The Real Agenda of Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich And Rick Santorum

Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are determined to stay in the race even if the chances of them winning the Republican nomination grows slim with each passing election contest. All of the candidates know this but they're not in the race to become President. Each one of them have an agenda. 

Ron Paul

Ron Paul's chances of winning the Republican nomination is extremely low. He hasn't a won a single primary or caucus and his unfavorability rating is quite high.  However, Ron Paul has admitted that he isn't in the race to become President but that he's in the race for the sole purpose of amassing enough delegates so that he can use his delegates as a way of getting the Republican party to adopt his libertarian views on foreign policy, economics and other issues. Recently, Ron Paul admitted on Fox News that he doesn't want the power of being the President but to have the power to influence our nation on matters he considers important. However, if that is his goal, Ron Paul has only has 50 delegates as of today. By the time the GOP convention rolls around, he won't have enough delegates and as a result will be in a inferior bargaining position in attempting to negotiate with the Republican party into adopting  his views on the national platform.

Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich's chances of winning the Republican nomination is also extremely low. He's only won two Republican nominations and he only has 135 delegates as of today. He also has amazingly high unfavorability ratings of 60%. Regardless, Newt Gingrich is determined to press forward by bypassing the primary process and winning at the convention by getting the delegates to switch their votes to Newt.  Joe DeSantis, the campaign’s communications director, explains Gingrich's new election strategy:

The idea, Mr. DeSantis said, is to persuade unpledged delegates and those who have backed another candidate to see Mr. Gingrich as the best challenger to face President Obama. 

Joe DeSaintis elaborates more on their new election strategy: 

 “We believe that if Governor Romney is unable to secure 1,144 by the last primaries, he will be unable to do so at the convention where the vast majority of the delegates are conservative,” DeSantis said. “That creates [an] environment at the convention where Gingrich can emerge as the one candidate who can unite social, economic and national security conservatives (a fact which is borne out by polling).”

Newt Gingrich's agenda is pretty obvious. He is remaining in the race out of pure revenge and will do anything he can to prevent Mitt Romney from winning the nomination:

Joe DeSantis said Gingrich's decision to lay off staff and replace his campaign manager was a reorganization that would enable him to fight on to the Republican National Convention in the summer and win the nomination there.

The overhaul comes as a CNN/ORC International poll released Tuesday indicated that most Republicans would like to see Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul end their White House bids.

But they want conservative challenger Rick Santorum to stay in the race.

The poll, conducted over the weekend, showed that about six in 10 Republicans wanted Gingrich and Paul to halt their campaigns, while a similar number supported Santorum continuing his bid.

DeSantis said the poll "showed that Gingrich dropping out of the race would help Mitt Romney dramatically more than it helps Rick Santorum."

This would "virtually guarantee Mitt Romney the nomination," he said, as he urged conservatives to rally behind Gingrich to keep the former Massachusetts governor from victory.

Rick Santorum

Rick Santorum has done much better in this election than Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich have. He's won 11 primary contests so far and currently has 273 delegates. However, the chances of him getting the 1,1140 delegates needed to win the Republican nomination grows slim with each primary election. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that the electoral math doesn't work for Rick Santorum. He cannot get the necessary 1,140 delegates needed to win. As Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post points out, there's just no way for Rick Santorum to win the Republican nomination: 

Romney still leads by about 300 delegates . With 568 delegates to Santorum’s 273 Romney, Romney needs only 576 more delegates, about 46 percent of the remaining delegates. Santorum would need to win about 70 percent, and that just isn’t going to happen.

Rick Santorum disputes the current calculation of delegates by arguing that what you hear in the news doesn't accurately reflect the delegate count:

As he struggles to keep up with frontrunner Mitt Romney and parries calls for him to drop out of the Republican presidential race, Rick Santorum has said in recent weeks that he has actually won more delegates than some media counts show.  Those counts, Santorum says, are not taking into account Republican party rules, as well as the state-level meetings that actually determine how many delegates go to each candidate.

"Here's one of the things that I can tell you I didn't know," Santorum told a small group of reporters at a breakfast in Washington Monday.  "Every single state is different.  Every state. Every single state is different.  It's different on how you get on the ballot.  It's different on their structure, how they allocate delegates, whether they are bound, whether they are unbound, when they're committed, how long they committed, how they're selected. Our math is actually based on the reality of what's going on in the states."

Now, the Santorum campaign is providing some numbers to flesh out the candidate's claims.  In a long conversation Wednesday evening, John Yob, the campaign's national and state convention director, pointed out that many high-profile primaries have been little more than beauty contests, and that delegates in many key states are actually being awarded in county, district, and state conventions, which are often dominated by conservative activists. "In that process, we are doing very well," said Yob. "The moderate candidate almost never performs better than a conservative candidate in a county, district, or state convention process."

Of course, the Romney campaign rejects Rick Santorum's claim and argue that no matter how Rick Santorum calculates the delegate math, he's still going to come up short: 

The Romney campaign strongly disputes Santorum's numbers.  In a March 22 memo -- sent out after Romney's win in Illinois but before Santorum's victory in Louisiana -- Romney political director Rich Beeson wrote that Romney led Santorum by more than 300 delegates and that Romney already had more than half of the needed 1,144 delegates. "Each day Senator Santorum continues to march up this steep hill of improbability is a day we lose to unite in our effort as Republicans to defeat President Obama," Beeson wrote.

Beeson pointed out that it is impossible for Santorum to reach the 1,144 delegate number himself.  Team Santorum doesn't really claim otherwise.  But their math is now about keeping Romney short of 1,144 -- and hoping things go their way in state conventions and, ultimately, in Tampa in August.

Despite the small chances of winning the Republican nomination through out the primary election,  Rick Santorum is going to try the same strategy as Newt Gingrich by  wooing delegates at the Republican convention: 

Arguing that neither he nor Mitt Romney will be able to sew things up by the last GOP primary in June, Santorum envisions spending July and August trying to persuade individual delegates to support him and “put together the coalition that’s necessary for you to get the 1,144.” He and his delegates would then move on to the Republican convention, scheduled to begin Aug. 27 in Tampa, Fla.

Its clear that Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are in the race because they want to become President. Each of these men are not interested in becoming leaders. They all have their own person agendas which they are placing above the American people's wishes of getting Barack Obama out of the White House. Ron Paul is running is in the race purely to change the Republican party platform from a conservative platform to a more libertarian one. Both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are aiming for the mythological brokered convention as a last ditch attempt to prevent Mitt Romney from winning the Republican nomination. 

There's only one candidate who is in the race to defeat Barak Obama and make him a one term President. Moreover, he's in the race because he wants to be the President who will be a true leader and revive America's economy. That man is Mitt Romney.