Before we address the progress of Democrats' favorite class warfare gambit, the inevitable Republican coalescence is underway, with Santorum's top money man rushing to Romney's aid:
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Foster Friess, the retired investor who spent nearly $1.7 million boosting Rick Santorum’s presidential run, is ready to help Mitt Romney. “I’m obviously going to be of help in whatever way I can,” Friess told POLITICO Tuesday afternoon, hours after Santorum suspended his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, cementing Romney’s status as the party’s presumptive nominee. “I’ve got some plans as to how I might be able to be of help,” said Friess. “The bottom line is, I’m going to be very supportive and I’ll probably have plans to share with you a little later on.”
Some of the commentariat noted that Rick Santorum did not explicitly endorse (or even mention) Romney in his remarks yesterday, causing a minor "snub" tempest that I view as overblown. The Pennsylvanian's campaign suspension announcement focused primarily on the people he had met along the trail, as well as his animating values. He spoke movingly of family and faith -- and of protecting society's vulnerable and marginalized. His speech did not lend itself to rote pronouncements of party loyalty. A full embrace of Romney will come, I have no doubt, but yesterday was a different sort of moment. Foster Friess' instant defection reflects the mind set of the vast majority of center-Right voters -- including those who have bitterly opposed Romney's nomination: We must defeat President Obama. As Republicans seek to keep pace with the Obama money juggernaut, some eyes may also shift Newt Gingrich's chief SuperPAC bankroller. Sheldon Adelson and his wife gave tens of millions to Newt's quasi-over campaign, but finally cut off the spigot last month. Will the Adelsons open their wallets for Romney in a general? The billionaire has hinted that he's open to crossing over to Romney when the time comes, and you can be sure the development team at Restore Our Future is courting him hard. I'll leave you with a few reminders of why the entire Republican field entered this race to begin with. Here's President Obama angrily insisting that he has no desire to redistribute wealth:
"So these investments -- in things like education and research and health care -- they haven't been made as some grand scheme to redistribute wealth from one group to another," the president said today at Florida Atlantic University. "This is not some socialist dream," Obama added, as he called for tax increases on millionaires today to pay for those investments.
He sang a decidedly different tune in his infamous moment of candor with Joe the Plumber in 2008, of course. The Romney campaign released a web ad "welcoming" Obama to Florida, where he made the claim quoted above:
Finally, here's White House spokesman Jay Carney defending the Buffett Ruse, which would have negligible impact on our exploding deficits, and won't create a single job:
The issue isn't rich people volunteering to pay any taxes, it's sanctimonious rich liberals refusing to put their own money where their statist mouths are, even as they advocate for higher mandated tax rates.
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