Is Mitt Romney destroying the chances of a Republican winning the White House?

   Question: What do Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and now Rick Santorum have in common?

 Answer: At various times during the campaign they have each posed a serious threat to Mitt Romney’s inevitability and because of this Mitt Romney has launched vigorous, brutal, and nasty attacks on these candidates in an attempt to destroy them in order to assure his assumption to the nomination which he feels he is entitled to.

  I read this opinion piece on American Thinker the other day and, well, it got me thinking. The article was about Mitt Romney’s “scorched earth” politics and how it is suppressing voter turnout as people become disenfranchised with the Republican party as a result. Here is some of that article:

The  real story of the three results from Tuesday night is not that Rick Santorum  picked up some wins — though that is big.  No, the real story is that  three states held votes and nobody came.  Almost nobody, that is.   Consider that the total turnout for Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesota combined  was barely over half of the turnout of South  Carolina alone and — worse yet — barely over half the turnout for the  same three states in 2008.

What  gives?

The  answer is fairly clear.  The candidates have forgotten about Obama.   What has turned folks off is Mitt Romney’s scorched-earth campaign, which has  managed to unfortunately suck all the rest of the candidates into a circular  firing squad of a childish food-fight that is of zero interest to the Republican  base voter.

   After giving this article some thought I have come to the realization that this is a legitimate concern moving forward. Mitt Romney will stop at nothing to win the nomination and if that means destroying to political careers and personal reputations of all of those who stand in his way, so be it. Rick Santorum said it best when he said, and I am paraphrasing here, that Mitt Romney doesn’t want to stand on his record as governor of Massachusetts so he has focused on destroying his opponents instead. 

    In 2010 the Republican base was energized and wanted to send Barack Obama a message and they did so with huge gains in the House and modest gains in the Senate, but now at a time when the Republican base should be energized against a weak incumbent they are simply not showing up at the polls to select a person to defeat the failed president.

  What possible explanation can there be for this lack of enthusiasm other than the fact that voters are tiring of the negative attack ads being run by Mitt Romney, as well as the other candidates who feel the need to counter-attack? Mitt Romney has successfully corrupted the opinions of a majority of the voters in regard to the other candidates, and because they simply do not trust Mitt Romney they see no need to go to the polls either in support of him or any of the candidates he has laid waste to. 

  Mitt Romney is destroying the chances of defeating Barack Obama in November and he is doing it because he has convinced himself that he deserves to be president and he is willing to ruthlessly attack anyone who challenges him.

  In the end he will most likely be successful; he will win the nomination, but it will be at the cost of creating the circumstances and conditions which make it impossible for him to beat Barack Obama in November. If he is the nominee there is the real possibility that he will have so alienated the supporters of the other candidates with his dirty politics that they will not be able to support him because they will harbor a deep resentment at the way he won the nomination. If he were to win the nomination on the issues alone without destroying the other candidates this might not be an issue, but the depths to which he is willing to sink in order to win the nomination will leave voters with a bad taste in their mouths, and the low voter turnout in the recent Republican contests could provide truth to this.

  On the off chance that a Republican candidate will rise up and defeat Mitt Romney in the primary Mitt Romney will have left him so damaged that he will not be able to defeat Barack Obama.