Right up until Friday, I was right there with everyone else, pointing out that only Rick Santorum had managed to miss the Republican primary spotlight; everyone else had their moment as the frontrunner, but not him. It made him easy to dismiss.
Slow and steady.... that's what wins the race everytime.
Iowa really confirmed what most political observers already knew - the Republican field is a mess, Republican voters both hate their choices and are flailing to find someone to get behind, and Mitt Romney is by no means a sure thing.
But who knew we'd still have Rick Santorum?
Before I go much further, I should add I wasn't planning to write much about this. Then I read Erick Erickson's trenchant analysis of the Republican problem:
The reason this Republican primary season is so chaotic is because George W. Bush failed to have a successor. Had President Bush had a Vice President to run for President, Bush would have undoubtedly made different policy decisions, but even aside from that there would have been an ascertainable front runner coming from the Bush administration to win or lose.
Because there was not such a thing and because the GOP likes orderly processes, we had to go back to 2000 and dredge up John McCain.
The Republican field was unable to reboot because we had no logical successor coming out of the White House to either win or lose. We went back to McCain and have had to work our way back through unresolved issues from 2000. And now, when the field should be rebooted, we’re having to deal with Mitt Romney who should have been displaced by an heir in 2008 and instead, because the 2008 season did not reboot the crop of candidates, is now the guy three quarters of the GOP does not want who is about to be the nominee.
Like some of the other candidates, I didn't write about Rick Santorum because there isn't much to say. There's no rational reason Santorum, who was never entirely in step with his state when he was a Senator, should somehow look more plausible as a Presidential candidate (can he even win Pennsylvania?). As always, he's the candidate who appeals most and best to the sliver of the right who think "social issues" matter most: abortion, "family values," antigay extremism of the worst sort. Even if Santorum could ride that appeal to the nomination - something Iowa doesn't prove - even a campaign as inept as the Obama team can marginalize him enough to win.
But I think Erickson - who's been pretty gloom and doom for montghs about the GOP's national prospects - has the larger point that probably matters most, something similar to what I've said all along: Republicans can't fix what ails them until someone manages to fully examine (and repudiate) the failure of the last Bush presidency. There's no rational "either/or" choice between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum; they don't represent some "sensible" set of differences between two wings of a thoughtful political party. Rather, they are two terrible, extreme examples of how badly Republicans are struggling to offer an alternative to Barack Obama. And, in the end, having failed to pick anyone who can be "not Romney", social conservatives wound up at Santorum. Because everyone deserves a surge. Rick Santorum deserves credit for surging when it really mattered. Beyond that... his success in Iowa means very little.
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