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" We begin the week with a question with which we have become familiar over the past couple of years: Is Politico just messing with us or what? Let&amp;#039;s see if we can figure this out, shall we? The Romneybot 2.0 is about one step away from actually locking up the Republican nomination for president. (No, really. It can happen. Trust me.) Alas for him, the Republican brand has pretty much cratered with women because of the party&amp;#039;s recent dedication to its war on ladyparts and what ladies should be able to do with them. This, in turn, has generated a gender abyss in the polling numbers that has given the president strong margins over the Romneybot in many of the states he&amp;#039;s going to need to get re-elected. These include Wisconsin, where the Romneybot is expected to roll over Rick Santorum, which means that Santorum will have three weeks without another primary, during which time he can continue to get testy with people who ask him when his campaign is just going to roll over and die, and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick that guy is? So, suddenly, with women running away from the Republican party and its putative nominee as though he&amp;#039;s gone radioactive, we get a story that tells us that the White House &amp;quot;fears&amp;quot; the power of &amp;quot;rock star&amp;quot; Ann Romney, the woman with several Cadillacs? As near as I can tell from that Politico story, the main sources of Ann Romney&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; are that she&amp;#039;s Mitt&amp;#039;s only first wife, and that he&amp;#039;s a little bit less of an animatronic foof when she&amp;#039;s around. She&amp;#039;s his &amp;quot;link&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;the base&amp;quot; simply because they&amp;#039;ve stayed married to each other. I mean, seriously, I understand beat-sweetening but this is a danger to your dental health. But it is of a piece with what&amp;#039;s going to begin in earnest when the polls close tomorrow night in Wisconsin and Maryland. The work of humanizing the Romneybot \u2014 recreating him as a &amp;quot;moderate,&amp;quot; so that we can actually have the horse-race that people want so badly come the fall \u2014 is going to continue and accelerate. His campaign has been stunningly adequate throughout, just about up to the task of spending a quintillion quatloos to crush a field of lightweights and rodeo clowns. He&amp;#039;s outspending Santorum 55-to-one in Wisconsin and has built up a virtual monopoly on television advertising, and his lead is still only in single digits. And he&amp;#039;s being stunningly adequate in a state that is in a merry chaos of superheated politics. For the first time since Fighting Bob LaFollette was in there swinging, Wisconsin is the red-hot core of American politics. The Republican party is stuck with an extremist budget that would roll the country back to the Gilded Age? Who&amp;#039;s its author? The zombie-eyed granny-starver from Wisconsin, Representative Paul Ryan. The Republican party is facing a recall of its governor, its lieutenant-governor, and several key members of the state legislature. Who prompted this spate of citizen outrage, which has since spread to places like Michigan and Ohio? The goggle-eyed homunculus from Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker. Who was the funniest speaker outside the Supreme Court last week, moaning to the crowd, &amp;quot;Leave us that one last shred of freedom&amp;quot;? Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a state which has come to define Republican overreach on so many levels that it&amp;#039;s a wonder the last administration didn&amp;#039;t run a rendition program in which suspected terrorists were packed off to Minocqua. And Willard Romney has the support of every one of these guys. Johnson has declared himself Romney&amp;#039;s chief surrogate and his envoy to the Tea Party faithful. Romney has endorsed Ryan&amp;#039;s zombie-eyed granny starving. This is not a &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; position. This is support for one of the greatest attempts to hijack the nation&amp;#039;s wealth ever undertaken by a political party. The Ryan budget would enshrine into law the infrastructure of economic oligarchy. Frankly, I don&amp;#039;t think Ann Romney&amp;#039;s charisma is enough to overcome that. Her husband has done everything he has to do to win the nomination of a party lost in the ideological Everglades. That&amp;#039;s where he lives now. That&amp;#039;s where they park their Cadillacs. Moreover, for all the talk we&amp;#039;ve had since 2008 about No Drama Obama, it&amp;#039;s Romney who&amp;#039;s run on his inevitablity ever since he announced... in 2007. It is important to look at the two presidential campaigns as a continuum because refashioning the Romneybot into enough of an extremist to get nominated has been a long job, and the campaign to do so tried to do it as quietly as possible. The problem was that, every couple of weeks there for a while, there was another debate when the &amp;#039;bot was beset by the other flying monkeys and was forced, in public, to demonstrate how well the renovations were proceeding. Now, in Wisconsin, where almost nobody is in the middle \u2014 wherever that is \u2014 anymore, he has had to choose the company of an Ayn Rand fanboi, a Koch Brothers rentboy, and a rookie senator who thinks the Affordable Care Act was drawn up at Nuremberg in 1935. There&amp;#039;s been a lot of talk about how the effort to recall Walker has rendered the presidential primary rather an afterthought but, more likely, I think that a low turnout is less a function of the primary&amp;#039;s having been obscured than of the momentum gathering on the other side. Wisconsin is where the pushback truly began. It is where the pushback will succeed or end. And Willard Romney clearly has chosen a side. If the pushback succeeds, he&amp;#039;s going to need more than the rock-star power of his wife to pull him through. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13477/wisconsin-primary-romney-7795496/>