Mitt Romney clinched the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday with a win in the Texas primary, a triumph of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and had to fight hard this year as voters flirted with a carousel of GOP rivals.
Romney surpassed the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination by winning at least 88 delegates in the Texas primary, according to the Associated Press count.
The former Massachusetts governor has reached the nomination milestone with a steady message of concern about the U.S. economy, a campaign organization that dwarfed those of his GOP foes and a fundraising operation second only to that of his Democratic opponent in the general election, President Obama, says San Francisco Chronicle.
Meanwhile, Romney launched a tough new campaign ad slamming the Obama administration for job losses at the bankrupt solar-energy company Solyndra, which got more than $500 million in loan guarantees from taxpayers but eventually laid off 1,100 workers.
"More than $16 billion have gone to companies like Solyndra that are linked to big Obama and Democrat donors," said the ad. "Good for them. Bad for us."
But on a day when Romney should have been celebrating, he found a new distraction coming from one of his supporters: Donald Trump, who brought back the birther issue on the day he held a $2 million fundraiser for the former Massachusetts governor, informs New York Post.
President Obama is right to raise this issue now. I wish he had done so during the debate on financial regulatory reform - only now is he posing the kind of fundamental questions that needed to be asked - but better late than never.
There's nothing wrong with private equity, which plays an important role in the economy. And, of course, there's nothing wrong with wealth; those who risk their capital in private-equity ventures should be rewarded when those deals pay off.
But as Romney himself acknowledges, free markets need rules and regulations in order to function. Some kinds of dealings are prohibited or even criminalized - insider trading, for example, because of the way it benefits a select few at the expense of other investors, according to San Antonio Express.