A Plea to End this Madness

I debated between framing this article as a sort of "open letter to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich" or else just a regular piece written to those who happen to be reading it. I have opted for the latter, but I sure wouldn't mind if Rick and Newt were reading it. We are standing at a point in this election cycle where I feel compelled to write what I know millions and millions of people are thinking, and that is that it is time for Senator Santorum and Speaker Gingrich to knock this nonsense off, and step aside so that the eventual nominee of the Republican party can have maximum resources at his disposal for doing what absolutely has to be done: Defeating Barack Obama in his bid for re-election.I will get the obligatory part out of the way first. Mitt Romney is a deply flawed candidate. I do not know if he will win. I know he can win, and I certainly know he gives us the best shot of winning out of the remaining three candidates, but he is far from ideal. From an ideological standpoint, I believe Rick Perry brought a fantastic blend of social conservatism, a history of job creation, a personal military service background, and an impressive perspective on energy policy. However, Rick Perry proved to be a walking Saturday Night Live cariacture of himself, and this was not actually because the media was picking on him - he seriously could not get a word out of his mouth.I do not believe any of the other candidates had the actual gravitas, pedigree, ideology, or appeal necessary to be President. Each had their strengths of course, including Santorum and Gingrich, but this pool of candidates was, in my estimation, remarkably unimpressive, and there is no doubt that some of the strongest names on our bench did not enter the game. I would not be clamoring for a Romney vs. Obama race right now if Paul Ryan or Mitch Daniels or Mike Pence were in the mix. But alas, they are not. So here we are. And the winner of this pool of candidates is Mitt Romney.Neither Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum are running right now to get the 1,144 delegates they need to win the nomination. They both know they can not win, neither mathematically nor practically speaking. Their explicit and stated objective in staying in is to keep Romney from getting 1,144, so that we will get to a chaotic convention, and then two months before the election against a $1 billion-funded genius campaigner incumbent President, the delegates can then give the nomination to a second or third place finisher. This is NOT my interpretation of events. It is THEIR stated, self-conscious objective. It is selfish. It is delusional. It is never going to happen. And if it continues, it will result in the re-election of Barack Obama.The health care debate in the Supreme Court this week has really upset me. I wrote a piece right after the bill passed that I feared it would go the way of 9/11, whereby people were really upset and motivated right after the event, but with enough time, they would forget, grow complacent, and eventually lose their zeal. The health care law passed by Barack Obama is the single worst piece of legislation ever passed in American history. It has to go. I am 100% confident that all three Republican nominees for President will overturn it if elected. I also am in agreement that Romney has a tough road to hoe on this issue given his Massacusetts legislation. But I have no doubt at all as to what political course Romney MUST take. Either should any of you. Disagree with Romney all you want about the Massachusetts health care law (I do), but he is not going to be a defender of ObamaCare, and we all know it. I do not want to turn this article into a case for removing Obama from office, because I would like to think that it just goes without saying. But just in case ...Obama in a second term will get to replace at least one and possibly two Supreme Court justices. He will take a 4-4-1 court and make it (at best case) a 5-4 court, and possibly a 6-3 court. Obama has taken the reckless spending of past administrations and added zeroes to it, and then after that thrown in exponents for good measure. Worse, he is UNAPOLOGETIC. He believes in all the spending he has done, shows no signs of wanting to unwind it, and is begging for the right to do more. He rejected his own bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission, a move so politically stupid that I do hold out hope that he can be defeated. But if you believe that the runaway debt is the #1 issue America faces, and you believe that Mitt Romney will NOT cut the debt as much as you would like, you at least have to acknowledge that he will cut it more than Obama. More importantly, Romney has endorsed the Paul Ryan plan on entitlements, and THAT is the REAL problem that does not even get included in a discussion of our $15 trillion national debt. Mitt Romney is not the issue here. Obama is. He will spend us into oblivion. Paul Ryan is the issue here. He can not get his bill passed with Obama; he can with Romney. I assure you I am right in all these premises. The conclusion should be easy to draw. If you say, "No, I just can not vote for that Mitt Romney guy. He is an establishment buffoon who is an impostor", then fine. Don't vote for Mitt Romney (in your mind). Vote for the guy who will get Paul Ryan's country-saving bill passed into law. His name rhymes with Nitt Momney.There is another factor that has to be mentioned in the discussion as to why Obama must go. It is not the spending levels that brough Greece down, but more importantly, the war on productivity that brought Greece down. That rhetoric has defined the first term of Barack Obama - an utter war on productivity. If I needed to be pumped up in the battle to defeat him I would re-play his commencement speech from the Arizona State graduation in 2009 every single morning (though I would likely die from catatonic depression). We have a President of the United States right now who, for the first time in American history, has told people to say no to the good job, say no to the corner office, say no to the raise and the nice car - no, for this President, we need a country of community organizers and government workers. And that is all well and good, as long as another country will be that country's sugar daddy. Greece has a basket of European countries who (so far) have been willing to keep paying alimony to their disgraced ex-wife. But America does not. We cease to be the United States of America if Obama were to ever get his utopian dream of a country where no one does anything. I could not misrepresent the President on these issues if I tried. This is the most overt class warfare President we have ever had, and because I view the economics of envy as the defining moral issue of our day, I believe it is of pivotal moral importance that he be removed. I confess, part of it is that I just can not stomach any more of his narcissistic moralizing press conferences, but far more significant than that is that this man is the leader of the country. His tone, rhetoric, and agenda matter. We can not cure our economy and preserve our exceptional fiber as a nation if we do not reject the idea that productivity is to be shamed.So this brings me back to Mitt Romney. I did my obligatory part of explaining his flaws, but at this point, I believe it is beyond obvious that he is going to be the nominee. Any effort to delay this or hamper this has the not so indirect effect of benefitting Barack Obama. It needs to stop. The arguments that supporters of Santorum make are well and good, but they do not matter any more. If Santorum was a better candidate than Romney, his inability to raise money, to get votes in populatin centers, to win swing states, to build a national infrastructure, etc. all kept him from securing the nomination. It is impressive that he made it this far (or understood differently, that he had more staying power than Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Huntsman, Pawlenty, etc. had). But Rick Santorum has got to decide if he loves his country more, or his own personal ambitions. I am pleading with him to drop this effort to embarrass and lambast Mitt Romney, which makes him a de facto tool of the Obama campaign, and to instead join the cause of defeating Barack Obama.Romney will have plenty of unfavorables to overcome. The arguments for why he should not be our nominee were made over the last six months. They did not succeed. I wish we had a better candidate, I really do. But we do not. At this point, the only chance of defeating this radical President is to coalesce around the man who has won the nomination. Jim DeMint agrees with me. So does John Thune. And Pat Toomey. And Chris Christie. And Eric Cantor. And John Bolton. And Ann Coulter. I really wish that we could have a presser where Paul Ryan, Mitch Daniels, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Michelle Bachmann, and even Sarah Palin would all come out and say the same thing.Republicans do a lot of stupid things, but this is one thing they could do that would be anything but stupid. We have an imperfect candidate who has a solid team of people and a solid batch of endorsements behind him. He has done some bad things in his political career, and some really good things as well. He is no Ronald Reagan. But he is no Dole/McCain either.And most important of all, he is no Barack Obama.Please, Rick and Newt, move aside. It has been the nastiest primary fight I have ever seen. Let's end it - now. Our country awaits your support of the defeat of Barack Obama. The time is now.