is the “for now” but that can mean a great deal in politics — because it can break that downward spiral that a campaign can get in and never recover from. Saturday gave Mitt Romney a new political lease on life.
For now.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/02/11/with-saturday-victories-romney-retakes-control-of-the-gop-narrative/?xid=newsletter-daily#ixzz1mAuUhp8b
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.