NATCHITOCHES, La., March 21, 2012—Mitt Romney won decisively in Illinois last night. According to CNN, he earned 43 delegates there, and Rick Santorum, ten. The total up for grabs was 54.
The Santorum campaign argues that Romney’s victory was simply a matter of money and organization. That argument is bizarre to the point of being unhinged. The eventual Republican nominee will need large amounts of money and a solid organization to have any hope of defeating President Obama, and they think that Romney’s command of both is irrelevant or a negative? That’s completely absurd.
Late last week Santorum went to Puerto Rico to campaign, and while there he observed that the island would have to adopt English as its official language in order to become a state. Aside from the fact that there’s no such constitutional requirement, it was a bizarre and stupid thing coming from the mouth of a man who wanted the island’s delegates. He spent some time working on his tan, but otherwise his visit was a waste of time, money and effort.
We might explain the comment away as the man’s honest, misinformed refusal to pander. And how to explain this one? “I don’t care what the unemployment rate is going to be. It doesn’t matter to me. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates.” A simple gaffe? Romney made a similar mistake when he said that he didn’t care about the poorest Americans, and that wasn’t exactly what he meant. In context, Santorum’s gaffe was worse, and he made it much more emphatically. It clearly wasn’t a gaffe at all, but the product of muddled thinking.
Another unfortunate comment came not from Santorum, but from his friend, Rev. Dennis Terry. Terry told a group as he introduced Santorum, “There is only one God and his name is Jesus. I’m tired of people telling me that I can’t say those words.. Listen to me, if you don’t love America, if you don’t like the way we do things I have one thing to say – get out! We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah, we worship God, we worship God’s son Jesus Christ.”
Santorum appeared to applaud those remarks, but he’s since said that he didn’t actually clap at all, offering no explanation for his odd hand motions. Terry backpedaled on his comments and Santorum temporized, both noting that Terry really didn’t mean that non-Christians should leave the country, but that only people who don’t love America should leave.
On the day of the primary, clearly expecting to lose, Santorum’s campaign held a phone conference with reporters to explain that delegates are being miscounted. They explained that the will of the voters doesn’t really matter, because the people who choose actual delegates are more conservative than the voters and so will choose delegates who will vote for Santorum. They excoriated Romney for trying to get another delegate in Michigan by retroactively changing the rules, and claimed that their strategy includes retroactively changing the rules in Florida and Arizona to get their candidate some of Romney’s delegates.
On top of that bravura display of hypocrisy, Santorum went on Joe Scarborough’s MSNBC program and complained that it’s unfair “pigeonholing” to claim that the campaign is focused on birth control. Santorum whined that his comments about contraception not being okay were really just concern about pressures on nuclear families, and when he says he’s opposed to contraception, he doesn’t mean he’s opposed to getting or using it.
The Santorum campaign has no discipline with regard to its message. Neither does it have the organizational skill to fully run a national campaign. It needed to get out the vote last night in order to defeat Romney, and it failed. It didn’t have the money or organization to succeed. Its lack of organization and careful, adult supervision has cost Santorum in the delegate hunt, as it’s failed entirely to get him on the ballots of Virginia and Washington, D.C., and in some districts in Ohio and Illinois.
Through all of this, the Santorum campaign has made Santorum sound like a loser. He’s squandered any momentum he picked up in Mississippi and Alabama, and he’s recognized that he can’t possibly win the nomination in the primaries. He’s adopted the Gingrich strategy of just trying to deny the nomination to Romney, and like Gingrich has started to explain that his losses in states like Illinois are further evidence that he’s the best candidate to face Obama in November.
Gingrich said last night that he will not be leaving the race, and he correctly pointed out that Santorum’s loss in Illinois, on top of losses in Ohio and Michigan, shows that he doesn’t have the wherewithal to win a large industrial state. He then made the bizarre leap that in spite of his even worse showing in all those states, it shows that Gingrich is the one with a chance to win. Gingrich is completely delusional, and Santorum is beginning to sound like him. His only hope, like Gingrich’s, is to make one of those smoke-filled backroom deals to undo a primary season that hasn’t gone his way, justifying it as the truly conservative thing to do.
Rick Santorum can no longer be taken seriously as a candidate for the GOP nomination. Nor can he be taken seriously as a genuine conservative. Mitt Romney does not have the nomination locked up until he has 1144 delegates, but he has a much better claim on the nomination than either Gingrich or Santorum. It would be presumptuous to tell them they should drop out (though each has said that repeatedly of the other), but it’s clear that their candidacies are now exercises in vanity, not for the good of the GOP or the country.
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars’ College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. Louisiana is next on the primary schedule, and he’s so excited he can hardly stand it. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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