Memo to Mitt Romney’s Indiana team: In the next six weeks, tune-up the candidate on all things Hoosier. Get him familiar with the pork tenderloin sandwich and what to say about it. Remind him that we are not “Indianians” but Hoosiers. Give him better lines than “South Bend is in the north and North Vernon is in the south.” Have him listen to some Mellencamp. He needs to know about Tony Stewart, Butler Bulldogs and Crystal Gayle.
The Republican presidential race is headed our way because Romney has not been able to land the knockout punch, even though his delegate lead (495 to 252 over Rick Santorum) is sizable and may be approaching the mathematical point of no return for the ankle-biters.
Despite his “must” wins in Michigan and Ohio by tiny margins, Romney keeps stumbling along the way in how he communicates. Losing tight races in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday might have come down to goofy Romney quotes about cheesy grits, catfish and the enunciation of “y’all” (Tip: listen to Peyton Manning’s Hoosier/Volunteer dialect on that one).
After Romney admitted in South Carolina that he wasn’t a “catfish man” (a state he lost) he drew on his inner rebel in Pascagoula, Miss., over the weekend when he said, “I’m learning to say ‘y’all’ and I like grits. Strange things are happening to me.”
Yikes.
“If you’re going to pander, at least pander well, and this isn’t pandering well,” said Stephen Gordon, a Republican consultant based in Birmingham, to NBC News. And we’ve seen this wooden act before, most notably in one of his home states of Michigan, where he declared his love for cars and trees just the right height (Mitt may not do so well in California).
A well-pandered Romney might have won Alabama and Mississippi if he had gotten the finesse lines down.
But what is developing is a southern losing streak outside of Florida, with Romney failing to win in those two states, along with Georgia, Tennessee, Oklahoma and South Carolina. This is the region where Republicans have been securing presidential elections since Richard Nixon.
What he faces in Indiana is what we like to call the “middle finger of the south.”
NBC News reported that Santorum continued to enjoy strong support from social conservative voters — but he also continued to lose many of those voters to Gingrich. The anti-abortion voters in Alabama preferred Santorum 42 percent to 21 percent over Romney.
Pew Research in a poll released Wednesday noted Romney has regained the lead in the support for his party’s presidential nomination, as conservative backing for Rick Santorum has declined. Romney currently holds a 33 percent to 24 percent lead over Santorum among registered Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters, with 20 percent backing Newt Gingrich and 14 percent favoring Ron Paul.
I expect the first Howey/DePauw Indiana Battleground Poll in early April to show Santorum with decent strength because he will play well to the evangelical, 2nd Amendment, homeschooler crowd that distrusts liberals, including folks from lefty places like Massachusetts.
Our forecast is that a Romney/Santorum showdown here will be competitive, with a repeat of some of the auto rescue/bailout related issues we saw in Michigan and Ohio, where the much better financed Romney was able to eke out only tiny margins.
Republican pollster Christine Matthews of Bellwether Research, who will partner with Democrat Fred Yang for the Howey/DePauw Poll, observed, “The one thing that has been true this season is the prognosticators and pundits have almost always been wrong. This process has really defied categorization. This is not a primary that has played out by any kind of standard metrics.”
Yang, who polls for Garin-Hart-Yang, acknowledged that 2009-11 were hard years for Obama and Democrats. “Until he has an opponent, it’s an up or down scenario on Barack Obama,” Yang said. “His opponent was basically the person he saw in the mirror every day.”
As for Indiana, Yang said that in 2010, focus groups found this predominant thought among Hoosiers: “They view Washington as ‘them.’ One team versus the rest of us. It doesn’t matter if you put a red uniform or a blue uniform on. At the end of the day they all do the same thing, which is to forget about us.”
Yang added, “When you look at all the historical numbers, there’s really no way Barack Obama should be reelected,” noting that the right track/wrong track number is at 33 percent, up from the teens in 2011. “That’s a tough number. If you’re an incumbent and two-thirds of the people aren’t happy with how things are going, that’s a problem.”
Yang also noted the University of Michigan Consumer Index, where normally anything below 66 percent is bad news for incumbent. “In 1992 and in 1976, the last two incumbent presidents to lose, the Michigan Consumer Index was below 66 percent at the time of their defeats,” Yang said. “We’re in the 50th month of the index below 66 percent. Historically and structurally it should be very hard for this president to win reelection. One thing you’ve got to say about Barack Obama, just being who he is, he defies history.”
That included Obama’s win in Indiana in 2008. But for now, Hoosier history awaits Romney and Santorum. I’ll take my tenderloin breaded.
Opinion Columns
BRIAN HOWEY: Romney better learn about the pork tenderloin
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RONN MOTT: Rabid Republicans
The so-called news people at Fox News can hardly sit still long enough to report on the latest gossip or untruth about our sitting President. They can hardly contain themselves.
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LIZ CIANCONE: Smell of fresh air gave way to dryers
Remember when clean clothes smelled like fresh air and sunshine rather than fabric softener and dryer sheets?
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STATE OF THE STATEHOUSE: Is it regulation that doesn’t make sense or evening the playing field?
I’m not much of a drinker, so I haven’t spent much time thinking about how Indiana’s alcohol laws personally impact me, but that changed last fall when my daughter got married.
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Mark Bennett: High-profile mural connects historical dots from city to river
At 96 feet wide and 2 stories tall, the power, impact and value of the Wabash will be evident.
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RONN MOTT: Mushrooms = Hoosier happiness
Someone wrote or said a few years ago a statement that would define the word “Hoosier.” According to this urban legend, a Hoosier is somebody dribbling a basketball around the Indy 500 while eating a fried, morel mushroom. It did not define me, at the time.
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RONN MOTT: Israel’s Air Force
Recently the Israeli Air Force bombed and rocketed a convoy leaving Syria going to Lebanon with rockets that were going to be used to attack Israel. It did not get there. It was destroyed.
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RONN MOTT: Media merry-go-round
Round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows. That isn’t a unique phrase to this writer or to this era in time. But, when it comes to the musical chairs of broadcasting, it certainly applies.
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LIZ CIANCONE: Courts see a different appearance than cops
Have you ever noticed the transformation between the arrest of an accused lawbreaker and the first appearance in court?
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MARK BENNETT: Life at face value: Mom’s simple advice still presents a valuable daily challenge
Most moms don’t base their advice on scientific research.
(Unless, of course, your mother is a scientific researcher. If so, carry a No. 2 pencil and take good notes.) -
SUSAN DUNCAN: Advice to the kids on Mother’s Day
Just so you know, now settled firmly into middle age, I think of “kids” as anyone in their 30s and younger. I also accept that many of my elders view me as an upstart whippersnapper, though snapping even my fingers nowadays can be a chore.
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FLASHPOINT: Again in 2013 General Assembly, middle class generally ignored
Last year, the people of Indiana entrusted the Republican Party with some of their most precious possessions.
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RONN MOTT: ‘Raccoons II’
In the Algonquin Indian language, raccoon means “working with hands.” They are really cute little fellows until they injure a child, or a pet, or leave feces around where you certainly do not want it.
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RONN MOTT: ‘NRA Convention’
At the recent NRA Convention in Houston, Texas, where the right-wing political hot air almost lifted the convention's building off its foundation, the NRA trotted out the forever yours political dame of the right wing, Sarah Palin. Sarah did not disappoint.
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RONN MOTT: ‘Heritage gone’
The last high school I attended was being torn down just a few days ago. I didn't learn about it until I saw classmate Dick Mills on television and a display he had put together about State football championships in the middle 1930's. I began elementary school with Dick Mills. That was Matthew South Elementary School on South Sixth Street in Clinton, Indiana. After seeing Dick on TV, it dawned on me that all schools I had attended in Clinton have been torn down.
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LIZ CIANCONE: We always want more than we need
Washington seems more preoccupied with the unemployment rate than they are about the constant stalemate. Still with thousands out of work and the unemployment rate hovering somewhere between 7 percent and 9 percent, it does deserve more than a passing nod.
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MARK BENNETT: Should I stay or should I go?
Some have their Bill Clinton-era Cavalier packed (with the trunk bungee-ed shut), apartment cleaned (except for the fridge), and iPhone GPS locked onto the fastest route out of Terre Haute. Others are staying — until they find a better job, or because they’re starting a career here, or because this town feels like home. In each case, a new stage of life begins today.
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College Class of '13 gets a little extra advice
Local college grads will hear commencement speakers offer life and career advice this month. We’re offering them an extra dose here from folks who’ve found success in various vocations and regions of the nation. Many have Terre Haute roots.
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RONN MOTT: Things that go bump in the night
I live in a very old house. There are all kinds of noises that occur, especially at night, or so it seems. Aside from the various creaks and pops from old wooden floors and walls when the furnace heats up and sends warm air into the rooms, we, my wife and I, have heard other noises.
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RONN MOTT: Around the dial
At lunch the other day with Terry Tevlin (First Financial Bank), I bumped into Dale Mahurin. I hadn’t talked to Dale in a long time and inquired about his wife, Julie Henricks.
Julie has returned to the radio microphone doing a weekend gig on Mix FM. For fans of Julie’s show on WTWO-TV, don’t worry, she’s not leaving … just multi-tasking. Welcome back to the radio airwaves, Julie! -
ANDREA NEAL: Newspaper journalists still make a difference
A recent survey ranked newspaper reporter as the worst career of 2013, just below meter reader and lumberjack, but you wouldn’t guess it from the stories told by journalists who gathered in Bloomington to see six of their own inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.
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RONN MOTT: George Jones
I got to Nashville in the early ’70s, hired by John Patton, who had been a DJ for WBOW earlier in his career. Then, he was managing WMAK in Nashville and I was promised a top sales list and received the yellow pages (many a promise like this has happened to people in this business). I also did sports commentary for the morning man and would ultimately do a season of play-by-play and a short TV schedule for Tennessee State.
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LIZ CIANCONE: Old age is in email of the beholder
My Best Friend isn’t much for writing letters, so email has opened a new world for him. He can dash off a few words to a high school friend or his college roommate — now living in Florida and Washington State,
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MARK BENNETT: Spirited response to a rising river
The power within the Wabash revealed itself last week.
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FLASHPOINT: Time has arrived for overhaul of TV news
Former FCC Chairman Alfred Sikes gave an address in 1992 in which he claimed television news was too superficial and too focused on visuals.
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RONN MOTT: Remembering Pat Summerall
I don’t remember how I first became aware of Pat Summerall, but the first time I heard him was on a New York radio station (WCBS, I think). He was doing the sports for the morning man and exchanging some opinions about sports and such with him.
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RONN MOTT: What I don’t know
I was watching a segment on the History Channel the other night while I waited for the end of “The Big Bang Theory” and a show I had seen before. It was “Sex in History.” And the two segments I watched were about Ben Franklin and Howard Hughes.
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RONN MOTT: You, me, and the Muslim world
I don’t know how to do this. I’m a fairly intelligent human being, but the events of the past week in Boston have turned me emotionally inside out. It’s more than the people who died, it’s more than the people who were injured … some permanently,
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LIZ CIANCONE: A memory test from the oldtime radio days
For some reason, I seem to be the go-to source for all sorts of obscure information out at the Wabash Valley Family Sports Center.
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MARK BENNETT: Littered with irony: Why do people callously discard their trash, and who are they?
Though they aren’t acknowledged by the U.S. Census Bureau, there are basically two demographic groups of people … Those who would dump their old toilet on the banks of the Wabash River or a rural roadside. And those who wouldn’t.
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RONN MOTT: China
The recent blustering by North Korea and their weaponry, which now includes ICBMs, has pulled into full attention America’s involvement with China.
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