Close races in Ala., Miss. fueled by ideology
AL, MS voters guided by religion prefer Santorum
Early results from exit polls of Alabama and Mississippi voters show Rick Santorum leading among evangelical and born-again Christians saying a candidate's religious beliefs deeply affected their choice. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are faring better with such voters who said religion mattered less.
GOP voters in Ala., Miss. worried about economy
Live Blog: Santorum Wins Alabama; Mississippi Still A Tight Three-Way Race
The two Dixie primaries give Mitt Romney a chance to solidify his place as the inevitable Republican presidential candidate, while his rivals, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are looking for enough delegates to hang on another week.
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Has Southern Hospitality Steered Pollsters The Wrong Way In Ala. & Miss.?
Mitt Romney is at or near the top in polls of Alabama and Mississippi Republicans. But some voters in those states may just be too polite to tell pollsters that they don't support the "establishment" candidate.
Five Things To Watch For In Tuesday’s Alabama, Mississippi GOP Primaries
Voters and analysts alike will be watching the two states closely Tuesday to learn whether voters in the Deep South choose to go with the most electable candidate, which many say is Romney, or the most conservative, a label Santorum and Gingrich say properly labels them.
Newt Gingrich Vows ‘I Will Not Leave The Field’
WASHINGTON -â Newt Gingrich ended an appearance Monday night at a presidential forum in Birmingham, Ala., with a cry of defiance, vowing to remain a candidate for president in the Republican primary.
"I do not believe the other two candidates can beat Obama and I believe this race is the most important in our lifetime," Gingrich said emphatically. "And I will not leave the field."
Equally important as the former House speaker's (R-Ga) resolve is the fact that polls show him in the hunt to win in both primaries on Tuesday, in Mississippi and Alabama. A victory in either state would make it hard for those supporting former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) to argue that Gingrich should drop out and give Santorum a one-on-one shot at Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
Santorum and his campaign lowered expectations Monday for his performance in the two Southern states, arguing that the election calendar ahead, beyond the primaries on Tuesday, favors them.
"All the pressure is on Romney and Gingrich tomorrow," senior Santorum adviser John Brabender told The Huffington Post. "Our big states are down the road."
A memo from Santorum's newly hired delegate counter, John Yob, implied that Gingrich could be out of the race by the April 3 primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Yob wrote that those three primaries "could be the first contests that are a one-on-one between a conservative and a moderate."
And in a spin that strained credulity, Yob argued that Santorum's failure to qualify for the D.C. primary ballot "was not a problem for us ... because D.C. Republicans would almost surely vote for the most moderate candidate anyway."
Yob predicted a "good day" on April 24, when New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware hold primaries, even though most of those states are likely to favor Romney. And he wrote that May 8 primaries in North Carolina, Indiana and West Virginia will be "the beginning of the end for Mitt Romney."
But the reality is that if Santorum loses either Mississippi or Alabama, and especially if he loses both, he will face questions about his ability to light the match and fully ignite the GOP's conservative base.
A week ago, Santorum was coming off a strong showing on Super Tuesday, winning Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota, and nearly beating Romney in Ohio. His own advisers and a super PAC supporting him said Gingrich should drop out and let Santorum run against Romney without anyone splitting the conservative vote.
But Gingrich stepped up his attacks on Santorum, and even overruled a comment from a spokesman implying that his candidacy might no longer be viable if he lost either Mississippi or Alabama.
A Santorum win in Alabama is possible, but a third-place finish in Mississippi looks equally so. That would be a blow to his hopes of gathering an unstoppable momentum to sweep Gingrich out of the race and to shake Romney's lead in delegates.
Yob's memo focused on opportunities to narrow Romney's delegate lead through the state convention process. He said that the longer the primary goes on, the more the nomination rests in the hands of the most conservative activists who make up the party's base, and the more that favors Santorum.
But activists and Republican delegates in key states will only consider breaking toward Santorum if he stays close to Romney in the delegate count and if there is powerful momentum sweeping up loose anti-Romney elements inside the party and toward Santorum. So far, that has yet to happen, as best evidenced by Santorum's apparent inability to surge ahead of Gingrich and Romney in Mississippi and Alabama.
Santorum's path to the nomination will grow more difficult with losses in either primary. Yet Santorum insisted, in an interview with conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, that "this race isnât even close to over, and everybody knows it, including Mitt Romney."
Santorum told Hewitt that the Romney campaign's delegate arguments -- focused on Romney's two-to-one lead in delegates -- are "silly theories that are not based in reality."
And Santorum again raised the prospect of fighting Romney all the way to the August national convention in Tampa.
"This is a convention that we may end up going to, I donât know. But either way, conservatives are going to nominate a conservative. Iâm convinced of that. And the more this race goes on, the more that will become evident," Santorum said.
Romney took an equally forceful position against the GOP primary extending to Tampa.
"We sure as heck are not going to go to a convention, all the way to the end of August, to select a nominee and have campaign working during a convention," Romney said on Fox News. "Why, can you imagine anything that would be a bigger gift to Barack Obama than us not having a nominee until the end of August? That is just not going to happen."
Romney's campaign brought in comedian Jeff Foxworthy, who has significant red-state appeal, to campaign with Romney in Jackson, Miss., on Monday morning.
"I am looking forward to going there and hunting with you sometime. And you can actually show me which end of the rifle to point," Romney joked to Foxworthy.
Foxworthy told CNN after the event that hunting with Romney "sounds even more dangerous than Cheney if you ask me."
"We may start with a BB gun and work our way up to a rifle," Foxworthy cracked.
For Romney, the worst outcome on Tuesday would be to finish behind Gingrich and Santorum in both contests. But poll numbers, especially in Mississippi where he has a strong organization headed by Henry Barbour, nephew to the state's former Gov. Haley Barbour, do not indicate that Romney will finish third.
Nonetheless, Romney supporters sweated details including this week's spring break at Mississippi high schools, taking many wealthy families -- a dependable Romney voting bloc -- to the Gulf Shores for the week and away from their homes and voting precincts.
Hey, Y’all: Why Romney Might Just Win In The South
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's on-the-trail efforts on Mississippi and Alabama may look awkward, but his money and organization could translate to wins on Tuesday.
Andy Ostroy: True Grits
No, that's not Mitt Romney talking. It's his new alter-ego, Mr. Cheesy Grits. Romney, in his desperate, last minute attempt to win the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, has been trying to sound more Southern than Foghorn Leghorn. Nothing's more painful to watch than the uber-stiff, fake and uncomfortable Romney trying to connect with regular folk. Because the truth is, with Mitt Romney, there is no truth.
At a Dixie rally last week he told the crowd "I am learning to say y'all, and I like grits and things... strange things are happening to me." Strange for sure. But what's strange is that Romney thinks the way to win voters in the South is to turn them all into inarticulate, soul-food-eatin' caricatures. Perhaps a more effective strategy might've been to say, "Now I don't know a thing about fixing grits, and I'm not going to pretend I do. I'll leave that to Rick and Newt. But I'll tell you one thing, I know an awful lot about fixing the economy and creating jobs. That's why I deserve your vote."
But that won't ever happen on the Romney campaign trail, because that would require the candidate to sound like a real human being rather than a fork-tongued automaton who who wouldn't know honesty and sincerity if it hit 'em in the neckbone.
Romney is the "severely conservative" candidate with more flip-flops than a Birkenstock store. From abortion, immigration and taxes to gay marriage, health care and the environment... from the way he talks to the food he claims to eat... with Mitt Romney it's what you see is, well, we have no idea what we get."
Analysis: Big win for Suu Kyi’s party in Myanmar election? Maybe not
MAWLAMYAING, Myanmar (Reuters) - Cho Cho May knows who she will vote for in next month's Myanmar by-elections: the candidate for the party created by the former military junta. "No need to ask me that question," she says. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) candidate is her boss. Finding another USDP supporter elsewhere in this normally sleepy river town is harder. ...
Rick Santorum Calls Mitt Romney Campaign ‘Desperate’ for Questioning Saturday’s Delegate Haul
Lindsey Graham Says Rick Santorum Wrong on Economy
Gingrich: U.S. Mission in Afghanistan ‘Not Doable’
Newt Gingrich Knows What It Takes to Be Southern
Rick Santorum Says He Regrets ‘Snob’ Comment
Appearing on "The Mike Huckabee Show" with his wife on Saturday, Rick Santorum said that he wished he had not called President Obama a "snob" for wanting everybody in America to go to college.
Huckabee brought up the remark in asking Santorum if he regretted anything he has said on the campaign trail during his run for the GOP nomination.
"Look, having been a candidate, we all go out there on the campaign trail, we say some things we wish we hadn't said, or we wish we'd said 'em a little differently," Huckabee said. "Is there anything out there that you would love to walk back and say, 'Well, let me do that a little differently'"?
Santorum replied: "Well, my wife, after she heard that comment, she said, 'Rick,' she said, 'His comment might have been snobbish, but that doesn't make him a snob.'"
Sometimes you say things you wish you had said a little differently, and that's certainly one of them," he continued.
Huckabee then praised the role of "the wives" on the campaign trail, who tell candidates "things nobody else will." He asked Karen Santorum to give an example of helpful advice she had given her husband.
"So much of it is just, you know, 'Be yourself, be sincere, speak from your heart -- and Rick is a very passionate man," she said. "And I love that in Rick -- very passionate. But sometimes people misinterpret that as sort of being mean. So sometimes I ask him to tone it down a little bit, and keep the balance between your passion and getting a little too fiery."
Mike Huckabee also addressed Santorum's fraught relationship with women. He said that, since the former Pennsylvania senator had married a woman with a law degree and nursing degree who has homeschooled seven children, "the last thing on earth that would ever be legitimately said about you is that you fear strong women." Karen Santorum concurred, calling Rick a "loving, passionate, devoted husband and father."
Santorum is coming off the heels of a resounding " target="_hplink">win in Saturday's Kansas caucus, which will net him most of the state's 40 delegates. Also on Saturday, Santorum fell to Mitt Romney in Wyoming's caucus.
Santorum: With Economy Improving, Foreign Policy May Be Dominant Issue
Santorum Wins Kansas
Mitt Romney’s Humor: An Appreciation
Romney Wins In Guam
TAMUNING, Guam -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has picked up nine more delegates, winning unanimous backing at the Republican convention on the U.S. territory of Guam.
Republicans on the tiny Pacific island decided to shun traditional paper ballots, and all 215 eligible to vote at the state convention backed Romney with a show of hands.
The Guam convention's co-chair, Jerry Crisostomo, says that while Guam's Republican National Convention delegates are technically uncommitted, all nine have pledged to vote for the candidate chosen at the state convention.
Romney's son Matt attended the event, which took place on Saturday in Guam. A day earlier, Matt Romney visited the neighboring Northern Mariana Islands. It too has nine delegates and Republicans are set to vote there this weekend as well.
Romney picks up 9 convention delegates from Guam
‘Game Change’ and Sarah Palin
Newt Gingrich Slams ABC Show ‘GCB’
Paul seeks Kan. delegates, ‘the more the merrier’
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is calling Kansas "a fertile field" as he pitches his libertarian views the day before state caucuses for delegates to the party's national convention.
Romney’s Private Accounts Raise Questions
WASHINGTON -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and some of his top aides used private email accounts to conduct state business at times when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The communications were legal, even though Romney's own administration warned state agencies against the practice due to cyber security concerns. The state archives in Massachusetts – which learned about Romney's emails from the AP – now says the private emails should have invoked rules about preserving copies of state records.
Private email accounts used by public officials to perform their public jobs are effectively off limits to review by citizens, watchdog groups, political opponents and news organizations because they're often used secretly. Free accounts from commercial providers also are more vulnerable to hackers who exploit easy-to-use features to reset email passwords.
Romney's use of a free Microsoft Hotmail account and a private email address linked to his 2008 presidential campaign was revealed in documents the AP obtained under the Massachusetts Public Records Law. The Romney files, which span four months in mid-2006, represent the first substantive emails written by him to surface since he left public office in 2007. When the AP examined dozens of boxes of archived materials last summer in Boston from Romney's former administration, it found no emails or memos written by or to Romney himself.
Some of the emails obtained by AP describe Romney's internal deliberations on his health care policy and the state's 2006 budget crisis: "I hate appearing as if I am just playing national politics," Romney wrote in November 2006 during sensitive negotiations on state budget cuts, when he was preparing his 2008 presidential campaign. Romney chose to use his full name as his Hotmail username.
The private email accounts raise questions about why Romney and his aides sometimes bypassed Massachusetts' official communications system – and how many of those emails remain and whether they could be disclosed to the public. Late last year, Romney acknowledged that near the end of his governor's term in 2007 he approved a sweeping purge of executive emails from the state government's computer servers, and the removal of top aides' hard drives and computers. Romney justified the purge as legal, prompted by privacy worries.
Romney's presidential campaign declined to explain why Romney and his aides used the private accounts or explain how long and how extensively they used them.
"Gov. Romney and his staff complied with the law and followed precedent in the handling of documents in the executive office," campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said.
Using private email accounts to conduct government business has embroiled leading political figures, including Karl Rove and Sarah Palin, and has become a growing legal flashpoint nationwide. While 26 states view the use of private emails for government business as public records, the rest have no clear rules or prevailing case law – a source for continuing turmoil in state courts.
"Any time public business is being done electronically, whether its public or private email, the public should have a record," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, which tracks how states deal with electronic data and other records. "When you use private devices to do public business you remove public accountability."
Last year, former Alaska Gov. Palin – the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate – was forced to release more than 24,000 pages of emails from her official and private Yahoo email accounts, including more than 400 emails from her Yahoo account.
Separately, a college student in Tennessee, David Kernell, was convicted in April 2010 on federal charges of hacking into Palin's private emails weeks before the 2008 presidential election. Palin and her daughter Bristol testified about harassment and disruption they suffered. Kernell had correctly guessed answers to security questions guarding Palin's account, giving him access.
In recent months, governors in Florida and South Carolina have fought to block disclosure of state communications on their private email accounts. In 2011, news organizations pursued a lawsuit to see the emails of former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat, who used a private email account for state business. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled last year that Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter was not required to disclose his private cellphone records even though the calls were mostly for state business.
In Washington, even though the Presidential Records Act requires White House documents to be preserved, a congressional investigation disclosed in 2007 that millions of Bush administration emails on a private server could not be accounted for – including emails from former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove. President Barack Obama negotiated a compromise at the start of his term allowing him to use a private BlackBerry for personal and official business – provided that some messages would go to the National Archives at the end of his term.
Romney campaign officials said that Massachusetts governor's records are not subject to the state's public records law and that their preservation is voluntary. Mark Nielsen, Romney's former chief legal counsel and now a presidential campaign fundraiser, said that a 1997 Massachusetts high court ruling exempts the governor's office from any public records requirements. He said prior governor's administrations were not required to preserve emails.
"I don't think there has ever been an expectation that all electronic records or emails would be preserved," said Nielsen, who corresponded with Romney using private emails.
But Brian McNiff, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, which oversees handling of government records, said his office considers private emails used for state business to be government records and subject to preservation rules. "This office would contend they are public records and that retention rules apply," McNifff said.
Laurie Flynn, the department's chief legal counsel said last year that the governor's electronic files were subject to preservation rules. "There may be exemptions from producing them but they are still public records," she said, adding: "Even if they don't transfer records to the archives, they remain records of the office."
State rules in effect in 2006 required that internal, executive, "decision-making" correspondence had to be reviewed by state archives officials before destruction. A separate 2006 rule required executive emails to be preserved permanently. Current rules allow that correspondence about internal decisions and policies can be discarded after five years but only with permission from the state's records conservation board. New guidelines also warn that destruction of electronic records can proceed only in accordance with applicable laws and the board's approval.
When Romney stepped down as governor in early 2007, his administration turned over more than 630 boxes of documents to the state archives – a move that Romney campaign officials said exceeded previous administrations. But several former aides said those files included only limited materials from Romney's executive office. After the AP examined boxes of state archives last summer, it requested Romney-era email files from nearly two dozen Massachusetts agencies. The state turned over nearly 400 emails this week that included 10 emails written to or from Romney.
The newly released emails do not indicate how regularly Romney used private accounts for state business, but he used them during the work week and after hours and weekends. The emails also show that Romney used his official state email account at times, mostly for routine messages or mass mailings.
Massachusetts does not forbid conducting state business over private email accounts, but Romney's own administration warned one month after his inauguration in 2003 that using such accounts can be vulnerable to hacker break-ins and computer viruses.
The former chief information officer under Romney, Peter Quinn, said there were no known virus outbreaks linked to Romney or his staff but several viruses were traced to the state Legislature.
Romney used both a Hotmail account and a political email account linked to his mittromney.com presidential campaign website for at least four months in 2006, his last year as governor. In August 2006, Romney told a group of recipients who included at least one state official that all future emails were to be directed to the campaign account.
Romney wrote that, effective immediately, the new account would be his new email address. "Please keep it confidential as its use is for family and close friends," Romney wrote. "I will no longer be using my Hotmail account."
One month later, Romney again used the Hotmail address to revise an editorial he was writing. "Hi team," he wrote to then-press aide Eric Fehrnstrom, now a campaign strategist, along with several other top staffers. "Here's another crack at the op ed. Thanks to Eric for the draft from which I stole much. And apologies to Eric for rewriting so much. You know how I am. Best, Mitt."
The emails show that Fehrnstrom also communicated on state business at times from a private email account. So did former Romney chief of staff Beth Myers, now a senior campaign aide, as well as former aide Cindy Gillespie, now a Romney campaign fundraiser.
Many of the newly-released emails were written to and from Thomas Trimarco, a former state administration and finance chief whose electronic files were among the few accounts not deleted during the records purge under Romney. Alex Zaroulis, a spokeswoman for the state administration and finance office, said her department has so far identified 3,500 Trimarco emails and was searching for more.
Trimarco told the AP that he left his email and other electronic documents in his state computer because, "I considered them state records and they belonged to the state." He said he was not told about the erasure of files authorized by Romney "probably because I wasn't part of his inner circle. He was my boss, but I wasn't part of his executive staff."
The AP sent emails to each of Romney's private accounts and those of his former aides. Both Romney's accounts appeared to be operative, but he did not reply. A Microsoft spokeswoman said Hotmail accounts are closed after 270 days of inactivity and incoming emails sent afterward are rejected as undeliverable. Neither of Romney's accounts bounced messages back to the AP.
Messages to Nielsen and Gillespie bounced, and there were no replies from Fehrnstrom and Myers. Trimarco acknowledged he occasionally used a now-defunct private account for state business but stuck to his official computer "almost exclusively."
In one instance, an email sent to Romney's official governor's email account was returned from his private address. In August 2006, Trimarco told Romney that he and other state officials had pressed members of an influential health care "Connector" board to approve higher rates for poor patients but ended up compromising on lower rates. The next morning, Romney replied from his campaign account, praising Trimarco for cutting the deal.
"Tom, congrats on moving the ball forward," Romney wrote.
A heightening battle with the Massachusetts Legislature over the state budget was a consuming issue. After the Democratic-dominated legislature used a state "rainy day" surplus account for $425 million in spending, Romney told Fehrnstrom in a June email from his Hotmail account that "I'd like to get the message out that what they are doing is a huge departure from fiscal discipline and that if we go down that road, big problems – like deep cuts to local aid, education and higher taxes – are sure to follow."
Romney vetoed the surplus spending that month, but the Legislature overrode his veto.
By November, intent on finding an offsetting $425 million in appropriations cuts, Romney wrote Fehrnstrom from his campaign email account that he was considering negotiations but inclined toward a budget battle that would "let the fur fly." Romney wrote that "this is about getting spending under control for the state and a new administration."
Romney ordered $425 million in cuts that month, slashing medical, social service, education and public works programs. But he backtracked on some reductions because of public concerns.
Deval Patrick, the incoming governor, restored most of the cuts.
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