Xinhua Net
As GOP contest drags on, Obama big winner
By Katherin Harbin
Mitt Romney may continue to lead the Republican pack of presidential nominees, but as voters continue to resist his candidacy and fellow contenders vow to stay in the GOP race until late summer, one politician is beginning to rise above the rest: President Barack Obama.
Romney's Republican rivals continue to plead their presidential cases to the American public. Their efforts to garner support overwhelmingly come at the expense of attacking Romney - the man favored by the majority of analysts to ultimately win the Republican nomination.
Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum's victories in the all three Republican contests Tuesday gave a burst of life to his campaign that had struggled since its Iowa victory, showing that a significant percentage of Republicans still actively resist a potential Romney presidency and seek a conservative alternative.
Tuesday's results ensured that both Santorum and Texas Congressman Ron Paul, who also beat Romney in Tuesday's Minnesota Caucus, will be around to continue their anti-Romney pitches for at least the next round of nationally-televised debates and extensive media coverage.
And even in the face of overwhelming defeats in the last five state contests, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich also defiantly vowed to press onward, saying definitively Saturday that the Gingrich campaign would continue all the way up to the Republican Convention in August.
"I am not going to withdraw," Gingrich said after his defeat in Nevada, largely brushing aside the importance of the Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri contests and looking instead toward March's Super Tuesday and the Texas primary, where he said he expected to do well.
"I am actually pretty happy where we are and I think the contrast between Governor Romney and me is going to get wider and wider... and I think that over time we're going to drive home that clear contrast in a way which will be enormously to his disadvantage," Gingrich confidently continued, alluding to future criticism he planned to levy on both Romney's record and leadership qualities.
It is exactly these negative and highly publicized "contrasts" Gingrich and others continue to make with Romney that are arguably more threatening to the former Massachusetts governor than any of the other candidates' real chances of securing the nomination for themselves.
For as Republican rivals continue to blast Romney for things like his switched positions on an individual healthcare mandates and corporate work history at private equity firm Bain Capital, they are drawing increased attention to precisely the same weaknesses that could hurt Romney most in the general election.
Negative campaigning is certainly not new to the election cycle, but the fact that it is currently Republicans who are the ones firing the political bullets at their own eventual nominee may have far-reaching consequences for the general election, as voters hear more and more criticism of the GOP field and why Romney in particular is not the best choice for president.
Romney seems to have brushed aside these concerns that a nomination race characterized by negativity will hurt the GOP in November, instead holding that it will make the Republicans stronger.
"A competitive primary does not divide us," Romney told his supporters earlier in his Florida victory speech. "It prepares us. And we will win."
However, an ABC News/Washington Post poll February 4 found that public opinion to certain factors surrounding Romney's candidacy are drawing heightened negativity, while in contrast Obama's support has risen, his approval rating now at a nine-month high in that poll of 50 percent.
One of the hallmarks of Obama's reelection campaign is the inequity of the U.S. tax system at the expense of the middle class, and in his State of the Union address in January Obama explicitly referenced his belief that millionaires needed to "pay their fair share" in taxes.
In the same ABC News/Washington Post poll, 68 percent of respondents agreed that the U.S. tax system favored the wealthy, while 66 percent further believed that Romney's tax rate of 14 percent on his 2010 income of 22 million dollars was not paying his fair share.
That Romney released his controversial income tax returns in the first place was not because of pressure from President Obama or the Democrats, but rather due to the repeated demands of Gingrich, who had blasted Romney for his reluctance to level with the American public.
Similarly, a string of negative ads questioning Romney's work at Bain Capital were done through the work of Winning Our Future, a Gingrich Super PAC.
Painting Romney as an opportunist who laid off everyday Americans in order to increase his own fortune, the Winning Our Future ads cast a negative spotlight on Romney's past that had previously been championed by the Romney campaign as executive business experience.
The anti-Romney ads were largely effective as Gingrich went on to win the South Carolina primary at that time, and 36 percent of the ABC News/Washington Post poll's respondents were now of the opinion that Romney's work as a corporate investor did more to cut jobs, slightly higher than the 33 percent who said it created more jobs.
How much more damage the Romney campaign will suffer before November and to what effect remains uncertain, but until then the Democrats are no doubt happy to sit back, relax and let Republicans fight amongst themselves as the nomination drags onward.
In the meantime, President Obama's campaign announced in January that they and the Democratic National Committee raised 68 million U.S. dollars in the 2011 fourth quarter, dollars that will be saved until, finally, there are no more Republican Super PACs left to do the work for them.
Combined with the gradual recovery of the U.S. economy and recent declines in the U.S. unemployment rate, last measured in January at 8.3 percent, Obama supporters may be hoping that the President's reelection bid is looking increasingly optimistic.
As it currently stands, Obama would now defeat Romney in a general election by 9 percentage points, the ABC News/Washington Post poll showing Obama beating Romney 52 to 43 among the general electorate.
It was Obama's highest recorded number against Romney since ABC News/Washington Post began testing the question in April 2011.
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