1. It has to be a little frustrating being Romney right now. They last two weeks went about as well as they could have, and he still only won Ohio by 1%. Most Republican voters in most places just don’t want him. Just barely enough are reconciling themselves to Romney that he will probably get the nomination and many aren’t reconciling themselves at all. But I think Romney is even more vulnerable than that. Looking at the exit polls last night, Romney’s strength was among voters that prioritized electability (and this was the largest group.) My sense is that many of these voters aren’t pro-Romney as much as they are anti-Obama and see Romney as the only realistic chance for beating the incumbent. They aren’t voting for Romney because they like him. They are voting for Romney because they think other people like him. If Romney hits a bad public relations patch, a lot of these people will be in a hurry to jump ship. Given the right circumstances, Romney’s support might not just decline, it might shatter. That means that Santorum’s task isn’t only to show that Romney is a phony. Many potential Romney voters know quite well that he is a phony (I heard many Romney-voting conservative voters say just that on the radio while I was driving home from work yesterday.) Santorum also needs to convince these voters that Romney is a loser too. I think that can be done, but I doubt that Santorum has the skills and discipline to do it.
2. Santorum spent the last two weeks bumbling around from one foolish culture war fight to another. He wasted his time mounting unconvincing defenses on earmarks instead of focusing on his tax plan and, above all, on the similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare. Santorum enlightened us all on why JFK’s Houston speech on church/state relations made him want to ” throw up.” And he still only lost Ohio by 1%. Santorum could have won Ohio and severely wounded Romney if he had run even an average campaign over the last few weeks. So did Santorum learn anything? I hope so, but I doubt it. I saw some of Santorum’s speech yesterday. The first couple of minutes were a disorganized mess about a high school weight room and his wife’s parents and I-don’t-know-what. That’s when I went to bed. I have strict limits on how much Santorum incompetence I can bear to watch at any one time. I saw the rest of his Super Tuesday speech on YouTube this evening. It was a pretty good ten minute speech that was buried within eighteen minutes of talking because Santorum doesn’t have the discipline to properly organize his thoughts before speaking. I guess falling just short agrees with him.
