Romney’s CPAC FL Speech. “If you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.”

    After his well received debate performance in Thursday evening’s Florida Republican Fox News/Google debate, Mitt Romney today delivered a casual but compelling speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee Florida conference. [hear speech below this post]

In his approximately 14 minute speech, Romney laid out the argument that his lifetime of private sector experience afforded him the knowledge and ability to make government work correctly.  He cited several examples of  how the state bureaucracy of Massachusetts operated before he took office and how it wasted time, money, and manpower on initiatives that he reformed for the better.  In general, Romney presented a case for his commonsense conservative touch and how it can effectively reform government, and limit it.

Romney also took the opportunity to lay in to his chief riva at the moment, Texas Governor Rick Perry.

After Perry used Thursday night’s debate to double down on his support for giving in-state tuition discounts to illegal immigrants and claimed that if you didn’t see it his way, you had no heart, Romney took advantage of his opportunity to address the large Florida CPAC audience and tried to place a nail in Perry’s electoral coffin.

Romney told the conservative activist’s;

“My friend Gov. Perry said if you don’t agree on his position to give in-state tuition to immigration, you don’t have a heart,” Romney said. “If you’re opposed to illegal immigration, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a heart. It means that you have a heart and a brain.”

While not your typical rah-rah speech, Romnney’s time addressing Florida’s CPAC conference was well spent.  He positioned himself as the man who possesses all the right conservative credentials, experience, and accomplishments, to effectively take on President Obama as the G.O.P. presidential nominee.

An easy message

Is this race about to get dirtier?  The more crazy moves Obama makes, the greater the temptation will be for Republican candidates to start slinging mud at each other.  I’ve said since the start of this primary that Republicans need to focus on Obama, but so far Newt Gingrich is the only one who has been able to accomplish this.  The result is that he continues to post poor showings in the polls as few Americans are paying attention to anything he is saying.

So why are Republicans getting more comfortable attacking each other?  The right is getting more and more confident of a 2012 victory with every misstep this President makes.  I still maintain though that Republicans need to make this election about defeating Obama.  Already, Romneycare, Perry’s HPV order, and Bachmann’s gaffes are going to make it that much harder for the GOP nominee to win in 2012.  Obama has done plenty of things to run against, and I give credit to Newt Gingrich who has been pointing them out in his weekly newsletters.

I thought I would provide a refresher course to the Republican candidates to help them stay focused. For example, do they want to focus on jobs?  President Obama is the President whose policies have driven unemployment up to 9.1% while running annual deficits over a trillion dollars a year.

In the meantime, he is also the President who is blocking the opening of a US manufacturing plant in South Carolina because it is not a union factory.

He is the President whose federal agents performed an armed raid on a US manufacturing plant because they were buying materials overseas and manufacturing them here in the US instead of manufacturing them in India.  Yes, you read that right.

He is the President who took a public US corporation away from the company’s bondholders, sold the company overseas to an Italian company and gave the proceeds to the United Auto Workers union.

He is the President who unilaterally shut down US oil drilling in key areas of the Gulf of Mexico.  When a judge said his moratorium was unconstitutional and tossed it, Obama simply wrote another one.  In the meantime, he heavily invested US tax dollars into drilling operations in Brazil and promised the US would be one of their best customers.

He is the President who today proposed $1.5 trillion in cuts in private investment and consumer spending through higher taxes, after proposing $400 billion in tax hikes just a week and a half ago.  That’s $1.9 trillion in proposed tax hikes over a two week period when he was promising new policies to create jobs.  By the way, these are the same tax hikes his own party wouldn’t pass in 2009 or 2010.  All this and he is the one proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

How about government waste?

He is the President who after taking $850 billion in stimulus dollars and funneling it to unions and pet projects such as duck ponds and skate parks is now asking for another $450 billion to fix the 152 bridges he neglected with the first stimulus.

Speaking of the first stimulus, Obama is the President who invested billions of our tax dollars into various “green energy” projects that have now gone bankrupt.  And it gets worse:

He is the President who gave a $529 million taxpayer loan to a company owned by one of his biggest supporters, multi-billionare George Kaiser, despite knowing that the company was failing.  Then he restructured that loan so that when the company went under Kaiser would get paid first and taxpayers would get what was left over.

Barack Obama says we need to cut private investment and consumer spending through higher taxes because the rich need to pay “their fair share”.  But when it came to Solyndra, Obama specifically made sure that the rich got their millions of dollars back at the taxpayer’s expense.

How about in Afghanistan?

As Obama slowly draws down forces and quickly pulls out of combat roles, he also keeps fighting for cuts in military spending.  He seems uncommittedly committed to the war in Afghanistan.  Could that have any correlation to there being nearly twice as many US deaths in Afghanistan in Obama’s three years in office as there were during the entire Bush Presidency?

What about Obama’s management of the Justice Department?

While letting the black panthers off the hook for voter intimidation when they showed up in military garb with clubs at the voting booths, Eric Holder took pro-lifer’s to civil court and sued them over standing too close to abortion clinic driveways.

And of course, Fast and Furious.  This was the operation where this President’s Justice Department sold guns to violent Mexican druglords.  Those same guns were used to kill border patrol agents.  Meanwhile, Obama has sued Arizona for trying to enforce immigration laws on their own.

All that, and I didn’t even mention Obama’s disastrous healthcare legislation.

If 2012 Republican candidates feel the urge to take a swing at a political opponent, might I suggest that Obama makes for an easy target?

Oh, and one last thing.  Report@whitehouse.gov might be a thing of the past, but if you disagree with what I wrote you can always report me to Obama’s new citizen watch website, http://www.attackwatch.com.

Perry Polls Well in Florida

A recent Florida Times Union poll has Rick Perry up by 9 in Florida.  Florida will be a key early state in the primary and of course could be the key to the Presidency in the 2012 general.  How solid is Perry’s lead?  As solid as the opinion of a 20 year old.

Perry took 67% of the young vote, ages 18-29.  The only other candidates to take any of this demographic were Newt Gingrich with 10 points and Ron Paul with 13.  10% of young voters remained undecided.

2010 election map: TEA Party favorite Rick Scott won Florida.

Perry won most demographics except notably seniors and blacks.  Romney carried seniors by a couple points and Perry got 0% of the support from blacks.  Support among blacks was carried by Mitt Romney with 37%, followed by Cain with 31%.  This was a bit of a shock in a state where blacks tend to come out to vote for black candidates regardless of party affiliation.  In fact, many in this demographic have come out saying they voted for Barack Obama and now support Herman Cain.  Romney’s ability to break into this demographic could be very helpful in the general election.  Perry got 0% of the black vote, while Santorum of all people and Huntsman picked up 14 and 18%, respectively.

Ron Paul did not crack the top five in the poll, and Huntsman eeked out a very weak 1.3%.  Surprisingly, even after ending up in the same boat as Perry on illegal immigration in the last debate, Huntsman got 0% of the Hispanic support while Perry ran away with 48%.  Bachmann also did well with the Hispanic vote.

In Florida, it is Perry’s game for now.  But this poll was taken right after the last debate and does not reflect the fallout from Perry’s Merck connection.  Fair or not, that is the same type of loose connection/unfair accusation that sunk Mitt Romney in Florida in 2008.  Just days before the Florida primary, John McCain accused Mitt Romney of supporting a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq.  the result was a swing of a couple points that gave McCain the edge in the end.  Perry may not have forced retardation causing vaccinations on 11 year olds just for a $5,000 campaign contribution, but among Florida voters perception is sometimes reality.  This is especially true among young voters.

The minority split between Romney and Perry is not a great sign for Republicans in Florida for the general election.  It is difficult to win Florida without support in the I-4 corridor and the southern part of the state which have large Hispanic constituencies.  At the same time, when a Republican can’t garner support among blacks, but the opposing candidate is black, central-north and north Florida go from solidly Republican to only tenuously Republican.  The fact that Perry scored a 0% with blacks and Romney scored a 0% with Hispanics shows that both front runners need to do some work in Florida to ensure a shot at victory in the general election.

I can think of an easy solution for Romney or any other Republican candidate to nearly guarantee victory in Florida.  Make Marco Rubio your VP pick.

Huntsman Loses Key Campaign Staffer

Jon Huntsman’s late and slow start took a hit last Thursday when Susan Wiles, his campaign manager, decided to call it quits and return to Ponte Vedra, FL.  Wiles had recently come off a successful campaign for Governor Rick Scott of Florida when Huntsman brought her on.

Wiles stated that there wasn’t any specific event or circumstance that caused her to return to her Florida public relations firm, but simply that she wanted to take some time off of political campaigns.  Wiles manages a public relations firm with former Jacksonville Jaguars football player Tony Boselli.

Wiles comments related to her departure were intended to sound as though she was only there for a phase and that phase was over.  However, she was influential in the decision to move his headquarters to Orlando, FL, and her statements suggest that the decision to leave was a little more sudden.  She said “This morning I said, it’s time to move on.”

Huntsman is unconcerned about his slow start

Huntsman’s campaign has not yet taken hold after he joined the field late.  He also comes across as a Mitt Romney generic and has polled consistently behind front runners like Romney and Bachmann.  Aside from being a political unknown for most voters, Huntsman has made conservatives nervous due to his working for Obama as an ambassador and his acceptance by more centrist political commentators.

For now, Huntsman isn’t worried.