So after Rick Santorum managed to win in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, he seems to have replaced Newt Gingrich as the current favorite not-Romney... how many not-Romneys will we have to go through before we can finally settle on a not-Obama?
Mitt Romney just won in Maine, and also won the CPAC straw poll, so I'm not sure how far this surge will ultimately take Santorum. Newt seems to finally be imploding, something I predicted would happen eventually, and Santorum seems to be winning over most of the supporters that Newt is losing... also, Mitt Romney recently stuck his foot in his mouth a few times, and Obama seems hellbent on pissing off as many Catholics as he possibly can, so all this is working together to help Santorum.
But will this perfect storm last long enough to get Santorum the nomination... and would a Santorum nomination be a good thing? I would certainly vote for him if he won the nomination. I am still leaning towards Romney at the moment, but if for some reason Romney dropped out then Santorum would be my next choice. He'd be the only choice left for me at that point, really... I refuse to vote for Newt in the primary, and I refuse to vote for Ron Paul in either the primary or the general election.
I think that Santorum is mostly right on the issues, and he often manages to have the best line of the night in these debates... but I worry that as nominee he would get strong support mainly from social conservatives while too many moderates and independents end up running away from him screaming. It's not just that Santorum is pro-life and opposes gay marriage, those are pretty standard positions for a GOP nominee to have... it's that he's so strident, and he puts so much emphasis on those issues. My fear is that it will be too easy for the media to bait Santorum into saying things that might make many social conservatives happy but sound crazy to just about everyone else.
Obama is already vulnerable on the economy, and he is making himself more vulnerable by overreaching on the issues of abortion and religious freedom... I'd hate to see us throw away that advantage by nominating someone who appears to be trying to overreach from the other direction.
Update: Leon H. Wolf writing over at Red State cautions us against bringing back Compassionate Conservatism to the White House:
I defy any of Rick Santorum’s supporters to point out to me one instance – even one – of Rick Santorum battling other Republicans on spending. Maybe it happened and I missed it; I certainly don’t pretend omniscience.
I don’t suppose this would matter so much, except that the people who are now flocking to Santorum are the same people I hear constantly telling me that another go-along, get-along Republican is completely unacceptable, and that they’ll stay home if one is nominated. It isn’t enough, I am constantly told, for the nominee to oppose Democrats now and then – we must have someone who will also oppose feckless Republicans. What good will it do us to march toward socialism a little slower than the pace preferred by the Democrats? It boggles that mind that, as an electorate, we rejected Rick Perry because his voice sounded too much like George W. Bush’s, and yet we stand on the verge of nominating George W. Bush’s true ideological successor, Rick Santorum. Bush’s fundamental problem was that he lost his veto pen until the Democrats took control of the Congress and let the Republicans run all over him on spending; who can say with a straight face that Santorum would not have this exact same tendency?
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