Republican contest update

Carson suspends leadership bid

By John Twigg

Though Republican Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would stay in the contest to the end, on the day after Super Tuesday he's now changing his tune.

Carson failed to emerge as a force in the voting in 11 states and so this morning (March 2) he announced he was "suspending" his campaign and would not participate in a forthcoming leadership debate.

That falls short of withdrawing and leaves open the possibility of some kind of draft but as Carson himself noted he now sees no path to victory.

That's a shame because as I noted in the previous blog he (viewable below) has a lot of admirable qualities and was developing an attractive platform, but he lacks charisma and chutzpah and thus is a marked contrast to front-runner Donald Trump, who clearly won the night and now has about 60 per cent of the delegates chosen so far.

Now it appears the Republican Party old guard are marshalling their forces for a final stop-Trump coalition since neither Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich or Carson showed any signs of serious momentum, and longtime party stalwart and former nominee Mitt Romney was planning to make a major statement about the future of the party.

Meanwhile pundits were remarking on Trump's new tone, somewhat more measured and even moderate; he even was claiming to be a unifier though clearly many of his supporters see him as an outsider challenging the hegemony of the GOP's entrenched insiders.

On the Democrat side Hillary Clinton was a big winner even though rival Bernie Sanders won in four states; she slyly turned her attacks towards Trump as if to show it's already a two-way contest between her and Trump, a contest she and others including many Republicans believe she could win.

As my blog yesterday pointed out, either one could become a disaster for world affairs. If you haven't read that blog yet please do so now by scrolling down to it.

Meanwhile Bernie Sanders is staying in the chase and the upcoming state contests  look good for him because they're almost all in states with relatively high proportions of white voters.