Yeah, yeah. I know what delegates are for, but what are they good for? They're beginning to look like a way of turning the Republican primaries into successive games of three-card monte.
Santorum is tenacious -- and popular. Romney is unpopular -- but he's the establishment's candidate. The establishment appears to be disorganized or uncertain, doesn't it. Whatever. The delegate game feels like the echo of archaic politics, chaos and corruption in this 2012 election canyon.
Surely the shuffling of delegate cards behind everyone's back can't be helpful in the long run.
Romney's team remains confident, arguing that by any delegate count, Romney has knocked his competitors out of the race. Campaigns, news organizations, and the Republican National Committee have all released different totals, each within a handful of delegates of one another, but none are final until each state completes the process of selecting delegates under a complex set of rules unique to each state.
"To put it simply, the past week has been yet another missed opportunity for them to close the gap. Instead of closing the gap, they watched the gap grow," Romney political director Rick Beeson said of the other GOP contenders in a statement.
But while Romney may be the only candidate remaining with a path to 1,144 delegates, that doesn't guarantee he will earn them, leaving Team Romney with serious — and costly — work left to do. ...The Hill
It doesn't seem like "serious work" to many Americans. It seems more like a con job.
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Washington Post reporters are looking at the Republican campaign and saying "This much is clear: Whoever wins is going to win ugly."
And this: "In a memo released Wednesday, Romney’s aides reiterated what has become the central argument of his campaign: The math says nobody else can win."
If the convention opens without a clear winner, the Post reports, "Santorum would try to woo delegates who had supported Gingrich, as well as others who came to the convention unpledged to any candidate."
With their help, he could pass Romney and win in later rounds of balloting.
No major party has tried such a thing since 1952. They much prefer their conventions to be pep rallies instead of brawls.
Still, experts said, this ugly kind of win is the only hope for Santorum.
“There’s hardly any logic there. But that’s the only play they have right now,” said Josh Putnam, a professor at Davidson College in North Carolina who studies the Republican primary process. ...WaPo
All of this sounds like Wall Street's version of "democracy," doesn't it?
