Santorum Spikes

I guess 2012 is the year of the pious underdog. After Tim Tebow and Jeremy Lin alighted their respective leagues, it seems that Rick Santorum may well be the Republican nominee. In one of my first articles on the site, I argued that Rick Santorum wasn't a credible candidate and was essentially running for Vice-President. At the time I recognized that the Republican base was fickle, but I couldn't imagine that Santorum would end up becoming the Anti-Romney. It appears to be a great quirk of fate, Santorum's candidacy flew under the radar until a couple days before Iowa, leaving him immune to scrutiny from the media and his fellow candidates.

Santorum's win in Iowa provided him with a big boost, but he wasn't yet a major candidate. However, the win allowed him to stick around in the race while other also-rans fled from the race like rats on a sinking ship. He weathered Newt Gingrich's calls to withdraw, and when the race shrank to 4 candidates, Santorum began to seem more attractive. In another blog I compared Romney and Gingrich to Twain's Duke and Dauphain. In contrast, Santorum and Ron Paul came off as beacons of honesty and integrity. While you can bash the media for ignoring Dr. Paul, his politics are simply too divergent from the mainstream of the Republican Party for him to ever become the nominee.

And thus, Santorum became more and more attractive. He began scoring points in the debates, and started to gain traction. Following his big wins in last Tuesday's contests, he raised a bunch of money, and he became the proverbial Anti-Romney. A series of recent polls show that his ascendence might be for real. A number of polls show him with a slight lead over Romney nationally, and more jarringly for the Romney campaign, some polls show him leading Romney in Michigan. Michigan is one of Romney's 'home states,' his father ran for governor there, and he scored a big win there in 2008. However, he had written an Op-ed piece during the Detroit bailout that argued that American automotive manufacturing ought to be allowed to fail. Combined with Santorum's support of manufacturing, he says that manufacturing should be immune from taxes, Michigan becomes a state ripe for Santorum's taking. If Romney loses in Michigan it may be his death knell. His campaign has survived on a combination of inevitability and money, as opposed to voter sentiment. As the veneer of his inevitability is stripped away, voters are fleeing from his campaign.

Of course the long knives have started to come out against Santorum. A link on today's Drudge Report links to an article called Time to Take Down Santorum's Disguise. The article is simply a list of all of Santorum's supposed crimes against conservatism. It's an incredibly lengthy list and can be accessed here: http://www.dailypaul.com/213706/time-to-take-down-santorums-disguise. In Santorum's defense, a lot of his anti-conservative votes were during the Bush era, and he was merely being a good party stooge. As I said last Friday, to think that any of these candidates isn't sufficiently conservative is ludicrous, all of the remaining candidates are extremists. The Republican's demand for ideological purity may well imperil their chances in November, and they risk becoming a more marginalized party if they can't accept some variety amongst their base.

CPAC and the Attacks on Romney's Conservatism

Only have time for a short post, because like Mr. Smith I'm taking my talents to Washington. I'll be appearing at CPAC, where presumably I will become the Republican frontrunner.

In 2008 Mitt Romney went to CPAC as the conservative alternative to John McCain. He bowed out and the party began to coalesce around Mr. McCain. It says all you need to know about the 2012 Republican campaign that the last conservative alternative is now the milquetoast moderate. It's conventional wisdom that the three candidates besides Mr. Romney are running to his right, but that perception seems slightly askew. In his rhetoric Mr. Romney normally offers equally or more conservative positions on all the issues as the rest of the field. It seems to me that the other candidates are running as the none disingenuous, articulate, and relatable alternative to Romney. The candidates attack his conservatism, specifically they point to Romneycare and his various flipflops, but what they are really attacking is his integrity. It seems ridiculous to think that Romney is some sort of Manchurian candidate, laying in wait to unleash his radical leftist ideology on America, and I don't think the rest of the Republican field believes that. They use an attack on his conservative identity to attack his personality. With all of this talk of political PACS, I'm reminded of 2pac, because these candidates seem desperate to assert their conservative 'street cred'.

The candidates have come out swinging thus far at the conference as the tenor of the race devolves into ad hominem attacks. Saturday marks the completion of the Maine Caucus which is projected to go well for Mr. Paul and Mr. Romney. After that the next couple of races aren't until the 28th and because they are supposedly solidly in Mr. Romney's camp they shouldn't have a clarifying effect on the state of the race. The forecast calls for stormy weather in the Republican field until Super Tuesday, March 6th, at the earliest. If this was Groundhog's day Punxatawny Phil wouldn't have seen his shadow, or perhaps he would've because I can't recall off top which signifies more inclement weather.