ROMNEY'S CATBIRD SEAT HEATS UP

By H. N. Burdett

More than 50 years back, University of Maryland sprinter Dennis Abdalla was running the 100-yard dash of his life. He was clearly in the lead and streaking toward the finish line. But something was wrong. Duke University's Dave Sime, then the fastest man in America if not the world, was in the race. "I glanced over my left shoulder to see where Dave was," Abdalla later told me. "And he passed me on my right." Abdalla's time of 9.9 seconds was the best of his collegiate career. Sime's time of 9.7 seconds was, for him, just another day on the cinder path.

That long ago race comes to mind as Republican presidential nomination front-runner Mitt Romney desperately strives to nail down the 2012 blessing of his party. The hitch is that rank-and-file conservative Republicans do not trust him. And for good reason.

While seeking to unseat Massachusetts U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, Romney ran to the left of the Liberal Lion of the Senate. While serving as Governor of the Bay State, Romney became identified with the health care reform program on which so-called "Obama-care" was patterned.

Moreover, Romney's trust level is plunging even among what remains of the moderate contingent within GOP ranks - 25 per cent or less of that shrinking entity, judging from the combined poll numbers registered thus far by Romney and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman. Huntsman is the only hopeful for the Republican nomination on record as believing, unlike the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court, that "of course, corporations are not people."

Romney's tightly scripted, expensively organized campaign has until recent days kept him above the serial firing squad that the interminable debates between the Republican presidential aspirants have become.

The former governor of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the union, has had a nightmarish week as more traditional GOP conservatives - Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry - make their last ditch efforts to head him off at the pass.

Barring the most colossal upset since David's slingshot brought down Goliath, Romney will emerge victorious after the votes are counted in today's New Hampshire primary. The eyebrow raising aspect of Romney's victory in the Iowa caucuses was not so much the fact that he managed to win there, though earlier all but conceding that he could not; it was the the fact that he won by a measly eight votes over the pathetically under-funded Santorum.

Similarly, capturing anything below 40 per cent of the Granite State vote will be further, if not exactly conclusive, evidence that Romney has yet to clear the remaining high hurdle of GOP distrust. Anything less than an overwhelming triumph, where polls showed him only days ago to have a commanding 20-point lead over his nearest rival, will keep the next two primaries - in South Carolina and Florida - interesting.

"Man will occasionally stumble over the truth," Winston Churchill once noted, "but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on."

Romney's hands-down worst day in the current campaign cycle was in the debate last Sunday morning in New Hampshire. After he solemnly denied that he was a career politician, Gingrich countered with: "Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?" The former House of Representatives Speaker then proceeded to remind the audience that Romney has been "running consistently for years and years and years... Just level with the American people. You've been running for (office) at least since the 1990s."

Still smarting from the apparent wreckage of his own candidacy, thanks to attack advertisements from political action committees supporting Romney, Gingrich went on to deflate the GOP front-runner's claim as a "job creator." He characterized Romney's role at Bain Capital as that of a predatory capitalist gobbling up companies, stuffing his own pockets with the assets, then dumping jobs and destroying entire communities.

Nor has Romney heard the last of the shots against his past as the leader of Bain and Company's equity arm. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has written a $5 million check to Winning the Future - a PAC supporting Gingrich - for attack ads in South Carolina on Romney's record at Bain. The ads will reportedly feature excerpts from a movie featuring interviews with individuals who lost their jobs at firms Bain Capital bought and then sold or sent into bankruptcy.

But Romney's problems in the Sunday morning debate were not limited to Gingrich's pit bull assault.

Romney exposed his weak left flank when he inexplicably jumped on former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, then languishing in the New Hampshire polls at a sickening single digit, for accepting President Obama's appointment as ambassador to China.

"This nation is divided because of attitudes like that," Huntsman said, in what will be perhaps the most memorable riposte of the current primary campaign cycle, along with Gingrich's "pious baloney" line. Huntsman's words seem to have fueled a surge enabling him to challenge libertarian Ron Paul for at least second place in the New Hampshire voting, though perhaps not nearly enough to load the slingshot aimed at felling Goliath.

Unlike the University of Maryland sprinter who looked over his wrong shoulder while a faster man passed him on the other side, there is little to suggest that Mitt Romney is sufficiently vulnerable on either his left or right within his own party. His flip-flopping on core Republican issues, such as gun control and reproductive rights, are relatively negligible when contrasted with his steadfast protection of laissez-faire, winner-take-all capitalism and feathering his own luxuriously comfortable nest at the expense of thousands of lost jobs.

Absent the ability of the Republican party to coalesce around a single candidate who more represents social conservatism, the GOP seems headed, if not exactly with full steam, toward nominating Romney, the candidate it least trusts but who is deemed the potential nominee most likely to deny President Obama a second term.

Should this materialize, the larger question looms as to whether Romney will be sufficiently healed from the bruises and battering inflicted by his primary opponents to vigorously contest the November election which he has called a battle for the heart and soul of America.

When confronted with criticism from Gingrich about the Iowa attack ads, Romney said, "This ain't bean bag." In the end, Romney may very well wish that it were.
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