{"id":14016,"date":"2012-03-14T11:52:43","date_gmt":"2012-03-14T15:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/03\/14\/14016.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:44","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:44","slug":"put-down-the-brooms-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/03\/14\/put-down-the-brooms-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"Put down the brooms, boys."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I don’t want to make this Tohu Bohu into a constant stream of reminders will not be the nominee this year, but I get cranky. There were four delegate contests yesterday. When the headline is that Rick Santorum swept<\/strong>, there’s an implication that he won all of them, even if the headline then goes on to say something like swept the southern states<\/i>. That’s just not how we use the word sweep<\/i>. But that’s how the New York Times<\/i> was using it this morning, and how NPR was using it.\n

And, you know? The headlines would seem to imply, wouldn’t they, that Rick Santorum got more delegates yesterday than anyone else. That’s not so. Mitt Romney picked up 43 delegates (according to the Times delegate tracker<\/a>) and Rick Santorum acquired only 36. Mitt Romney needs 50% of the delegates, and has 495 of the 926 delegates so far allocated, or 53% (again, according to the Times<\/i>, which is somewhat more aggressive in estimating the allocation of delegates); he continues to make it more and more likely that he will be the nominee.\n

Not that it was a good day for the Romney campaign. Far from it—yesterday was one more chance to wrap it up and clinch the thing, and he didn’t do it. Now he’s telling an interviewer in St. Louis that he wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood<\/a>; the longer that people believe that it’s a competition, the more stuff he will say that will be used against him in the trial general election. Of course, the longer that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are in the news saying he’s not a hard-line conservative, the more that people will think of his as the moderate in the race, which may be to his advantage in the general election. Or not.\n

Actually, I think this nonsense in the primaries is far more important—the general election will mostly hinge on whether the economy continues to improve or starts to stall. If the economy looks terrible, then Mitt Romney will be seen as a moderate; if the economy improves, he will be too conservative to risk with our future. Actually, most people won’t be swayed like that, and most voters, even, will tend to keep their views constant over the next few months, but among the 5% or so of Americans who have votes that could go one way or another, that’s the sort of thing that will happen. In the primary, though, Mr. Romney will be making some specific promises (such as getting rid of Planned Parenthood) which if he wins in November, groups will put pressure on him to attempt to carry out.\n

Which means, in the end, that the more people vote for Rick Santorum in the primary, and the more states Rick Santorum wins, the more a a Mitt Romney administration will look like a Rick Santorum administration. That’s the way our system responds to the will of the voters, that’s the system working. If any Gentle Readers are not yet persuaded to join a Party and vote in a primary (and otherwise support candidates in primaries), let Rick Santorum’s supporters convince you. Their candidate did not actually sweep anything yesterday, but there’s a pretty good chance that some of their policy choices will be laws in a few years.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger is all gripy, and then makes a point, because sometimes I do have a point to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14016"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19518,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14016\/revisions\/19518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}