Romney poised to clinch nomination

The Republican has emerged unscathed from the primaries to virtually tie with Obama in polls

MITT ROMNEY’S long march to the Republican presidential nomination was likely to end last night when ballots were counted in the Texas primary.

The Lone Star state was once expected to stage the final battle between Republican contenders, but the race virtually ended when Rick Santorum dropped out on April 10th. On April 25th, Romney self-declared himself the nominee.

With the exception of Texas congressman Ron Paul, all of Romney’s erstwhile rivals have declared support for him, executing verbal pirouettes to reverse past criticism. The Texas primary will award 155 delegates.

According to the Associated Press tally, Romney was yesterday 60 delegates short of the magic number of 1,144. He planned no elaborate celebrations, just a fundraiser with billionaire Donald Trump in Las Vegas. Trump’s outrageous behaviour – for example, having expressed doubt that US president Barack Obama was born in the US – makes him an ally of dubious value.

Romney has succeeded where his late father, the motor executive turned Michigan governor George Romney, failed. In many ways, he is an unlikely nominee: a New Englander in a party rooted in the south; a bland character in a party energised by firebrands; a Mormon among fervent Evangelicals.

The ugly primary contest appears to have left Romney largely unscathed. The fact that he is virtually tied with Obama in most national opinion polls alarms Democrats. The balance in the electoral college is clearly in Obama’s favour, but pundits including Karl Rove, George W Bush’s former strategist, paint a convincing scenario that could take Romney to the White House, especially if the economy worsens.

Romney intends to focus on unemployment this week, playing up the disappointing increase of only 115,000 new jobs in April. Both campaigns eagerly await the release of the May job figures on Friday.

Romney will continue to portray Obama as antipathetic to the business community. “There’s no question but that he’s attacking capitalism,” he told Fox News. “In part I think because he doesn’t understand how the free economy works. He’s never had a job in the free economy, neither has Vice-President Biden.”

The Obama campaign intends to keep hammering away at Romney’s record at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded in 1984. “People have a visceral reaction to Mitt Romney’s time [at Bain],” Obama strategist Robert Gibbs told CBS.

“What Bain Capital never did was focus on job creation. That is not what Bain Capital does. It loads up companies with debt, takes money out of those companies and pays investors.”

The Obama campaign will seize every opportunity to portray Romney as a flip-flopper and an ultra-conservative who is far to the right on issues such as abortion, climate change and immigration. Obama’s 2008 message of hope has shifted to fear of how a Romney presidency would harm women, gay people and Hispanics.

The campaign could dent Obama’s high likeability ratings. “For anyone still starry-eyed about Obama,” John Heilemann writes in New York magazine, “the months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a saviour, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power – in other words, a politician.”

Democrats are trying to freeze Romney “like a bug in amber at the end of the dinosaur era”, an Obama aide told Heilemann. Obama routinely accuses Romney of wanting to take the US back to the economic policies of the George W Bush administration.

“Mitt Romney has the foreign policy of the 1980s, the social policy of the 1950s, and the economic policies of the 1920s,” Obama’s senior advisor, David Axelrod, told MSNBC. “We don’t want to go backward. We want to go forward.”

Now that he has cleared the hurdle of securing the nomination, Romney will shift from proving his ideological purity as a conservative to connecting with the American electorate. He will highlight his record as a family man – 43 years of marriage to the former Ann Davies, their five sons and 16 grandchildren.

Romney is under pressure to put more meat on his vague proposals to turn the economy around. Don’t expect too many specifics. Alluding to New Jersey governor Chris Christie – a possible running mate – Romney told Time magazine: “And the media kept saying to Chris, ‘Come on, give us the details, give us the details, we want to hang you with them’. And he said, ‘Look, my plan is to reduce spending and to get us to a balanced budget’.”

The biggest suspense centres on Romney’s choice of running mate, with pundits predicting it will be “a boring white guy”.

Romney cannot afford to repeat John McCain’s error in choosing the insufficiently vetted Sarah Palin. “Lots of Republicans figure they got enough vice-presidential excitement in 2008 to last a lifetime,” says Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal.