The Golden Report

6 DAYS UNTIL SOUTH CAROLINA (25 delegates)
9 DAYS UNTIL THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
16 DAYS UNTIL FLORIDA (50 delegates)

TOP STORY: Jon Huntsman is dropping out of the 2012 Republican Presidential Race.

Coming less than a week after he finished third in the New Hampshire Primary and promised supporters that he would continue in the race on to the South Carolina Primary on Saturday, and a day before candidates will gather for the latest debate of the primary season, the announcement comes as the frontrunner, Mitt Romney, looks to solidify his support and momentum into enthusiasm for a general election race against President Obama.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES’ JIM RUTENBERG AND JEFF ZELENY IN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

“Mr. Huntsman, who had struggled to live up to the soaring expectations of his candidacy, made plans to make an announcement as early as Monday. He had been set to participate in an evening debate in Myrtle Beach.

Matt David, campaign manager to Mr. Huntsman, confirmed the decision in an interview Sunday evening. “The governor and his family, at this point in the race, decided it was time for Republicans to rally around a candidate who could beat Barack Obama and turn around the economy,” Mr. David said. “That candidate is Gov. Mitt Romney.”

A third-place finish in the New Hampshire primary last week failed to jump start Mr. Huntsman’s flagging candidacy, aides said, and his campaign limped into South Carolina with little money. Mr. Huntsman has spent days pondering his future in the race, but aides said that he concluded he was unlikely to topple Mitt Romney or match the momentum of his Republican rivals in the conservative Southern primary.

The decision from Mr. Huntsman came on the same day that he received the endorsement from The State, the newspaper in the capital of Columbia. He had campaigned in South Carolina over the weekend, not giving any indication that the end was near.”

MORE: Huntsman will endorse Mitt Romney tomorrow, which means Romney enters tomorrow night’s debate with even more momentum.

A win by Romney in Saturday’s Primary will likely force additional candidates to drop out of the race as Republican donors and party leaders solidify their support around the nominee.

An official announcement is scheduled for 11am Monday.

CANDIDATES WHO HAVE WITHDRAWN SO FAR:

Tim Pawlenty (August 14)
Thaddeus McCotter (September 22)
Herman Cain (December 3)
Gary Johnson (December 28)
Michele Bachmann (January 04)
Jon Huntsman (January 15)

GALLUP DAILY TRACKING POLL (of remaining candidates)

• Mitt Romney 37%
• Rick Santorum 14%
• Newt Gingrich 13%
• Ron Paul 12%
• Rick Perry 5%

WHAT’S NEXT:

Tomorrow night, the 16th Republican Presidential Candidates Debate, from the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in Myrtle Beach, SC, on FOX News, moderated by Bret Baier of Fox News’ ‘Special Report’ and Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal. It will air at 9pm ET and last approximately two hours.

It will be the fifth debate airing on FOX News this cycle. Previous FOX debates:

• Greenville, South Carolina (May 5th)- the first debate
• Ames, Iowa (August 11th)
• Orlando, Florida (September 22nd)
• Sioux City, Iowa (December 15th)

On Thursday night, CNN and the Southern Republican Leadership Conference are sponsoring another debate, from the Citadel in Charleston, SC.

South Carolina Republican voters go to the polls on Saturday.

Next week, there are two more Republican debates scheduled (Monday January 23rd and Thursday January 26th) leading up to the Florida Republican Primary on Tuesday January 31st.

AMERICA FOR A BETTER TOMORROW TOMORROW- the Political Action Committee started by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and now run by Jon Stewart, is up with a television ad in South Carolina. The one-minute ad buy takes aim at Mitt Romney and his record at Bain Capital, calling him “Mitt, the Riper” It’s worth watching if only to think about whether this ad, and the apparent intent of Colbert to involve himself in the presidential election in a very tangible way, will have.

THIS WEEKEND’S TOP POLITICAL STORY- A group of social conservatives convened by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, has elected to support Rick Santorum as their candidate in the Republican primaries. From POLITICO’s Jonathan Martin:

“In a conference call [Saturday] afternoon, Family Research Council chief Tony Perkins said that on the third ballot Santorum won a solid majority of votes from the movement conservatives gathered at a private ranch near Houston.

Of 114 votes cast, Santorum won 85. Newt Gingrich took the remainder.

In a remarkable slap in his home state, Rick Perry didn’t even make it past the first ballot, Perkins said.

Santorum backers were already taking to Twitter in the moments after Perkins announced the decision to tout the news. The former Pennsylvania senator, largely absent from the political conversation since finishing well behind Mitt Romney in New Hampshire and staying out of the Bain debate, is badly in need of a lift. In that sense, the endorsement is well-timed.

“It’s a validator that people who have been out there, in the fields laboring for the conservative cause, see us as someone who can not only stand and fight for the causes, but effectively fight and win.,” Santorum told reporters at his Mt Pleasant, S.C., headquarters.

THE GOLDEN GLOBES 2012 (as of 10:50pm ET):

Best Actor (Drama)- George Clooney
Best Actress (Drama)- Meryl Streep
Best Director- Martin Scorsese
Best Actress (Comedy or Musical)
Motion Picture (Comedy)- The Artist
Supporting Actor- Christopher Plummer
Supporting Actress- Octavia Spencer

TOMORROW IS MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY

Full text & audio of King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” Speech 

King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

IN 2011, the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial was dedicated on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Tomorrow, at 8am, a wreath will be laid in honor of Dr. King at the Memorial. The National Park Service has additional information and resources on the Memorial 

AND/BUT- an inscription on the Memorial was ordered changed on Friday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe reports

“Salazar said Friday that he has told the National Park Service to consult with the memorial foundation and the King family and to report back to him within 30 days with a plan to fix the carved excerpt that turned a modest and mellifluous phrase into a prideful boast.

The paraphrase on the north face of the 30-foot-tall granite statue comes from a powerful and poignant 1968 sermon King delivered two months before his assassination. King spoke of the “drum major instinct” as the epitome of egotism, a self-centered view of the world that he denounced. Imagining his eulogy, King used the conditional tense: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.”

But after the architect and the sculptor thought the stone would look better with fewer words, a shortened version was put on, composed of just 10 words with a heavy staccato beat. It was no longer a conditional statement; it was a flat assertion: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Salazar said he thought the excerpt was not true to King’s character.”

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