At a speech last night at St. John's University in Collegeville, Karl Rove said Mitt Romney is close to securing the party's nomination for president.
The Republican national strategist and former President George W. Bush aide said Republican contests on April 3 in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Wisconsin could signal Romney is reaching "the beginning of the end" of his push for the nomination, Rove said, according to the St. Cloud Times.
Rove also said Ron Paul’s coalition of support is "unsustainable," and he said Rick Santorum was "Mr. Earmark" in the U.S. Senate, the paper said.
When told that Paul has a relatively strong following in central Minnesota, he described the Paul phenomenon as an "uneasy coalition of two disparate groups: young, antiwar isolationists and older, anti-Federal Reserve activists with 'two years’ supply of food in the cellar,' " the paper said.
Not surprisingly, he also predicted that President Obama will lose a close election in November.
The speech was sponsored by the College Republicans of College of St. Benedict & St. John’s University and the school’s Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy and Civic Engagement.