Polling Polling & More Polling....

Not even five days ago, Rasmussen called the Brown-Warren senate race deadlocked at 48% a piece, with only four percent undecided.
Today the Boston Sunday Globe says Citizen Warren is up a bare 5% over Former State Senator Brown but with eighteen percent undecided in this race.
(BTW the above link is to David Bernstein's blog who riffs a bit on the numbers, I can't link back to the Globe due to the pay wall, Bernstein recounts the stats accurately though).
I don't think the senate race has reached such a fever pitch that both sides are essentially tied at over forty five percent each....on the other hand eighteen percent undecided is a statistic better suited to a down ticket office like Register of Probate or Public Exploder.
My over all sense of the race is that it is tight, volatile that a lot of independents are still dithering and that as a consequence a lot of attention will be paid to the debates as a framing device.
I also suspect the broad consequences of the Globe's polling will validate both candidate's campaign strategies insofar as they both need maximum party unity in order to go a-hunting for stray suburban independents.

John Silber R.I.P.

There the Former President of BU is at the Gates of Paradise, haranguing Saint Peter over the slack operation he is running.

While on Earth though, Silber ran up quite a rhetorical tab, as President of Boston University he routinely lectured incoming freshmen girls on dress, deportment and the mysteries of femininity. Thats when he wasn't harassing recalcitrant professors, paying himself a Fenway Major League Baseball Salary, hired Billy Bulger to a lecturer's gig, tripling BU's endowment, enrollment & tuition in general disporting himself like a Prussian Drill Instructor gone ever so mad on Emanuel Kant.
In sort he was a columnist's dream,  a mean spirited eminently  quotable windbag who no more confess ignorance of a subject than he'd back down on the efficacy of cold showers and the lash.
Silber was destined to run for governor and in a last bit of cosmic irony, as a democrat as well in that far off year of 1990 with it's curious"angry white males".
To call the man a gaffe machine would be utter understatement he insulted everyone, Cambodians, Puerto Ricans, welfare recipients, he called his GOP opponent "An orange haired WASP"and then in final transport of fury opened verbal fire on Natalie Jacobson in a TV interview and thus met his Waterloo.
He also dragged down a few good democrats that year, notably George Keverian the democratic candidate for State Treasurer and his owning running mate Marjorie Clapprood whose promising statewide political career came to an abrupt end on election night 1990.
There is little to remember of the man, he was angry, self righteous and given to bullying...but curiously despite his tendency to alienate core democratic constituency he stuck by the party to the end.  One can only imagine the long term damage he could have done to the GOP if he had switched over, but know perhaps Silber's most memorable virtue was loyalty.

When Jeff Jacoby eructates a howler

it is one for the ages...consider this quote from today's Globe:

"Barack Obama has been the most polarizing and divisive president in modern times."

Not for nothing but  didn't Jeff say the exact same thing about Bill Clinton? How did Obama supplant Clinton in this Jacobyean category anyway...did The President forcibly relocating the Kulaks when I wasn't looking or something?
For that fact, Jeff said the exact same thing about John Kerry and Al Gore...They can't ALL be The Most Polarizing and Divisive democrat ever, some sort of qualitative heirarchy has to impose itself on the situation.
All snarkage aside, the reason Jeff can write that is because so few republicans crossed the aisles to support the President's program nigh these last few years.
Why?
It is not because said program was so radical, indeed parts of it were the very antithesis of radicalism, no the GOP refused to parlay mostly so they could accuse the President of being "Polarizing and Divisive"during this election cycle.
Thus we come to Jeff's column today...huffy indignant,condescending and yet boring....one thing is for certain for readability and wit no one will ever mistake Jeff Jacoby for H.L. Mencken or evenWestbrook Pegler for that matter.

Y'know why

Scott Brown is so pathologically obsessed with Citizen Warren's alleged Indian heritage?
Because the gawd damned fool has driving his wife & daughter's show horses around for so long, the Former State Senator thinks he is a Cowboy.
And we all know the metaphor emnity between cowboys and indians....of course to be playing at cowboys and indians into adulthood and public life as well is a miserable spectacle indeed.

When the Mitt Hits the Fan...

To add to the former viceroy's woes, apparently his polling lags even among NASCAR fans. 
I can scarcely credit the results of what is admittedly an on-line poll...unless one postulates the President  has had enough terrorists shot and bombed enough dictators to satisfy even the most belligerent of gearheads.
Otherwise this poll likely stands as a good indicator of Mitt Romney "Unlike-ability Factor", a sort of bizarre anti-charisma that repels even the most hardcore republican cadres.  

Jeff Jacoby makes a attempt

to cast a "Carter-esque"patina over President Obama's foreign policy in today's Sunday Globe.
Aiyeee, it must be the end of September in a Presidential election year, because Former President Carter is coming in for his usual straw man drubbing.
Jeff's point is pretty shallow &hypocritical  even for him, the rioting in the Middle East MUST be all President Obama fault cuz he is a weak leader etc etc etc.
Jeff is a neocon, and neocons despite a  transparent veneer of bipartisanship are heavy traffickers in the needs of movement conservatism at the moment.
So of course out comes the Carter metaphor right on schedule...and just as suddenly the US Backed Fall of Colonel Khadaffi and the impending fall of the Supreme Opthamalocrat in Syria have become in the neocon mindset equivalent to the Fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979.
But then again I can recall with the simplest nostalgia back in 1998 or so when Colonel Khadaffi was being ginned up as a threat to National Security by the neocon right  who in turn flung the charge of appeasement at then President Bill Clinton.
I don't think you have go far back into the neocon archives to find all sorts of blusterly editorials demanding the deposition of Col, Khadaffi, President Assad of Syria and Saddam Hussein as rogue regional actors that are threatening the peace.
So of course fourteen years later, Khadaffi is dead, Bin Laden is dead, Assad's ne'er do well son totters and Saddam is worm chow and yet somehow Jeff Jacoby can summon the mental gymnastics to call that appeasement and failure.
It is a special sort  of neocon mental gymnastics, as politicians are in the greatest danger when they listen to neoconservatives and faithfully go about engineering the downfall of Khadaffi, Assad etc etc etc.
We are deep into the murky territory of partisan cognitive dissonance when a US President who openly connived at the fall of Colonel Moamar Khadaffi can be called an appeaser by anyone left alone a partisan commentator.
Part of our problem in the region today is because the US more of less uncritically accepted neoconservative assumptions about certain regional actors from the git-go, admittedly this cuts across party lines in the USA pretty evenly.
And meanwhile those selfsame neocons have completely quit on their premises circa 1998 all in bid to tear down President Obama.
Well what can you expect in an election year?  Hypocrisy front and center.
Me?
I would love to meet a neocon that could ever admit publicly or privately that they had made a mistake....

I also thnk that...

Mitt Romney is one gaffe away from a serious political death spiral of Goldwateresque proportions...he isn't there yet, but he is close believe me.  Mind you, he can still win, but it will take Harry S. Trumans heart and Richard Nixons will to power...so does Romney have any of that???

Y'know it is ironic

that Ray Flynn can stab the democratic party in the back and proclaim from the rooftops his endorsement of republican Scott Brown for the US Senate...but Scott Brown himself would probably spontaneously combust if someone cornered him and demanded he endorse his longtime political mentor Mitt Romney for President.
This fear of being cornered is probably the reason why Brown ducked out of the after debate presser last night...he wasn't being churlish, he was being cowardly there is a difference.

The Empty Chair...

Y'know Citizen Warren can do her cause a world of good tonight just by asking Scott Brown (in a firm but ladylike fashion) does he support and endorse Mitt Romney's candidacy for President?
Scott is so desperate to distance himself from the national GOP he is willing to come out for the forced collectivization of agriculture, pin him on the spot with that little query and his well groomed head will explode.
Meanwhile I think its hilarious that I'm getting a mailer today from "Democrats for Brown" (Chief backstabber, Ray Flynn) and poor Scott still can't make up his mind about his former mentor, Willard Mitt Romney.
Didn't Ray endorse Mitt? I wonder how he feels about Brown's indecision?

Deee-bate tonight...

Brown v.Warren mano a mano at long last....

The polls all describe a volatile race which accords with my own entirely anecdotal observations, Warren is up in a couple of them, Brown has the lead per the Boston Herald.
It is also my own personal theory that the voter's minds are as yet not made up thus a lot rides on the debates for both candidates. In a way it is a debut for both of them.
Demographically they are both going to be talking past one another to women, independents & suburbanites as they both seem to have their respective bases locked up. So expect a lot of economic issues, which could get to be slow going at times.
In terms of verbal pyrotechnics, look for Warren to use all means possible to manacle Brown to Mitt Romney. Proof of the power in that lies in the fact that Brown is backing off Romney at warp speed...can't find the words or the time to endorse his onetime political patron.
Jon Keller is the solo moderator, which is a bad choice IMHO, he has always been a rigid little libertarian partisan pretending to be a "objective journalist".
If I was the Warren campaign I'd take a moment to recall the O'Brien Romney debate of 2002 moderated by the late Tim Russert to catalogue all the ways a biased interlocutor can mess up an honest democrat.
Clearly Keller was the price Warren had to pay to get face to face with Brown....

Meanwhile I idly wonder just how much Scott Brown shells out to feed that stable of horses? Enough to feed a family of four?
KIDDING!
I KID!!

Scot Lehigh wallows in nostalgia

in today's Globe for the Mitt Romney of 2002 who vanquished that uppity insider Shannon O'Brien and became, for a single term the very Governor of Lehigh's heart.
I'd link to the column, but the Globe has gone all selfish negative vibe merchant on us when it comes to the old fashioned hot link.
Anyhow Lehigh's cure for Romney's current campaign is both simple and laughable, sign onto the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan and run as a balanced budget hawk.
The balanced budget is a placebo BELOVED by almost all the columnists currently published in the continental USA with only two lonely exceptions, Paul Krugman and Pat Buchanan.
The rest of them would see the planet blown to atoms like Krypton and would die happy in the catastrophe as long as the Federal Budget was Balanced.
It is a morbid obsession among the punditariat, I think they believe it gives them gravitas...airheads tend to worry about gravitas a lot.
And Scot Lehigh is no different of course what he does not realize is that the one issue on which Romney has no credibility at all, it is the chimera that is the balanced budget.
He has made too many promises to too many pressure groups and thrown around all sorts of tax cuts on the road to the nomination to have any room to maneuver on the budget.
In fact the whole GOP essentially punted the issue back when Reagan was sworn in, the past twenty five years the only politicians with any bona fides on the subject were democrats, chiefly Walter Mondale and Paul Tsongas and look where they ended up.
But Scot Lehigh likes to cling to an entirely delusional image of Mitt Romney as the outsider from the private sector even as the daily newsfeed tends to shred this notion by the hour....

Mitt Romney, The Gift that Keeps on Giving...

In what amounts to a "Secret Speech" to fundraisers, Mitt Romney unleashes his inner John Galt and dismisses 47% of the electorate as moochers, parasites & deadbeats.
What I just love about the above captioned "off the cuff" remarks is the false sense of both entitlement and persecution that permeates Romney's fundraising patter "gimme money or the looters will bust in here and roll you all!"

Given that Mitt is a famous opportunist that smack-tawkin' "No Apologies" shit sure doesn't leave Romney much room to maneuver when he says something patently stupid in ringing tones duly recorded...
If he wasn't such a trimmer then he wouldn't have this compulsion to over compensate and bluster and turn maybe he could graciously back off these remark, but no this is Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney could screw up a two car funeral.
Kinda questions the value of his MBA don't it?
And that is what has Humble Elias guffawing tonight....

Well well well...

Citizen Warren is up in the current polling, and has even taken the lead per the Springfield Republican newspaper.
To think a mere week ago there was a certain amount of hand wringing about the quality of her TV commercials when compared with what Brown is running...which was chiefly footage of the Junior Senator tooling around in the truck he bought to transport his horses from place to place.
Aiyee Scott Brown, "man of the people" indeed, and if the people are the legendary "Horsey Set" so much the better.
Okay all snarkage aside, this is some good news for Citizen Warren after a period of some doubt, clearly some of these numbers are derived from her prime time speech at the DNC, Scott Brown by comparison had to sneak in and out of Tampa like a fugitive Wall Street financier.
A high degree of democratic unity at the street level is probably another contributing factor which is why Brown is pathetically frantic to collect endorsements from every drunken turncoat he can dig up with a "D"next to their name.
For all that this feels like a drumhead tight race, Brown has big bucks to spend on re-election, he has at last what he wants which is name recognition and he remains the only serious republican in recent memory with a consistent lawn sign presence in Middlesex County.
It is an anecdotal & unscientific measure but one worth remembering.
I still think the debates are going to be a decisive factor in this face, a sort of debut literally for both candidates a lot may be sorted out therein.

ITEM!

A certain newly minted nominee for a cush gig in the lege in a verrry safe district did not receive a congratulatory phone call from his closest & best positioned primary rival on election night.
Rumors are flying out on the street that some democrats in the district's "key town" might be looking for a "Do-Over"in the general election by way of throwing the race to either the GOP challenger or more likely the well known, well liked and most of all well heeled independent candidate.
What can the captioned democrat do in these circumstances given his razor thin margin of victory?
Well likely he will need change his address assuming he wins the election but between now and election he needs to spend every waking hour in that aforementioned "key town" mollifying his opponent's disgruntled supporters and reaching out to independent women voters.
Even in a safe district, things are never as safe as you might think...

Final notes on the

24th Middlesex democratic primary.  Rogers won the nomination by a margin of only two hundred votes, he ran a strong second in Belmont and won everywhere else (by that I mean the relevant precincts and wards in Arlington and Cambridge).
This is all the more amazing given the fact that all three campaigns made what seemed to be only pro-forma efforts outside Belmont proper (unless stuff was happening unseen by Humble Elias...hell I am far from omnipotent folks).
Clearly Reardon's campaign though a third place finisher all over the district stopped Hegarty from running up the numbers she needed in Belmont.
What I'm taking away from all this is that the 24th is still a district in which Imperial Belmont is the major electoral factor and that Rogers' razor thin margin may well invite primary challenges to his incumbency down the line.
That is of course assuming he wins this fall, but of course there is this pretty shade of blue in the 24th House District to be sure.
If I was Dave Rogers I'd quit North Cambridge and the glittering lights of Norton's Liquor Store and buy a modest heap off Prospect Street, if of course, anything there constituted modesty and then start taking the commuter rail from Belmont Center to the State House.

Whenever Mitt Romney gets

outside of his comfort zone, he blusters.

Whenever he gets scared, he rants and raves and makes diresome and inaccurate accusations.

But he really goes berserk when someone calls him on any of it....

Case in point this awful situation in Libya, our Ambassador's body wasn't even cold and the lights hadn't even been turned on in the White House Situation Room before Romney was in full scream calling the Admin's policy "a disgrace"and insinuating in that cloying clumsy manner we know so well in Massachusetts, that the President was a Muslim Sympathizer.
Romney changes his mind about things regularly but his few foreign policy notions are reliably crude, belligerent, obnoxious and violent to a fault.
Some say he is trying to "Out Cheney, even Dick Cheney", I suspect though he is trying to overcompensate for some gruesome hidden inner inadequacies.
Whatever....today is when America found out just desperate Mitt Romney is to play the demagogue...as if throwing a mere tantrum at a press conference impresses anyone.

Dead Even...

That is Brown versus Warren in the latest polls.
I'm guessing that her speech to the DNC went over well and some bounce is derived from that more than anything.  Nice counter to the Brown's current round of adverts which spotlight his vital driving skills.
Moreover Scott Brown is still mired below a majority at 46% assuming the one point spread holds true this leaves him in scary territory on an election day where turnout is likely gonna bank high for democrats and like minded independents.
And it is interesting to consider that just possibly this year's DNC was so well run that it was able to confer some bounce down the ticket for captioned candidates of course.
Which of course means that maybe just maybe conventions aren't anachronistic enterprises after all.
But back here in the Commonwealth this remains a volatile senate race that could turn ugly at any minute moreover nothing but the common goodwill of the Brown/Warren campaigns prevents third party attacks adverts from contaminating the race. Tight numbers especially as they plague the incumbent make attack ads a dangerous temptation, one can but hope Citizen Warren's campaign won't get caught flat footed.
I'm thinking the public's full attention on this race won't be focused until the debates and then we will see some sh*t!

One Out of Six

of our fellow citizens now lives in poverty or so I read in the Boston Globe.
Nearly as many in 1964 back when President Johnson started banging the pots for a "War on Poverty"....
Nowadays we just wait for horrific news like this to inspire our statesmen and stateswomen to reel to their feet braying for New Education Initiatives to combat rising poverty, merit pay for teachers, more training more standardized testing blah blah blah.
Assigning education the lead role in ending poverty is like giving the moon landing to the Department of Transportation...Yes there is a continuum there, but it is hardly a efficient option.
But trust me if the world "Poverty"enters campaign 2012 it'll be as a shopworn opening act for the glittering rock-n-roll show that is Education Reeee-form....wait for it believe me.

Josh Marshall sez

Romney is trending towards the whole cultural warrior meme this week.
David Bernstein though, over in the Boston Phoenix thinks almost the exact opposite, that Romney is trying to rebrand himself as a family friendly moderate.
Who is right?
Both of them.
Mitt Romney regards rhetoric as mere manipulation, a means to fool the trogs into voting for him, he is man  who does not feel himself bound in any way by what he says in public, thus he contradicts himself virtually on an hourly basis.
He has been doing this for years, when the media catches him on it they sort of accuse him of either lying or hyperbole before backing off in a surly fashion. He is actually doing neither thing, Romney doesn't believe in truth, he believes in Steven Colbert's "Truthiness", in other words if it "Sounds good"and helps his electoral bottom line he'll use it. If he gets called out, he accuses the media of bias or else drops the trope and finds some other rubbish to spout.
If you discount the existence of truth, then you cannot have much shame about lying...this is why Romney never seems to turn a hair no matter how outrageous his fabrications.
Quite literally, Mitt Romney will figure out what he believes in only if he wins the election...and even then it is all in flux.

If Barack Obama wins this year

it is because he had a "Harry Truman Moment" last night.
That was to say the least a masterful speech he gave at the DNC, he conceded nothing, stayed on the attack and yet presented himself as an optimist.

Say what you like about Barack Obama, but he is not a "Declinist"....His opponents wanna fill the lifeboats with the rich and their possessions at gunpoint while the President trying to save the very ship itself.

Y'know, Mitt Romney is never more mealy mouthed than when quotes Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama cites The Great Emancipator and makes it all seem at once timeless and thrilling.
That more than anything makes stark the ideological and stylistic differences between the two candidates...

Congrats to

North Cambridge Attorney Dave Rogers who tonight collected a 43% plurality to become the democratic nominee for State Rep in the 24th Middlesex District (Will Brownsburger's old district now redrawn with more "Arlingtoness").
Wow
Did not see that one a-comin'...I figured this for Hegarty from day one...I guess Aimee Coolidge's endorsement has some serious street cred in Arlington, I mean like how else to explain it??
Well a few caveats, it was primary with a light turn out with numerous distractions piled into one week from school opening to the DNC and the election was held on a Thursday to boot.
Nonetheless as I speculated earlier, this was a "Battle for the Soul of Belmont" and in the end North Cambridge was the victor.
This is good news for Arlington and some of the maachers therein who endorsed Rogers, it means the town won't get overlooked when its interests are under discussion on Beacon Hill.
Otherwise it was a relatively clean campaign, little histrionics or skullduggery...Good show all around.

The nomination for the 24th Middlesex House Seat....

is up for grabs in tomorrow's primary, it has been to say the least a somewhat lackluster campaign over all, none of the captioned democrats in the race impress or inspire. None of them seem to be able project force into the relevant precincts in Arlington other that the usual last minute flurry of mailings. All these leads one to wonder if any of the democrats in this race really want to see a big turn out from Arlington.

Margaret Hegarty Belmont Town Meeting member seems to have the longest resume and some street cred in Belmont politics, she has served as an ADA and as an Assistant Attorney General.  Moreover the rump of the PUMA/Hilaryista faction seems to have warmed up to her late in the game with endorsements coming from Arlington's Diane Mahon & Clarissa Rowe along with former state rep Ann Paulsen. It is assumed that she is the front runner at this point although no polling buttresses that claim. She is otherwise bright, personable, well informed even charming, but the whole thing faintly suggests ticket punching of the most obvious sort.

Dave Rogers an attorney from North Cambridge is a bright even funny guy, he is determined to win the primary as the hardworking shoe-leather insurgent liberal who comes from behind at the last minute to upset the insiders. This is how Jim Marzilli did it in 1992 and it works if you have the volunteers, the campaign organization, professional management and the money....So far it seems like Dave Rogers has none of that to draw on save the earnest liberal fervor. Ideologically, Humble Elias is likely the best fit with him, but Rogers is trying to win in a district where Belmont is the main electoral factor, long odds indeed. He has however, picked up a number of useful endorsements within the democratic heirarchy in Arlington...then again so did Mark Roosevelt.

Bobby Reardon just does not impress, he is twenty two or so and looks like he is eighteen quite frankly his platform seems reliably liberal but other than youth and good looks nothing much seems to recommend the Belmont town meeting member for the office. There has been talk around the district that Reardon is trying to flex his electoral muscles a bit to see what kind of numbers he can run town wide in Belmont in preparation for a different race down the line. Of course, Sean Garballey won at a similar young age but then again Sean ran an energetic campaign I'm just not seeing the same pace here.

This ends the way it began, "A Battle For the Soul of Belmont Mass" which is a thought to chill the blood in every way.  A lot depends on unseen factors, can Reardon turn this into a house to house fight against Hegarty in Belmont such that Rogers is able to run up a plurality in a three way split?  Nothing that I've observed suggests this is gonna be a tight race (if it was, we'd see more effort committed to the outlier precincts and wards in Arlington and Cambridge) but then again exactly who is the front runner if anyone is a mystery...
At this point I enter the voting booth undecided in this democratic primary....Sad admission on my part but true.

Just...Don't...Inhale...Governor

Herein, the Boston Globe takes time out of it's busy schedule to gently bang the pots for a "Deval Patrick for President"in 2016 boomlet.
Its nice to get some good press in a Presidential election year, Governor Patrick has few claims on his time or good will and a great deal of room to maneuver as we move thru his second and last term of office in the Commonwealth.
But please for the love of Ghod Deval, decline and disdain this talk of the Potomac, six guys and aimed at the White House from Massachusetts in my life time they've all ended up in the foornotes.
The country's animus for Massachusetts and our political culture gutters on unabated...and until attitudes out there change there is naught any single pol from the Bay State can do.
Even one as able and eloquent as Deval Patrick, tis a formula for tears if it were to come to pass believe me.
***
Meanwhile the Herald jumped ugly on the Governor yesterday for being out of state...while the State Lege was adjourned...or some damn thing. I don't recall One Herald Square being this vigilant when Romney was Governor and flying to South Carolina at the taxpayer's expense to denounce the very state that elected his bony ass!

Brewmeister in Chief...

The President's heretofore secret recipe for Honey Flavored Ale, a product of the White House no less, has been released to the public.
Which of course only underscores the fact that the President, is a bit of a beer fanatic...Which is a very subtle contrast with the man he succeeded to office and the man who is vying with Obama for the Presidency, both teetotalers.
For better or worse, booze, has been a central factor in this Republic from the start, Harvard University used to have it's own brewery appended to the campus back in colonial times, at least until commencement turned into a drunken debauch.
George Washington had his own personal distillery at Mount Vernon and sent numerous letters to his business agent in Jamaica dickering ad infinitum over the price of a stave barrel of rum.
John Adams? A tankard of hard cider before breakfast every day.....
Thomas Jefferson? A great critic of hard liquor and the first serious wine snob to serve as Commander in Chief.
The rest of them had to get by with Madeira, bottles and bottles and bottles of good solid Madeira....from    the Boston Massacre to the Yorktown and beyond.
Lets face it, back in the day you had to be either drunk or crazy to call out the British Empire, and the Founding Fathers were not crazy by any measure.
Thus when Barack Obama brews and bottles his own beer and passes it around at White House receptions like a proud father, he merely celebrates his Olde Timey Americanism.

Romney's convention...

Well Ghod help us, Mitt Romney wanted to be the GOP Presidential nominee in the worst way, and he damn well got his wish.
So it is plainly ironic that his convention was storm-wracked, plagued by inappropriate eructations about rape & voting rights, his Vice Presidential candidate a glib little savage lied like a dog in the heat thru out his own acceptance speech, Clint Eastwood made a raving fool of himself and then Romney tried to make like Reagan and succeeded only in anesthetizing a noisy sectarian bunch.
A typical Mitt Romney triumph,  to be sure....
Ah but the party he leads, that is another thing, their convention was a bitter convocation of haters, insurgent libertarians & sundry racialized malcontents, these are people animated by utopian fantasies and a  contradictory need to destroy about a hundred years of US History.
This is an entirely delusional notion, but as far as the RNC is concerned with it's public commitment to a Taliban approach to abortion it is all very necessary and real.
Dunno what happens to the Republic when one major political party adjourns itself from reality but the intermediate term effects cannot be good for any of us.
And trust me, in the battle to make the GOP face facts, Mitt Romney is far too weak a statesman to be any sort of a Change Agent therein.
On the other hand, I get the impression more than a few attendees at the RNC  have already started thinking about 2016, Chris Christie barely acknowledged Romney as a nominee in his keynote address and it seems clear to me that Paul Ryan is desperate to take his nice clean shiny wingnut act to a national audience...solo. So the battle for rationality within the Republican Party gets booted downrange another fours years, unless of course Romney wins and then heaven help the reasonable!