Romney, Santorum Dogged by Doubts

In advance of tomorrow’s Republican’t presidential primary in Ohio, The New Yorker offers one of this political season’s cleverest magazine covers yet, featuring artwork by cartoonist Tom Toles. The Huffington Post explains:

Just over a month after portraying a smiling President Obama watching his Republican rivals fighting on a mock Super Bowl field, the magazine’s new cover, which was released Monday, shows a slightly sinister-looking Mitt Romney driving a car with a slightly frightened-looking Rick Santorum sitting in a doghouse on top.

The cover is, of course, a play on the infamous dog-related incident from Romney’s own life, when he strapped his dog Seamus to the top of his car in a kennel for a 12-hour drive. The episode has become a persistent and recurring issue for Romney, even sparking pro-dog protests against him.

Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart notes that Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, “earned his metaphorical place in the New Yorker cartoon.

After all, he’s spent the last few weeks 1) railing against pre-natal testing and contraception, 2.) calling President Obama “a snob” for wanting people to get at least a year of post-high school education to better equip themselves for the jobs of the future, and 3) saying he wanted to “throw up” over President John F. Kennedy’s eloquent speech on religion, the presidency and the separation of church and state.

Santorum has been nipping at Romney’s heels since his triple victory in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri last month. But Santorum’s angry, judgmental tone very well might have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Michigan last week. That unfortunate trait might also clobber him in tomorrow’s all-important Super Tuesday contests. All reports are that he must win Ohio. If he doesn’t, Romney may finally be able to cut him loose.

Meanwhile, inside the May 12 New Yorker, you’ll find contributor Ryan Lizza excellent piece on the current, self-destructive state of the RP’s campaign to unseat President Obama. Lizza dissects the dynamics crippling the Republican race:

Political parties aren’t supposed to act suicidal. For decades, the reigning theory held that politicians, not activists, defined the parties. These politicians were rational people who cared only about winning office. In his 1957 book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy,” Anthony Downs argued that candidates, in their Darwinian struggle to get elected in a two-party system, would cater, inevitably, to what Downs called “the median voter.” Even in a primary campaign, the powerful incentive of having to win over centrists in the general election should keep a candidate’s ideology in check.

But, in the current Republican race, if the so-called median voter were mentioned at a debate, he would surely get booed. A more recent theory about parties better explains the G.O.P. race. In 2008, John Zaller, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., and three co-authors--Marty Cohen, David Karol, and Hans Noel--published an influential book, “The Party Decides,” in which they claim that Downs had it all wrong. The activists, not the candidates, are the crucial players who define and control a party. Interest groups and partisans, like the ones who organize and attend CPAC, care a great deal about policy and ideology, not just about electability, and they decide who gets nominated. Zaller and his colleagues dub them “intense policy demanders,” which, in today’s G.O.P., includes all the familiar factions: religious leaders, gun enthusiasts, business élites, anti-tax activists, foreign-policy hawks. Their mission is to find the most extreme candidate who can win.

You’ll find Lizza’s full article here.

READ MORE: “Did the Romney Family Dog Flee to Canada?,” by Katy Waldman (Slate); Dogs Against Romney; “The’96 Strategy,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog).