A new Quinnipiac poll in Pennsylvania shows favorite son Rick Santorum with a big lead over his GOP presidential rivals at 36%, followed by Mitt Romney at 22%, Ron Paul at 12% and Newt Gingrich at 8%.

The Pennsylvania primary isn’t until April 24.

“I am not recommending prostitution to anyone, nor did I say I
engaged with prostitutes. I
took my wife. She was the only non-hooker on board.”

— Montana gubernatorial candidate Neil Livingstone (R), quoted by the AP, explaining one of the “spectacular list of exploits” included in his biography..

First Read: “What is his campaign about? He says he wants to ‘restore America’s greatness,’ but what does that mean? (Go back to the ’50s? The ’60s? The ’80s? The Bush years?) He says he’ll be able to turn around the economy, but what if it’s already slowly improving as the evidence currently suggests? And the campaign makes it clear that Romney is the inevitable nominee, but what happens if that inevitable nominee loses? Team Romney has had a message problem since this campaign began, and when you make your candidacy about electability and process, you’re going to pay a BIG price for losing to candidates. Why does Romney want to be president, an office he’s been running for the past six years? Has he really answered this basic question?”

A new Pew Research survey finds that 59% of American voters say that President Obama is likely to be re-elected if his opponent is Mitt Romney.

If the contest is between Obama and Rick Santorum, 68% anticipate an Obama victory.

President Obama took British Prime Minister David Cameron to a NCAA basketball game in Ohio yesterday and is rewarded with the front-page of the Dayton Daily News and this headline: “The heartland is what it’s all about.”

The full quote from a half time interview: “Sometimes when we have foreign visitors, they’re only visiting the
coasts. They go to New York,
they go to Washington, they go to Los Angeles, but the heartland is what
it’s all about.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to listen to a value judgment of a guy who strapped his own dog on the top of a car and went hurling down the highway.”

— Santorum advisor John Brabender, quoted by National Journal, hitting back at Mitt Romney for saying Santorum was “at the desperate end of his campaign.”

The Illinois primary is next Tuesday and after last night’s victories by Rick Santorum it’s shaping up to be a very important contest in the GOP presidential race.

First Read: “Once again, the pressure is on Romney. And once again, Team Romney has a HUGE advertising advantage, with the campaign and Super PAC spending nearly a combined $3 million so far (versus $16,000 for Gingrich and zero for Santorum). But the pressure is on Santorum, too. Can he defeat Romney in a state that isn’t dominated by conservatives and evangelicals? Can he pull off what he was unable to do in Michigan and Ohio? Romney hasn’t won an ‘away game,’ but neither has Santorum.”

“And the delegate match is NOT kind to Santorum in Illinois either. He didn’t file full delegate slates in the congressional districts; he’s 10 short. And Illinois is not an allocation system, it’s DIRECT ELECTION of the delegates INDIVIDUALLY in the congressional districts. A total nightmare, to be honest, for those tracking delegates. But it almost guarantees Romney will likely win a majority of the state’s delegates even if he loses the statewide vote, which has ZERO delegates connected to it.”

The DNC turned Mitt Romney’s promise that he would “get rid of” Planned Parenthood into a new web video.

[Read more…]

Politico
delves into Rick Santorum’s “decentralized, cause-driven, low-cost
modern campaign” model and “guerrilla approach,” a sharp contrast to Mitt
Romney’s much more organized, professional, and top-heavy operation.

“Santorum
has battled concerns about his field and turnout machinery, suffering
from a series of stumbles that left him without access to the Virginia
ballot and ineligible for some delegates in Ohio. He leans on local
political networks, powered in many cases by grass-roots Christian
conservatives, as a substitute for Mitt Romney’s bulked-up organization.
The campaign maintains the tightest of inner circles, reserving
Santorum’s ear for a small list of longtime aides and supporters.”

“The
fact that the campaign is now playing out across 50 states, rather than
the three early battlegrounds Santorum’s effort was built for, is a
double-edged challenge. On one level, Romney’s structural and financial
advantages loom ever larger as the race moves into places where the GOP
hopefuls cannot run a months-long, hand-shaking, Santorum-style retail
campaign. On the other hand, it means that national-level messaging can
have a disproportionate impact in states like Alabama and
Mississippi…in which no candidate has been able to build up a daunting
organizational edge.”

Reuters
reports that Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), chairman of the powerful House
Financial Services Committee, defeated state Sen. Scott Beason and two
other primary challengers in a closely watched race amid an investigation into whether Bachus violated insider trading laws.

Patricia Murphy notes Newt Gingrich tipped his hand last night at “his campaign’s real strategy, which is no longer to win to nomination outright but to make Mitt Romney lose by denying him the 1,144 delegates he needs to clinch the GOP nomination before the Republican convention in August.”

“Gingrich has grown increasingly bitter toward Romney throughout the campaign, as the former Massachusetts governor has unloaded a barrage of attacks against the former speaker and, Gingrich believes, hurt his showings at the polls in the process.”

National Journal quotes Gingrich: “Governor Romney will get at most one out of every three delegates. Once again he will fall dramatically short … I think that the odds against his being able to get 1,144 delegates is very, very high. I think he is more likely to be a front-runner who ends up not finishing the race.”

Mitt Romney won Hawaii’s first-ever Republican presidential caucus Tuesday, taking 45% of the vote, the Honolulu Star Advertiser reports.

Romney was followed by Rick Santorum at 25%, Ron Paul at 19% and Newt Gingrich at 11%. The four were competing for 17 of the state’s 20 delegates to the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced that this
would be his last campaign and his final term in the U.S.
Senate, KCSG-TV reports.

Hatch is currently 77 and would be 84 in 2018, the year he would again be up for reelection.

Paul Begala: “Let me be the first to call on Mitt Romney to get out of the race. By placing third in Alabama and Mississippi, losing to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich in both states, Romney has gone from inevitable to unelectable. Somebody strap him to the roof of one of his Cadillacs and drive him off to one of his many mansions.”

“One of the great legends of political consulting is the Dog Food Problem: an apocryphal tale of a company that had the best packaging, the best advertising, the best marketing. But there was only one problem: the dog wouldn’t eat it. Forevermore we should no longer call it a Dog Food Problem. We should call it a Mitt Romney Problem.”

“I don’t think anybody expected Mitt to win Alabama or Mississippi.”

— Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom, tonight on CNN.

“We are going to win tomorrow.”

— Mitt Romney, quoted yesterday by BuzzFeed.

In an interview with KSDK-TV, Mitt Romney said he would eliminate any federal funding of Planned Parenthood in an effort to reduce the national debt.

Said Romney: “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.”