On Santorum, Next Time Around

Byron York had an column on Rick Santorum yesterday, featuring an interview, and asserting that "Santorum will again be underestimated" as a presidential candidate in 2016.

Now, for one thing, he repeats the "runner-up" nonsense. But we can put that aside, I think.

A more interesting question is whether Santorum qualifies as a viable candidate. Could he actually win a nomination?

My two-step test (hey, I have a column up today about Christie which goes through that again) says that all viable candidates must have conventional qualifications and positions on public policy within the party's mainstream.

Santorum was a two-term Senator who was defeated for re-election in 2007. If that was all, I'd say that he did not have conventional qualifications. Nine years from office, and he lost last time out? There's no one similar to that who came anywhere close to winning a nomination in the modern (after 1968) era.

However, it has to count for something that he ran for president in 2012 and won several primaries and caucuses, including Iowa. I spent 2011-2012 saying that Santorum was close to the line for conventional qualifications...I think I'd have to say that his 2012 wins mean he has somewhat stronger qualifications this time around. I guess. Sort of. So he passes that test, albeit not by much.

What's less clear, however, is whether Santorum is within the party mainstream on public policy -- that is, on economic policy. I don't think I know the answer to that, but we do know that he was utterly incapable of attracting significant party support last time around, and I strongly suspect it was for policy reasons. And from this interview, it sounds as if he's moving farther from party orthodoxy, not embracing it.

I guess that sort of leaves him right on the edge of viability, pending more information.

Today in Comic Relief

Sure, there's war, and unemployment, and all sorts of other terrible things...but at least we get the unreported story of the 2012 nomination battle: that Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich almost formed a unity ticket to take on Mitt Romney.

Okay, granted, there's apparently less to this than meets the eye, or at least the headline ("nearly toppled Romney"). The story (nicely reported by Joshua Green) is apparently that in the run-up to the Michigan primary, the Santorum campaign pushed the disgraced former Speaker to drop out and endorse the struggling defeated Pennsylvania Senator. Newt, with typical Newtness, instead tried to get Santorum to go for a "Unity" ticket with Newt on top. The negotiations got as far as face-to-face meetings between the candidates, but eventually fell apart.

Now, this was after Santorum's big day on February 7 in which he posted surprise victories in Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and a Missouri beauty contest...it was at the high point of the Santorum campaign. But it was also a month after Romney had pretty much locked up the nomination. More to the point, there was no large Gingrich constituency ready to follow him to Santorum; to the contrary, if they had really named a Santorum-Gingrich ticket it's extremely likely that Santorum would have drawn fire from the large portion of the GOP who didn't want Newt anywhere close to the White House.

The truth is that if party actors wanted Rick Santorum, they would have rallied to him, and they very much did not. They did not after his win in Iowa; they did not after his CO/MN/MO big day. Even in the extremely unlikely even that a Newt endorsement would have been enough to push him past Romney in Michigan (Santorum lost 41/38 there, with Newt pulling 7%), Romney still would have won the day by winning the Arizona primary. And party actors still wouldn't have rallied to Santorum. Especially not to Santorum/Gingrich.

As for Gingrich/Santorum...well, if there's one thing that was clear from the beginning of the nomination process to the end it's that practically everyone who ever knew or worked with Newt Gingrich thought he would be a simply awful presidential candidate, much less president. And while many of them were willing to play along up to a point, every time he had any momentum at all they came out of the woodwork to make sure that whatever debacle Republicans would suffer through in 2012, at least it wouldn't be that debacle.

I'll give the last word to Jonathan Chait:

This is not surprising: Gingrich is always making elaborate historical arguments, and they always seem to justify his political self-interest at any given moment. If Santorum were really clever, he would have accepted the vice-presidential spot and waited for the inevitable Gingrich impeachment — misappropriating funds for jewelry? starting a war with Mars without Senate approval? declaring himself president for life? all the above? — and taken over then as a comparatively reassuring figure. Sadly, the world will never know.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Al Green, 66.

Getting right to the good stuff:

1. Fred Kaplan on Iran, Israel, and the US elections. Not cheerful.

2. 2016 alert: GOP state senators in New York blocked the creation of that state's ACA health insurance exchange...so Governor Andrew Cuomo created one by executive order. Reporting by Thomas Kaplan.

3. Tea Party-friendly new Senator Ron Johnson is about to sack his legislative staff, according to reporting from Meredith Shiner, mainly because he's more interested in being a showhorse than a workhorse. I'd love to see evidence of how these sorts of Member-staff problems predicts, or doesn't predict, other long-run problems. Has anyone ever collected these data?

4. And a couple of baseball links. Giants (and Orioles) fans who missed this on Sunday should read the NYT column by Emilie Miller, Jon's daughter; and Ben Jacobs interviews, Rick Santorum, baseball fan.

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Tricia Helfer, 38. I'm almost done now with my second time through BSG, and I'm still totally impressed with her apparently underrated performance(s). My latest theory about the show is that it's not particularly well written (the dialogue, that is), but that it's hard to notice because the actors all go such wonderful jobs.

OK, good stuff:

1. Matt Glassman on the question of reform and political science.

2. New research by Jayme Neiman, reported by Seth Masket, says that legislators are more likely to answer constituent mail that appears professional. I agree with Seth: in my experience, it was the crazy ones that stood out. But that's why we have actual research.

3. Jonathan Chait is correct that Rick Santorum's success in the primaries had nothing to do with who he was, but Sarah Posner's farewell to Rick Santorum focuses on what he actually did bring to this cycle: a focus on reproductive issues.

4. The state of the Massachusetts Senate race, or at least what the polls are telling us, from Mark Blumenthal.

5. Budget and ACA: debunking the latest GOP talking point about "double counting." Lots of good posts; I'll go with Paul Van de Water's clear explanation, and Kevin Drum's more fun story.

Santorum Out

I have a piece over at Plum Line looking forward towards the general election, but here's a couple of quick notes about Rick Santorum, as he drops out and somewhat-more-formally clinches the nomination for Mitt Romney.

Yes, Santorum was the last one standing, at least if you don't count Ron Paul, and if you understand that Newt dropped out a while ago but chose not to actually admit that he was dropping out. Santorum certainly finished second in delegates and votes. Nevertheless, I doubt that we can say he had the best shot at the nomination other than Romney. That honor, the real runner-up in this cycle, probably goes to Rick Perry, and perhaps even to Tim Pawlenty. Santorum, my guess is, pending further information, came in a solid fourth. Hey, it's something!

How close did he come to winning the nomination? I think there are two realistic possibilities.

One is that he was alive until South Carolina. Had Santorum, and not Gingrich, "won" the debates that week, then he might well have won that state, and perhaps at that point movement conservatives would have jumped on board. Santorum, under that scenario, has the resources to run a solid national campaign: he sweeps the south, wins at least Ohio and Wisconsin and perhaps Illinois as well, and has a very solid chance to defeat Romney and win it all. Add in to that what you wish -- while I don't think an earlier or more impressive decision in Iowa would have made much of a difference, others no doubt disagree; perhaps, too, Santorum could have made slightly different choices along the way.

The other possibility, however, is that those conservatives who did not embrace Santorum after Iowa (or after Colorado/ Minnesota) were really with Romney all along, or at least preferred Romney to Santorum all along. If that's the case, then Santorum really never had any more of a chance than Newt, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, or Ron Paul would have had if one of them had won in Iowa -- and the nomination was really locked up not in South Carolina, but the moment that Rick Perry couldn't remember that third department he wanted to eliminate.

We really don't know the answer. Can we find out? Perhaps. Interviews with key party actors might shed some light on it. Combing through Mark Blumenthal's "Outsiders" polling might shed some light, too. On the other hand, it may depend on choices that were never actively made, and therefore would be difficult,  perhaps impossible, to reconstruct.

So, congratulations to Rick Santorum on a race well run, and to Mitt Romney for a truly impressive job of winning a nomination from a party that, all in all, wasn't particularly interested in giving it to him. And now we get eight months of this...oh well, I'm sure some of it will be fun.

Oh, Those Republicans

So which was the best "there's something seriously wrong with this party" episode this week? Was it Rick Santorum stating as fact the entirely made up, entirely false, entirely wrong, entirely without even a kernel of truth idea that California colleges don't teach history? Or the 5th Circuit temper tantrum?

I've said it before, but it's really one of the central realities in US politics these days, and so it's worth pounding home constantly: there is no equivalency whatsoever between the parties on this dimension these days.  Left and right both, to be true, generate nonsense like this. No, they really do. I suppose centrists, and any other group you can imagine, generates nonsense like this, and as far as I can tell it's more or less in similar amounts and with similar lack of connection to reality.

But this is a panel of Federal Appeals Court judges, and a presidential candidate who won several states and the second-largest amount of votes and delegates. You simply won't get anything remotely similar on the Democratic side. Nor are these isolated incidents; you can find fairly similar stuff from leading Republicans all the time. Nor, by the way, is this the kind of spin and massaging of the facts that all politicians do all the time. It's just loony behavior by people who aren't supposed to do that.

Anyway: the Justice Department response is out on the 5th Circuit thing, and Jack Balkin summarized it and concluded:

One hopes that, in light of these remarks, a great weight has now been lifted from Judge Smith's shoulders. Perhaps now, having received assurances from the President of the United States that he actually possesses the powers of judicial review, Judge Smith can at last breathe a well-deserved sigh of relief. Armed with a new-found confidence, and the support of the Administration, perhaps he will now be able to put aside the distractions that have caused him such emotional turmoil in recent days. Perhaps, indeed, he may now, with equanimity, and a cheerful countenance, be able to return to the task of deciding the cases and controversies that are actually brought before him, as opposed to the remarks of politicians and media operatives that have almost nothing to do with his job.
Our prayers are with Judge Smith in his never-ending fight against anxiety and emotional upheaval. Surely there is no greater hell than that suffered by a person who cannot control his feelings of dread, and who finds himself buffeted about by a secret, gnawing fear that others do not accord him the respect and status that he craves. All of us can sympathize with the plight of Jerry Smith; all of us, in our own ways, have experienced our own dark nights of the soul. Your Honor-- and we use that term advisedly--we feel your pain. 

Elsewhere: FDA and Politics, Santorum Out?

At Greg's place today, I reacted to the NYT FDA story about WH political interference in policy matters. Important point that I didn't emphasize there: we would expect the FDA to leak that sort of accusation when there are differences over policy, so take that into consideration when evaluating the story. Main point: political interference from the WH isn't necessarily a bad thing, but interference in order to avoid attacks from the Republican partisan press is not very bright. It goes, by the way, with silly comments today from RNC chair Reince Priebus, who says that Congress's approval ratings would improve if Nancy Pelosi resigned. Silly because, of course, whoever replaced Pelosi would then become a GOP target, and nothing would change (and of course it's sort of unlikely that Congress's approval ratings dipped after the 2010 election because of Pelosi, but that's another story).

Meanwhile, at Post Partisan I looked at the question of whether Rick Santorum will drop out after today's primaries.

On "Obamaville"

If you haven't yet seen Rick Santorum's amazing "Obamaville" ad, you really should...I'll send you over to Paul Waldman's nice take on the apocalyptic video to watch it. Come back when you've seen it.

Ready?

Now, I liked Waldman's take on the ad, and I also agree with Dave Weigel about "Umbrage Bait." But my favorite part of the ad is that the horror-story "Obamaville" is set...two years into Obama's second term.

And that, to me, fully sums up the Republican case against Barack Obama, or at least one weird variety of it. Obama is about to do all sorts of horrible things: bankrupt the nation, induce hyperinflation, confiscate guns, bring back* the Fairness Doctrine. About to do them.

Now, if you absolutely hate the president -- and to be fair Santorum is of course a failing nomination candidate who at this time presumably is only interested in partisan Republican voters -- that kind of pitch might well be effective. But to undecided voters? The problem with Santorum's horror video is that it doesn't bother telling you what Obama has done wrong so far. And for most voters, that's what it should be doing.

Put it another way: Republicans are pretty good at running against challengers in presidential races, where a logical message is to not trust the untried candidate. Run that same message against an incumbent, and you're basically saying: ignore what you see, and believe us that you can't trust this president. That's a very, very hard message to sell, or at least so it seems to me. Much more sensible against an incumbent, I would think, is to identify some of the many things that are going wrong (and there are always some, aren't there?) and blame the incumbent for them.

Granted, all of this is quite speculative on my part, and we know that campaign effects are far more limited in presidential presidential elections, so I don't want to take any of this too seriously. For whatever it's worth, however, and putting Santorum aside, I do have to wonder whether Mitt Romney is going to run stuff like this in the fall -- ads hitting Obama on such things as experience and what he might do if (re-) elected rather than on what he's actually done in office and how it's (supposedly) responsible for anything bad out there.

*Fixed language on this one.

Santorum's Delegate "Strategy"

There was some talk last week and over the weekend that Rick Santorum had a delegate strategy -- that he was going to be fighting to get better results in the eventual delegate count than it looked from primary and caucus day reports.

Apparently, his delegate strategy consisted of: hire someone who the national press knew well (that would be  campaign operative John Yob); have him write a silly memo making implausible but technically complex and murky claims about the "real" delegate fight that was going on under the radar; and hope that the press was gullible enough to buy it.

But actually get organized enough to fight for real delegates? Not so much, apparently, as two stories out of Missouri hint at. You might have noticed that the Missouri caucuses received little attention over the weekend, even less than Puerto Rico. That's because they didn't do the straw poll thing that other caucus states have done this cycle (having instead held a beauty contest primary a while ago, which Santorum won easily). Nor have the released any official results. Santorum was expected to do very well -- the demographics are right for him. But (via Political Wire) if the AP and Daily Beast stories are correct, Santorum's people are being outmaneuvered by Mitt Romney's and Ron Paul's organizations.

Of course, the bottom line here is that winning the spin war on the subsurface fight for delegates is extremely unlikely to do Santorum's campaign any good if he's losing the actual delegates. It's hard to tell whether his campaign realizes that or not.

By the way, I credit the AP's Phillip Elliott for seeing through the Santorum delegate-strategy hype in his story last week. I didn't save all of the others, but lets just say that Elliott stood out for a job well done.

Puerto Rico

Well, that was decisive, no? Mitt Romney gets about 83% of the vote to sweep all 20 delegates from Puerto Rico. Overkill: he only needed to break 50% to get it. Either way, it's a large delegate win, and part of an impressive haul for Romney in the various miscellaneous places.

Nate Silver questioned whether it was wise for Rick Santorum to have campaigned there last week. It's a smart post, but I think I marginally and conditionally disagree. Silver's point is that Santorum won't win the nomination by picking off a delegate here and a delegate there; he needs to find some way to fundamentally change the way people are thinking about the contest, or else he's going to lose. So if he had managed to shave some delegates away from Romney, or even win Puerto Rico, it wasn't really going to change anything going forward -- while Illinois is going to get far more press attention, and thus gives him at least a theoretical possibility of breaking through.

That's true, and a good point.. But where I disagree is that I think Santorum's predicament is even worse than Silver sees it. The problem is that even if Santorum manages to shift momentum his way and start winning far more votes going forward....he could still lose anyway unless he avoids big delegate hits like this one. Well...I suppose it depends. If Santorum shifts everything 30 points his way, then perhaps a few delegates wouldn't matter. But if it's only a ten point shift? It's important to remember that the delegate count really does determine this thing, and it's very much possible for a candidate to lose a whole bunch of primaries at the end and be down in the national polls and the overall vote count but to still get the nomination if he has the delegates.

In other words, I think the problem for Santorum is that he has to thread the needle: he has to fight for individual delegates and find a way to change the clear voting patterns. Which is, of course, next-to-impossible.

The other piece of this is that it seems at least plausible to me that a campaign trip to underserved Puerto Rico could have a larger-than-normal effect; an extra day in Illinois isn't likely to do all that much. So if Santorum was looking at, say, polling that was showing a 60/30 Romney lead in Puerto Rico, but with weak enough preferences that a visit might have turned that around to 50/40 for him (a net 40 delegate swing!)...yeah, I'd send him there. Alas, since Santorum's campaign trip featured a seemingly massive gaffe and since we have no polling to judge anything by, there's no real way of even guessing what happens if Santorum's trip goes well or if he hadn't gone at all. At least until we get some behind-the-scenes reporting; for all we know he never took a poll there, and had no idea what he was doing (could his English-language comment have cost him 20 points? I have no idea!).

Oh, the other really cool thing about the Puerto Rico primary is that, as I write this (with 83% of the vote counted) Buddy Roemer is edging out Newt Gingrich for third place, and Fred Karger is beating Ron Paul for 5th. No, Plain Blog has nothing against Ron Paul and...well, I have nothing against Ron Paul, but it's a natural political junkie inclination to enjoy the obscure candidates.

Elsewhere: Return of the Nightmare Scenario, Santorum's Future, and Polling (Still)

Let's see...I have one over at Plum Line about the GOP nightmare scenario in which Santorum keeps "winning" every Tuesday night but Romney, meanwhile, locks up the delegates he needs. Could be fun! I have another at Greg's place about the polls this week, so if you haven't had enough about polling variation from me already you'll want to read that.

And at Post Politics I said that Santorum may be no closer to the nomination after last night, but he did lock up a solid second place showing. Now, just to be clear: I don't believe that finishing runner-up automatically makes someone the next GOP nominee. Haven't changed my mind about that. But resources matter, and Santorum is, if he behaves himself over the next few weeks, gathering useful resources for a future presidential run. He's also quite a bit more likely to get the VP slot than he would have been if he fizzled out yesterday and didn't revive, and that too puts him a lot closer to a future nomination.

Elsewhere: More Santorum Fun, ACA Effects, and Afghanistan

At PostPartisan, I have some fun at the expense of a Santorum campaign strategy memo. Over at Salon, I look at the results of the Nyhan et al. article about the effects of ACA on the presidential election, and argue that ACA won't have a similar effect on Barack Obama.

And at Greg's place, I argue that deteriorating support for the Afghanistan war effort works well for Barack Obama. Alex Massie today gave the crucial question for policy makers: "Do the unknown costs of leaving Afghanistan trump the known costs of staying in Afghanistan?" He's talking about policy costs, but politicians must (and I would argue should) consider electoral costs for themselves and their parties. As support for the war fades, and particularly as GOP support splinters (perhaps as a result of having a Democrat in the White House, perhaps just based on how things are going over there), the unknown costs in domestic politics surely decrease as well.

Catch of the Day

I'm not sure whether I should give this one to BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, who posted the clip, or to the Dutch TV correspondent doing the interview, but here's a wonderful clip of what happens when your candidate just makes stuff up. In this case, it's Rick Santorum, who has concocted (or, more likely, is repeating) fantasies about the Netherlands and euthanasia.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of all press secretaries, thanks to my long-ago past as one of them. So I'm not being sarcastic at all when I say that I feel for Santorum's Alice Stewart, who valiantly stays on message, repeating no matter how many times it takes that Santorum is simply pro-life, end of story, instead of actually answering the reporter's questions. That's her job! It's not as if there's a good answer available to her...I mean a good reality-based answer. I'm sure, too, that for virtually all potential Santorum voters in the remaining primaries, the essential truth of his euthanasia story would easily outweigh what anyone from the Netherlands has to say about the non-existence of the anti-euthanasia bracelets that the candidate has talked about.

Anyway, it's a very fun clip, and: Nice catch!

Sunday Question for Everyone 1

When will Rick Santorum drop out of the race (or at least concede it's over):

After Tuesday (Mississippi/Alabama/Hawaii)?

After March 20 (Illinois)?

After April 3 (Maryland/Wisconsin/DC)?

After April 24 (PA/NY/CT/DE/RI)?

After May 29 (Texas)?

After June 5 (California, New Jersey, others)?

After June 26 (Utah, the final primary)?

Between July 1 and the first day of the convention?

During the convention but before the first ballot?

After the first ballot?

Santorum 2016?

Alex Pareene, in an otherwise excellent Super Tuesday wrap yesterday, says:

As could have been predicted shortly after he dropped out of the 2008 race, Mitt Romney is the likely 2012 Republican nominee for president...The real scary news: Now Rick Santorum is the 2016 GOP nomination front-runner.

I'm with Daniel Larison on this one: there's no way that Santorum is the likely "next time" nominee. And I don't think that Romney's nomination this time was a simple consequence of "next in line," if that's what Pareene means.

It is true, however, that 2012 will be another data point in support of the idea that Republicans prefer someone with whom they are familiar. Remember thought that there have only been a handful of cases in which Republicans had no heavyweight candidate: the only cycles since party reform like that were 2008, 2000, and perhaps 1996. Ronald Reagan in 1980, and perhaps Bob Dole in 1996, had a major stature that folks such as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney this year just didn't have, one that could be both objectively and subjectively described (don't forget that in addition to being Senate Majority leader and a three-time candidate and 1988 runner-up, Dole was also the 1976 running mate).

Nor was Romney's nomination inevitable this time around. In particular, it sure seems to me that Rick Perry had an excellent chance of winning, and had his debate performances only been poor, and not consistently disastrous, it's very possible he would have won.

Still, now that we have the Romney example, it surely gives at least some additional weight to the "next in line" side of the argument.

But clearly, "next in line" isn't always going to work; as Larison points out it didn't do Pat Buchanan much good in 1996. And one could argue that the Huck, not Romney, was really the runner-up in 2008, which certainly doesn't say anything promising for Santorum. Overall, I wouldn't entirely rule out Santorum for 2016 (assuming no Romney presidency), but I wouldn't put him among the top three contenders, either.

Of course, we have a long ways to go this time, as far as that's concerned. If Santorum winds up sweeping the rest of the South and gets several other wins, winding up losing the nomination on delegate accumulation rules, that's a lot different from if Romney winds up winning all but a few remaining states. And then there's the running mate, whoever that turns out to be.

So I don't think Santorum is the favorite for next time as of right now, and I still don't really believe that "next in line" is really what's going on in any simple way, but I'm a bit more convinced now than I was before this cycle that Republicans give a boost to those who have run a strong presidential bid in the past.

Catch of the Day

There was quite a bit of chatter about how Rick Santorum lost the Catholic vote in Michigan by knocking JFK. Well, guess what? Ed Kilgore shows that Santorum has never done particularly well with Catholics, going all the back to Iowa:

His voting base has always been conservative evangelical Protestants, who also make up a high percentage of the voters fixated on making abortion illegal, a particularly strong Santorum demographic.

Yup. I didn't watch a whole lot of the TV coverage last night, but there was quite a bit (and I think I was mostly on CNN) about how Santorum had supposedly lost it by talking too much about social issues. Well, I suppose that there's always some way to get the emphasis slightly better, but look: that's his campaign. That, politically, is who he is. He's been campaigning from the start on social issues and a hawkish foreign policy; the economic stuff is really just an occasional attitude, as far as I can tell.

I guess the other part of this is that while the pundits and reporters who pay close attention to all of this know exactly who Rick Santorum is and what he stands for, it's important to remember that many rank-and-file Republican voters really don't. Not until the campaign comes to their state. So Santorum's choices aren't as easy as some make them out to be; soft peddle his strengths too much (in order to please the national audience, for example), and voters just tuning in may not realize why they should support him over Romney in the first place. After all, it's not as if Romney will allow any actual, current policy differences to appear. And I think a lot of Santorum's appeal, presumably, is that he's actually willing to come out and make strong claims. It's not just all dog whistles and cute references with him. Of course, if he was  more skilled candidate...but of course he isn't, is he?

At any rate: good catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Paul Krugman, 59, blogger, columnist, and, oh yeah, a pretty good economist, from what I understand.

1. Fascinating reporting on Rick Santorum's college days, by Molly Redden.

2. Dana Goldstein on Santorum, Barack Obama, and vocational education.

3. Where did Santorum get his take on JFK? Sarah Posner explains. See also a good Ed Kilgore post.

4. David Frum really, really didn't like Mitt Romney's Detroit speech -- the substance, that is.

5. And an outstanding AP story, by Malcolm Ritter, about voters in primary elections.

Elsewhere: ACA for Obama, and More on Santorum's Slim Support

At Plum Line today, I argued that ACA is unlikely to be a significant liability for Barack Obama this fall -- and at any rate, the current polling on it is unlikely to predict how it will play then.

And at PostPartisan, I talked about another aspect of what I find the most fascinating thing in this GOP nomination cycle: the almost complete endorsement shutout for Rick Santorum. This time, I suggested that in addition to the lack of support causing his recent slide in the polls, it may also have predicted it: perhaps one of the reasons the people who have worked with him aren't supporting him is because they didn't think he was national candidate material. Of course, as I mention there and have said before, there's also the possibility that many of them, even strong conservatives, really support Romney but just don't want to say so out loud.

I still basically think that Santorum could have had an excellent chance of winning the nomination had high-profile conservatives rallied to him after Iowa (yes, even if he had apparently finished a few votes behind Romney). That can't be proved, nor can we prove why they didn't. We sure know that it happened -- or, rather, didn't happen, however.

Future Rick Santorum Issues

Rick Santorum’s latest effort to prove he’s in the mainstream is an accusation that Barack Obama wants kids to go to college because…American colleges are “indoctrination mills” and they’ll all lose their religious faith if they attend. I’d like to say something about this, but both Kevin Drum and Ed Kilgore really have it covered, so I’ll just try to stay ahead of the curve by predicting future Rick Santorum discoveries:

1. Starbucks is pretty obviously brainwashing Americans, what with their foreign drink sizes and pagan symbolism.

2. Soccer: why are the secularists foisting on us a sport played mainly in heathen nations such as Brazil and Mexico?

3. Cable companies, with their bundling policy, forcing regular Americans to have IFC, BBC America, and other weird anti-Christian TV in their homes.

4. I’m really not all that sure about whether water parks promote good, clean, wholesome values. Are you?

5. We all know that cosmopolitan liberal elites have run Hollywood from the start, but what’s with all the pantheistic junk they’re serving up now? Thor? Really?

6. Now, I’m not saying that HOV lanes and energy standards for refrigerators are Satan’s handiwork, but there’s every chance that they are. Better safe than sorry.

7. Everyone knows that Ikea is mainly a plot to force Americans to stay home on Sundays assembling bookshelves and cabinets instead of going to church, right? Insidious.

Granted, what I’d really like to hear is what Santorum thinks about rap music, but we can’t have everything, can we?

Two Questions About the GOP Debates

1. Why would a modern political party turn over a large chunk of influence over their nomination process to the candidate best able to...pack the room for debates, thus ensuring that his points would be interpreted as resonating with real voters and that whoever failed in this minor organizational achievement would risk getting booed if they attacked that candidate?

2. How is it that Mitt Romney didn't figure out that he was supposed to be packing the room until about the 17th or 18th debate of this cycle (and after living through the same thing in 2008)?