2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

btw i find santorum terrifying, not so much b/c he will win the election (he won't) but because of the fact that a significant minority of the american electorate appears to be OK with his explicitly theocratic, fundamentally punitive vision for america. before this election he was a pathetic has-been, now he is a pathetic has-been around whom a very vocal minority (albeit, i think, not a big one) can rally and begin to cohere. i feel that this is somewhat different than the historical "moral majority"-type evangelical coalition which largely devoted itself to voting for broadly sympathetic politicians (or those they felt were sympathetic). in santorum we now have a national figure, with some electoral constancy, who embodies and even intensifies the ethos of the most retrograde elements of our society. that worries me for the future.

i mean santorum is basically pat robertson or worse and he's leading in some polls. even huckabee was not as disgusting as this guy.

tbh, Sarah Palin looked like that person four years ago. She's still in the news occasionally, but not at all omnipresent.

that's true. actually i haven't come across a palin article for many months

but frankly i think palin would have fared not much better than bachmann in this primary. maybe worse.

that section of society has never gone away

There's a reason why Nixon's or Dubya's approval ratings never dropped below a certain number.

that section of society has never gone away

― stay in school if you want to kiw (Gukbe), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:17 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have they ever -- in the past 50 years -- had a quasi-viable major party candidate that did not just pander to them but actually embodied their ethos quite so fully?

i think santorum is a clown who is going to fade pretty rapidly once it's all said and done. palin faded because she was so nakedly and stupidly opportunistic and obsessed w/her own celebrity and had zero credibility w/even a lot of people in her own base once she resigned as governor and after putting her foot in her mouth one too many times. even a lot of the idiots she appealed too wanted substance at some point. i think a lot of her fans turned to bachmann hoping for a more viable version of palin but quickly realized what was up. santorum i think is filling a bit of the palin gap but he's a bit of a hail mary for that base (so to speak.)

Santorum will fade away, sure, but to think that that base that loves him hasn't been there for a long time and will be there for a while feels a bit optimistic.

wouldn't deny that

Santorum only fades away with repeated washings

The base is highly situational though - it's not like he's been on 38% of the vote all along.

True, but that's also media attention. He was a joke until he managed to rally some local state support. The fact is he's a candidate who speaks his mind honestly and, as much as you can try to rip him for earmarks or (bizarrely) Arlen Spector, he's remarkably consistent in his ideals and comes across as genuine. In a way, I think, its his nutjob hardcore "moralism" that has refreshed his fans in a way that they haven't been pandered to in a while. Obviously his surge is probably over, but it also would never happened had Romney not been such a disagreeable candidate for so many. So yes, they are slaves to the trends, but Santorum is probably the most significantly attractive candidate they've had in years. And I'm including Huckabee.

the moral slump

^^ there's a lot going on in this phrase

Isn't the line on Santorum that his no-compromise neo-fundamentalism is more a campaign strategy than something he actually believes? It does get him votes, it's brought him this far, but I thought one of the ways Romney's managed to hammer his has been to point out that in Washington, he was a strategic-voting cynic just like everybody else prior to the Tea Party freshmen

however otm that it's a worrying sign for his 2012 campaign strategy, "be completely crazy," has been extremely effective

in this decadent era of abortions and insubordinance somebody's gotta run up the black flag and just start shooting people. santorum appears ready, willing, and able to delegate that job to trusted functionaries

http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/imgad?id=CICAgICQgZ76gAEQrAIY-gEyCJ2VF7RJk73p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3bYBkGgRCE

okay the reveal at 1:22 is just too much

however otm that it's a worrying sign for his 2012 campaign strategy, "be completely crazy," has been extremely effective

In fairness, it spent six months not being that effective until it was joined in a pincer assault by his strategy of "Don't be Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry or Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney". Most of the "Ask the people how they're voting" pieces I've seen have a lot of his voters talking more about how they need to make a stand against Romney / Obama than saying "I am fired up for President Santorum". If they were Democrats I'd say they were holding their noses, but the Republican style has always been more the fixed grin and panicking eyes.

yah santorum might be crazy but he comes across mainly as just a huge dweeb, no one is that psyched abt him, they just don't like mitt dawg

he really got where he is atm by everyone else being eliminated rather than any merit of his own

he's a bit of a hail mary for that base (so to speak.)

― omar little, Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:44 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol subtle

btw i find santorum terrifying, not so much b/c he will win the election (he won't) but because of the fact that a significant minority of the american electorate appears to be OK with his explicitly theocratic, fundamentally punitive vision for america...

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 1:12 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. I think aiding his recent rise (other than being the last viable non-Mitt)has been jumping on the contraception thing, and expressing his uber-Catholic views - which are more or less shared by Evangelicals - in a way that Mitt and his Mormonism cannot. (Newt is a recent convert, and has no moral high ground anyway, except in his own mind.)

btw Newt, stfu about debating the president. You're a single-digit (in MI) non-entity, and if I hear one more time about how Obama bowed to the Saudi king I'm gonna lose it.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_02/santorum_loses_catholic_votebu035714.php

So based on prior evidence, there’s really no particularly reason to think the “Catholic vote” was ever Santorum’s to lose. 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. I’m sure the JFK slur didn’t help, but this is one “surprise” in Michigan that really shouldn’t have been that surprising.

Interesting, thanks. From the comments:

Women! Women! Women! As a female Catholic I wouldn't touch Santorum with a ten foot heavily used turd pole

Spreading Santorum, the page defining 'santorum' as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on Google.

now it's urbandictionary ahahahahahahaaaa

win some, lose some eh rick

I like to think this whole campaign has simply been an effort to generate enough news mentions to change his Google search results.

I hate politics.

ok I lolled at this onion headline:

Romney Thanks State He Was Born And Raised In For Just Barely Giving Him Enough Votes To Beat Total Maniac

From WaPo "The Genesis of a church's stand on race":

At church functions, Gray said, he and other black Mormons suffered the assurances of their white brethren that “you will have the priesthood in the world to come,” or encouragements that if they lived worthy lives, “you will find your skin will become lighter and lighter.”

I'd say, "You can't make this up" except people already did make it up.

you can make this up, using one weird trick

Rick Santorum is NOT making friends among caretakers of the developmentally disabled.

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

for that libel alone santorum should be... i don't know if i can say it on a message board.

*plop*

With Michigan behind him, Santorum smells victory

srsly?

Interesting spin by Santorum camp. Basically, he's saying, most of the early voters didn't really mean to vote for Romney. It only looked that way.

He's obviously deluded over the long haul, but I think his point about early voting is valid (I've mentioned the same myself). The voters in this campaign have had the attention span of a flea, and I also think it would have made a difference if all the votes had been cast after Santorum's three-win night.

has santo won anything besides iowa? is this really still a race at this point?

oh duh I forgot about the ones he won where he ran virtually unopposed

He took almost half the delegates from Michigan as well.

Isn't the line on Santorum that his no-compromise neo-fundamentalism is more a campaign strategy than something he actually believes? It does get him votes, it's brought him this far, but I thought one of the ways Romney's managed to hammer his has been to point out that in Washington, he was a strategic-voting cynic just like everybody else prior to the Tea Party freshmen

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, February 29, 2012 3:05 AM (16 hours ago) Bookmark

yes and no. i suspect that, to his devoted fans, the issue isn't so much whether or not santorum is a political animal, but whether or not he "really believes" in the things he talks about. judging on appearances and as a non-fan, i have to say that he does seem to be a man who A) speaks his mind honestly and B) allows his principles to guide him. he's a real zealot, not a cynical fake one, and that's what makes him scary to us non-fundamentalists. in this, he stands in stark contrast to mitt romney, who never seems to believe anything he says, even when he's sticking his foot in his mouth.

to his devoted fans

these, frankly, do not exist. he is trying desperately to create them by getting ever more outlandish.

yeah, i dunno. santorum seems to the attract hardcore fundies in droves. they respond to the intensity of his gay-hating catholic fervor like women to bass.

he doesn't even win the catholics. he's just blindly paddling ever right-ward in the hopes that romney's inherent roboticism sinks him.

more to the point, rick santorum has no clue how he's arrived at his present position. he ran because he was bored and everyone in pennsylvania hates him. now he's sort of on the brink of vague importance! yet he remains a colossal dick with no clue about anything.

come on

Santorum obv came to his present position by virtue of being the last remaining choice of the insane wing of his party, after Palin abandoned them, and after they discovered Bachmann and Perry were fools and that Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich were knaves.

In Iowa, he literally was at 3% a couple of weeks before the caucuses, after spending four solid months shuffling around the state. Whatever success he has had so far has fallen right into his lap as a gift. He probably thinks it came from God.

In reality it came from desperation.

he doesn't even win the catholics.

yeah, that's what's so weird about him. catholics and evangelical fundies both realize what he apparently does not: he's more the latter than the former. it's foolish to understate his appeal to american religious fanatics, imo. doesn't matter that he's a fool, or that they hate him in pennsylvania, or that he's gotten to where he is basically by accident. he seems to have struck a chord among a particularly vocal group of lunatics.