What does Mitt Romney have to do to make an eventual nomination as a presidential candidate more than just a poisoned chalice? For France’s ‘Liberation’, columnist Fabrice Rousselot writes that winning the general election may require the impossible: Uniting the most radical extremes of the Republican Party behind a moderate message.
For Liberation, Fabrice Rousselot writes in part:.
Once again, the primaries held in ten states have revealed one thing: a divided party that remains unable to unite behind the moderate former governor of Massachusetts, to the point of pitching dangerously to the right and being attracted by the lure of ultra-conservative Rick Santorum.
While the influence of the Tea Party in Washington has declined, its ability to mobilize voters and be heard on a local level has suddenly united every extreme faction, from anti-government conservatives to Christians to isolationist libertarians.
The fracture is so deep, that even a charlatan like Newt Gingrich, a perfect example of a Washington political hack playing the system for all it’s worth, can now present himself as a “candidate of the base.”
From hereon in there is only one choice for Romney: try somehow to unite a party in dire shape. But the primaries coming up in the South are more likely to favor Santorum, whose level of extremism is hard for the French to assess, but who is capable of saying that JFK’s speech on the separation of Church and State made him want to “vomit.”
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