Florida Speaks! Yawn.

The Florida GOP primary election is now history, and we move on to ... the next primary election, which will be held somewhere, sometime relatively soon. The big winner, as we now know, was Mitt Romney, with 46% of the vote; Newt Gingrich came in second with 32%, and Rick Santorum in third with 13%. To the extent that there's any good news in all this, it's that people in Florida seemed to recognize the lesser of two evils. There are a few points to be made about the Florida results:

1. Organization and money trump noise and bluster. Newt Gingrich was steamrolled by a well-organized, well-funded Romney campaign that buried him under a huge, steaming pile of negative advertising.

2. Negativity is in. I have long bewailed the emphasis on negative campaigning, and we saw its power in Florida. If you want me to vote for you, tell me why you're the better candidate and deserve my vote. Don't tell me that the other guy is a scum-sucking pederast who hates America - tell me what you are and what you stand for. Read this interesting analysis from NPR.

3. Money talks. The Romney campaign completely swamped the Gingrich campaign with money, outspending it by an estimated five times. If you needed a good example of the real impact of the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that opened the fiscal spigot for political campaigns, here it is.

Republicans and Democrats. A plague on both your houses.

My endorsement still stands:

And I am sooooo not looking forward to the next nine months of political misery.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

P.S. - Great story here about Stephen Colbert's Super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Inc.

B.