Social conservative journalist Ramesh Ponnuru (one of my favorites) writes that putting social conservative Rick Santorum on the Republican ticket would be bad for social conservatives. Ponnuru argues that Santorum is too often bad at picking his fights and makes a bad impression with voters who are not social conservatives, but who might be open to a socially conservative message. Sounds right. Santorum has his good points but just hasn’t been able to keep his foot out of his mouth when the pressure was on. I saw David Gergen a couple of weeks back and he said that part of the reason for Santorum’s sometimes weak performance was that his campaign had a weak staff and that this forced the candidate to do an inordinate amount of the work. The result was an exhausted candidate who stumbled from one self-destructive controversy to another. I’m not a big Gergen fan, but it sounded about right.
