Romney wins Maine, the headline read. But there shouldn’t have been a story. Fewer than 6,000 votes were cast — about 2 percent of the registered Republicans took the trouble to mark a ballot in the non-binding straw poll there. Romney won 39 percent of those.
Maybe those 2,400 Mainers had a vested political or religious interest in the Romney cause. Whatever the explanation, the only reasons the Romney camp have for celebrating are (1) he didn’t lose; (2) Newt Gingrich, his main opponent for the nomination, drew only 6 percent or about 360 votes — essentially zero from a population of 1.3 million.
So forget Saturday’s Maine vote. The only tidbit worth saving from it was that Ron Paul won 36 percent, just a hair less than Romney, who, after all, is also a New Englander and owns a vacation home next door. He is kinda family and was expected to win big.
Now, consider: Paul isn’t a Republican. He is a Libertarian who spouts crackpot ideas such as bringing all U.S. troops home except maybe the Marines who embellish U.S. embassies and abolishing the Federal Reserve Bank. If he doesn’t win the GOP nomination he may run for president on the Libertarian ticket. Ron Paul really doesn’t believe in government. He has no legitimate role to play on the nomination stage.
Nevertheless, almost as many Maine voters chose him for the Republican nomination for president of the United States as marked their ballots for Romney — and Paul did six times better than Gingrich, twice as well as Santor-um. Which is also to say that their second choice was a guy who would make it impossible for the United States to stay in NATO, enforce the Monroe Doctrine, open the Hormuz Strait if Iran closed it, regulate the banking industry, have an effective voice in international trade or, for that matter, continue to operate the federal government.
Republicans looking for good news from Maine had slim pickings Sunday morning.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
