Romney team in New York looks to deliver knockout primary blow to Rick Santorum

NEW YORK — “A little secret,” Guy Molinari, the New York state director for Mitt Romney’s campaign, said as he leaned across his desk in Staten Island. The senior campaign advisers in Boston “don’t want us to be saying too much about how strong they are in the Northeast,” he confided. “They don’t want to look like just a Northeast candidate.”

Molinari had no such reservations. The local Republican kingmaker said that “a big, big” Romney victory is assured in New York’s April 24 primary, even in rural pockets friendly to Rick Santorum. Romney’s expected landslide, which isn’t much of a secret at all, is, Molinari said, “going to be it for Santorum and the rest of ’em.”

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New York’s preeminence as a political ATM has long made it an essential source of money in presidential elections. But when it comes to the actual voting, the state has mostly been an afterthought. Now in New York, with its prize of 95 delegates — the third-largest haul in the country — GOP leaders are boasting that they’re about to put an end to the perpetual Republican primary race. If Romney’s victories Tuesday night in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District served as a death sentence for Santorum’s campaign, New York promises to be the executioner. Romney’s backers here — elected officials, political operatives and mega-bundlers — hope to be so intimidating that they scare Santorum out of the race altogether.

If Santorum gets pummeled in New York and suffers a humiliating loss in his home state of Pennsylvania, Molinari said, “he is finished, finished, finished. Nobody is ever going to look at him as a political commodity.”

* * *

Molinari, a former congressman and Staten Island borough president, keeps an office down the road from pizza parlors, bagel places and nail salons on Staten Island’s Forest Avenue. The room is lined with pictures of him with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, for whom he acted as New York state director in the 1988 presidential campaign and whose signature was scrawled across his congressional tie clip. Between sips from a coffee mug that read “What a Guy,” he pointed at a photo of his old friend Rudy Giuliani. Molinari insisted that the former mayor’s endorsement of Romney was imminent.

“He’s about to,” Molinari said, acknowledging that Giuliani didn’t get along with Romney in the last election and that there remained “bad blood.” “He wants to do it for the sake of the country, so he is willing to put his own feelings aside.”

Giuliani would not be alone.

The state’s Conservative Party headquarters, a walk-up in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, is cluttered with printer paper, political posters and a triptych of Richard Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The party’s venerable chairman, Michael Long, has for months resisted endorsing Romney, despite pressure from Molinari. Long used to shuttle from the offices to his day job in a nearby liquor store, but he has since sold the business and made the party his full-time occupation.

Now he’s ready.

“New York could be the icing on the cake — it’s as simple as that,” said Long, who said he would encourage his party’s leaders to endorse Romney. “I think we better get off the dime.”