Does Romney Have Enough Money for Newt to Win?

It looks like the battle for the Republican nomination is going to be one of the ugliest spectacles in the history of American politics. With all of the major announced candidates standing on shaky ideological ground, rivers of money are going to flow into the nastiest kind of negative advertising. In fact, if the Bush administration had been as determined to win the war in Iraq as McCain, Giuliani, and Romney are to win the Republican nomination, things would probably be going better for the American cause.

The guy who needs to do the most negative advertising is Mitt Romney because he is so far behind Giuliani and McCain that the only way he can lift himself up is to pull one of the other contenders down. Foreshadowing the negative campaign to come, Romney came out slugging against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in New Hampshire. For Romney, Giuliani "is pro-choice, he is pro-gay marriage and anti-gun" while McCain can't even consider himself to be conservative because of his support for immigrant amnesty and opposition to "a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. " If Romney can match McCain and Giuliani's fund-raising, this kind of stuff is going to be saturating television broadcasts in Des Moines and New Hampshire for most of the next year.

And what will be the outcome?

I don't see Romney as having much chance of winning himself. Right now, he's pandering so hard to the right that he's in a lot of danger of looking absurd to hard core conservatives. But, given the weaknesses of McCain and Giuliani, there is a decent chance that Romney could weaken one or both of the front-runners and set the table for a Newt Gingrich campaign.