Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney takes the stage with his wife Ann to give his victory speech at his headquarters at the Westin at Copley Plaza on Super Tuesday. (Ryan Hutton/Boston University News Service)
Even though the Republican primary race has effectively been over since Rick Santorum ended his candidacy in April, we can finally drop the “presumptive” adjective. Mitt Romney officially clinched the Republican nomination yesterday with a victory in the Texas primary that gave him enough delegates to reach the magical 1,144 he needed. Now nominee Romney must prepare for even more scrutiny and the media frenzy that will surely ensue with any new revelation about the candidate. (Top results on the news search today included: Romney’s new “Believe in Amercia” app, the misspelling of which lit up the social media world yesterday; why the Republican foreign policy establishment has been slow to embrace him; how he got ‘trumped’ by birther talk; the revelation that his father was born in Mexico; and how people of the Mormon faith are responding to his White House run.)
Riding the Tiger takes this opportunity to highlight some of the (dare we say “excellent”) scholarly contributions on Mitt Romney to our blog. Former Miller Center National Fellow Nicole Hemmer compared Mitt Romney to his father, George Romney, and argued that Mitt has been more successful because of changes within the Republican party. John W. York opined about Romney’s prospects for romancing the right by comparing and contrasting his candidacy with Ronald Reagan. Verlan Lewis argued that 72 years of GOP presidential nominations (19 contests) make it very unsurprising that Romney has won the nomination. Lewis also asserted that four years of GOP presidential nominations (two contests) actually raises doubts about the conventional wisdom that Romney’s stances on the issues are uniquely inconsistent or “un-conservative” among the Republican candidates. Finally, we summed up highlights from the Miller Center Forum with Boston Globe investigative reporter Michael Kranish on The Real Mitt Romney.
A new chapter in the race for the presidency has now begun and the next chapter leading up to the party conventions this summer is critical for both candidates. Stay tuned as we at Riding the Tiger continue to cover the presidential race and place it in historical perspective.