Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney clinched the Republican US presidential nomination on Tuesday with a resounding victory in Texas and now faces a five-month sprint to convince voters to trust him over Democratic US President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 election.
Although the race has been essentially over for weeks, Romney finally cleared the benchmark of 1,144 delegates needed to become the Republicans’ presidential candidate after a long, bitter primary battle with a host of conservative rivals.
He will be formally nominated at the Republicans’ convention in Florida in late August.
In a statement, Romney said he was humbled to win enough of Texas’ 155 delegates to secure the nomination.
“Our party has come together with the goal of putting the failures of the last three and a half years behind us. I have no illusions about the difficulties of the task before us. But whatever challenges lie ahead, we will settle for nothing less than getting America back on the path to full employment and prosperity,” he said.
However, Romney’s big day was overshadowed by his appearance with real-estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump, who organized a major fundraiser for Romney in Las Vegas.
A famous self-promoter, Trump has been loudly fixated over whether Obama was born in the US despite clear evidence that he was born in Hawaii and Romney did nothing to publicly rein him in.
Romney endured serious threats from Republican opponents from Rick Perry to Rick Santorum to reach a goal that his late father, former Michigan governor George Romney, fell short of achieving — winning his party’s stamp of approval as its presidential candidate.
All indications are that Americans face the possibility of a cliffhanger election in November that will be decided by relatively small percentages of voters in as many as a dozen battleground states, such as Ohio, Florida and Virginia.
The former Massachusetts governor now faces a lengthy to-do list to gird for his duel with Obama, from picking a vice-presidential running mate to raising hundreds of millions of dollars for a national campaign.
In the immediate weeks ahead, his goal is to bolster his case that Obama has been ineffective in handling the sluggish US economy and hostile to job creators.
The Republican, while popular with white men and military veterans, has work to do to try to bolster his popularity among women and Hispanics, two key voting blocs.
Trump in recent days has resurrected the issue of Obama’s birth certificate to raise questions about whether the president meets the constitutional requirement of being a natural-born citizen of the US.
The topic had seemed to run out of steam a year ago when the White House produced the president’s detailed “certificate of live birth” from Hawaii, but Trump told CNN he is not convinced of the document’s authenticity.
Obama’s re-election campaign was all too eager to lump Romney in with Trump’s connection with the fringe “birther” movement to try to damage the Republican with independent voters who are likely to decide the election.
Romney aides did not like the distraction presented by Trump, but would rather have Trump helping Romney raise money for an expensive battle against Obama rather than sitting on the sidelines.
Romney himself did not address the issue head-on, instead issuing a statement through his campaign spokeswoman that said Romney has said repeatedly he believes Obama was born in the US.
Romney refused to condemn Trump.
“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me. My guess is they don’t agree with everything I believe in, but I need to get 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people,” Romney told reporters.
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