I trust that President Obama read E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s Sunday WaPo column, “Contraception and the cost of culture wars,” in which he argued that the President crafted a good compromise, albeit a little late, exempting religious institutions and their affiliates from being obligated to pay for contraceptives.
Many progressives disagree, citing equally-persuasive arguments that it should be a collective obligation of a sensible society. On balance, it appears to be a workable compromise that most reasonable people in both parties can live with.
But the real gold in Dionne’s column is in his eloquent defense of the much-battered Catholic Church’s good works, particularly with respect to alleviating the suffering of economic hardship.

Those of us who are liberal Catholics have remained in the church for reasons beyond tribal loyalties or a desire to honor the traditions of our parents and grandparents. At the heart of the love many of us have for the church — despite our frustrations over its abysmal handling of the pedophilia scandal and its reluctance to grant women the rights they are due — is a profound respect for the fact on so many questions that count, Catholicism walks its talk and harnesses its faith to the good works the Gospel demands.
When it comes to lifting up the poor, healing the sick, assisting immigrants and refugees, educating the young (especially in inner cities), comforting orphaned and abandoned children, and organizing the needy to act in their own interest, the church has been there with resources and an astoundingly committed band of sisters, priests, brothers and lay people. Organizations such as Catholic Charities, the Catholic Health Association, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and Catholic Relief Services make the words of Jesus come alive every day.

Critics of the role of the Catholic church will have no trouble enumerating its sins against humanity down though history. But all the while the quiet good works by rank and file church activists to help the poor and oppressed noted by Dionne have benefited millions around the world. it’s important to acknowledge that, even when church scandals dominate the headlines. In the context of the current contraception controversy, Dionne adds:

For liberals who sided with the church in this controversy, the most vexing problem with the original exemption on contraception is that it defined “religious” so narrowly that the reality that these organizations go out of their way to serve non-Catholics was held against them. Their Gospel-inspired work was defined as non-religious. This violated the very essence of Christian charity and the church’s social justice imperatives.
…What bothers liberal Catholics about the arguments advanced by some of our conservative friends is that the Catholic right seems so eager to focus the church’s witness to the world on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and, now, perhaps, contraception that they would effectively, if not necessarily intentionally, relegate the church’s social justice work and teaching to second-class status.
Liberal Catholics were proud to stand with conservatives in defending the church’s religious liberty rights in carrying out its social and charitable mission. Now, we’d ask conservatives to consider that what makes the Gospel so compelling — especially for the young, many of whom are leaving the church — is the central role it assigns to our responsibilities to act on behalf of the needy, the left-out and the abandoned.
And we’d ask our non-Catholic liberal friends to think about this, too. Many of us agreed that broad contraception coverage was, as a general matter, a good thing, and we shared their concern for women’s rights. But we were troubled that some with whom we usually agree seemed to relish a fight with the church and defined any effort to accommodate its anxieties as “selling out.”

Dionne applauds Obama for striking a reasonable compromise, but also for the strong stand he took as a young politician in 2006 defending “religion in the public square” and opposing stereotypes of religious people as intolerant fanatics.
President Obama would do well to celebrate the great works of the Catholic church at a time when many Catholics are feeling dissed by the negative fallout of scandals and unfair stereotypes. But it’s not just the Catholic church. “Prosperity Gospel” protestant churches, many with preachers living extremely high on the hog and often reactionary politics, get tremendous media exposure, while thousands of smaller churches with great programs serving the disadvantaged and destitute in their communities are overshadowed. Non-Christian faiths have also made a difference for the better in their communities in numerous instances.
It’s important that religious institutions should be recognized and uplifted for their charitable works, and the president who makes a special effort to do so could reap a bountiful harvest on election day.

David Lauter has has an update on the presidential race in the battleground states in the L.A. Times. Here’s Lauter’s take on ‘done deal’ states:

President Obama still holds leads along the West Coast, in much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions and in parts of the upper Midwest, giving him a likely base of 217 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win, according to the latest Real Clear Politics compilation of state-by-state polls. A Republican can count on virtually all of the South, the Plains states and conservative parts of the Interior West, giving the eventual GOP candidate a likely base of 181.

Here’s where Lauter sees the election being decided:

Fewer than a dozen states continue to appear to be clear battlegrounds….The states in between – the ones where the election almost certainly will be decided – include Colorado and Nevada in the West, where Obama will need a strong Latino turnout to win; Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where a key issue will be his ability to appeal to blue-collar voters; North Carolina and Virginia, where Democrats hope a combination of a strong black turnout and support among college-educated whites will do the trick; and Florida, a perennial tossup…In two states where Obama was doing poorly last year, Missouri and New Hampshire, some recent polls have shown the race a tossup, potentially adding those to the list.

In sum, Lauter argues:

…Assuming the list of solid states remains as is, a Republican candidate will have to pick up 89 of the tossup electoral votes to win, while Obama would have to pick up 53. Most analysts assume Obama will need to hold Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which he carried in 2008, and which together have 30 electoral votes. He would then have several possible ways to put together the additional 23 needed for victory.

So, in this snapshot, Obama has a 36 electoral vote edge in the contest for 270 e.v.’s., according to the Real Clear Politics compilation. That’s not to say he has any edge in the polls in the purple states, just that the blue states have a lead at this particular political moment.
Perhaps the most worrisome calculation in the RCP analysis is the classification of PA as “toss-up” It’s disturbing because PA should be “leans Obama” by now. He probably will not get re-elected without it. If the ‘toss-up” designation is an outlier, or overstated, on the other hand, then Obama is even closer to 272.
As always with snapshots, this could change abruptly. But it’s not a bad snapshot for an incumbent president seeking a 2nd term in February of an election year. And if favorable economic trends continue, the e.v. edge could grow. The value of such snapshots to a campaign is that they show where a reallocation of resources might get good results. The safest bet is that the ad wars in these states will soon escalate dramatically.

The New York Times’ Tom Friedman has for some time now been a leading promoter of the “false equivalency” nostrum – the idea that Republicans and Democrats are equally to blame for America’s current problems and that a new “middle of the road” third party is therefore necessary. Along with the Washington Post’s Matt Miller, Friedman has been the most visible poster boy for this infuriating notion, one which is as empirically false as it is morally and intellectually unfair to Obama and the Dems.
But now Friedman has finally come out loud and clear with a column that unequivocally says that Republican extremism is the fundamental problem:
Here is the gist of Friedman’s “heave-ho” as he finally throws the “false equivalency” nonsense out the window:

I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.
Without that, the best of the Democrats — who have been willing to compromise — have no partners and the worst have a free pass for their own magical thinking. Since such a transformed Republican Party is highly unlikely, maybe the best thing would be for it to get crushed in this election and forced into a fundamental rethink — something the Democrats had to go through when they lost three in a row between 1980 and 1988. We need a “Different Kind of Republican” the way Bill Clinton gave us a “Different Kind of Democrat.”
Because when I look at America’s three greatest challenges today, I don’t see the Republican candidates offering realistic answers to any of them…
…when all the Republican candidates last year said they would not accept a deal with Democrats that involved even $1 in tax increases in return for $10 in spending cuts, the G.O.P. cut itself off from reality. It became a radical party, not a conservative one. And for the candidates to wrap themselves in a cartoon version of Ronald Reagan — a real conservative who raised taxes, including the gasoline tax, when he discovered his own cuts had gone too far — is fraudulent…
…Until the G.O.P. stops being radical and returns to being conservative, it won’t provide what the country needs most now — competition — competition with Democrats on the issues that will determine whether we thrive in the 21st century. We need to hear conservative fiscal policies, energy policies, immigration policies and public-private partnership concepts — not radical ones. Would somebody please restore our second party? The country is starved for a grown-up debate.

Now if only Matt Miller over at the Post would man up like Friedman and come on back to reality, the “false equivalency” nonsense could be driven back into the corner of Fox News where it belongs – you know, the place where all the over-the-hill, has-been Democratic pollsters who can’t get a real job with the GOP go to sit in lawn chairs, play dominos and whine for the cameras about having been “betrayed” by the Democratic Party.

Democrats are well aware of the fact that Bill Maher’s monologues are frequently more insightful than most MSM commentary. Maher outdid himself recently with a rant that actually captured the essence of the Republican strategy for 2012 in a way that none of the major commentators have equaled.

“You know, Republicans have created this completely fictional president. His name is Barack X. And he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who is coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe, or worse yet, Saul Alinsky!
[The fact is that]….The Republicans hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling about what he might do, what he might be thinking, what he secretly wants to change.”
…And this is how politics has changed. You used to have to run against an actual candidate. But, now, you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate…

This isn’t satire; it’s an entirely serious analysis of a core Republican strategy.
And there’s really nothing funny about it.

Those who were wondering how low the conservative movement could go need look no farther than the CPAC 2012 confab, which yesterday hosted a panel on “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity.”
The big buzz panelist was Peter Brimelow, founder of VDARE.com., “a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas,” according to Brian Tashman of Right-Wing Watch, via Reader Supported News. Here’s how Tashman describes some lowlights of the work of Brimelow and VDARE:

Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.”
VDARE has published the work of people like Robert Weissberg, who says that black and Hispanic students are responsible for problems in the American education system, Marcus Epstein, the Youth for Western Civilization leader who karate-chopped a black woman after calling her a “n****r” (he later pled guilty to assault), and J. Philippe Rushton of the eugenicist Pioneer Fund.
The Southern Poverty Law Center lists VDARE as a White Nationalist hate group and notes that “VDARE.com’s archives contain articles like ‘Freedom vs. Diversity,’ ‘Abolishing America,’ ‘Anarcho-Tyranny — Where Multiculturalism Leads’ and ‘Why Immigrants Kill,'” compiled quotes from other VDARE writers that call the U.S. an exclusively white nation and denounce Jews for “weakening America’s historic White majority”:
“America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely.” — Sam Francis, VDARE.com, July 21, 2003

Read more…

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and Third Way conducted focus groups in late 2011 with swing voters in Ohio and North Carolina to explore their views on clean energy and its link to innovation and economic growth. The results were telling. Despite the conventional, and incorrect, wisdom that the cap-and-trade debate, the politicization of climate change and the controversy over Solyndra have put a damper on support for clean energy, these swing voters continue to express a strong desire to get America running on clean energy. However, these focus groups show that supporters of clean energy may need a new approach to rallying the public to their cause and maximizing support for clean energy.
Key Findings

Swing voters in these traditional energy states express a VERY strong desire to see the US move to clean energy like wind and solar. Clean energy is very much seen as an engine of long-term economic and job growth.
However, voters are much more skeptical about its ability to “jump start” a recovery through an immediate boost in manufacturing jobs.Voters are extremely pessimistic about government’s ability to do anything right and don’t see it as a driver of innovation. That is part of the reason they are skeptical about direct government investment in energy infrastructure or R&D. However, these voters remain very supportive of the government acting as a “facilitator” for clean energy by providing incentives like tax credits and loan guarantees. That opinion holds up strongly even after attacks using Solyndra.
These voters are also generally supportive of a national renewable energy standard and compared it to fuel economy standards (in a positive way). Backers of clean energy can enhance support by tapping into concerns about pollution and a strong desire to move away from coal. But these voters don’t see climate change as a reason to move to clean energy. Instead of touting the benefits of action, the best frame may be to describe the negative consequences of inaction: That America’s economic competitors (especially China) will dominate the clean energy sector and reap the economic benefits, instead of uso While Americans are left behind with a dirty, expensive and outdated energy system.

Now that Rick Santorum has had his sort of day in the sun, it’s instructive to take a step back and reconsider what Tuesday’s elections in CO, MN and MO mean for Romney. John Nichols’ post, “Anybody But Romney Wins Everywhere” in The Nation puts it all into perspective:

…The sweater vest had a good night. But the big deal is that Republicans rejected the empty suit…Rick Santorum may have won beauty contests Tuesday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, but he won’t even be on the ballot for delegate-rich contests in states such as Indiana and Virginia. He’s still running for vice president, or maybe a cabinet post.
Santorum is a story. But he is not the story.
The story is the fact that Mitt Romney lost so very miserably in three battleground states.
Romney finished second in Colorado and Missouri and, remarkably, barely mustered a third-place finish (behind Santorum and Ron Paul, barely ahead of Newt Gingrich) in Minnesota.
But the place on the list is less telling than than overwhelming levels of opposition to Romney.
In Colorado, 65 percent of Republican caucus-goers voted against the man who started the week as the all-but-declared nominee of their party.
In Missouri, 75 percent of Republican primary voters backed someone other than Romney.
In Minnesota, 83 percent of Republican caucus-goers rejected Romney. That’s particularly striking, as Romney won Minnesota in 2008 with 41 percent of the vote.
In many Minnesota counties, Romney finished fourth, behind Santorum, Paul and Gingrich. Some of the former Massachusetts governor’s worst losses were in [blue] collar counties around the Twin Cities, an essential base for Republican presidential contenders in the fall.
Several Minnesota counties recorded less than 5 percent support for Romney. In western Minnesota’s Norman County (Red River Valley), no one caucused for him. Mitt got 0 percent.
His finishes in the Republican heartlands of rural Missouri and Colorado were almost as bad.
Even more unsettling for the Republicans has to be the fact that, despite intensive campaigning in the three states, turnout collapsed.
In Missouri, a classic bellweather state, there was a stunning drop in primary participation. In 2008, GOP primary turnout was 589,289. In 2012 ,GOP primary turnout was 251,496. That’s way less than half the turnout just four years ago.
In Minnesota, caucus turnout four years ago was 62,828. This year, it will be under 50,000. That’s an almost 20 percent dropoff.
In Colorado, 70,229 Republicans caucused in 2008. This year, turnout was 64,000. That’s close to a 10 percent dropoff.

Fun to imagine GOP strategists mulling over these statistics id disbelief, mumbling WTF. Nichols concludes with a sweet kicker. “In Missouri’s Republican primary on Tuesday, where all the attention and campaigning was focused, Romney secured 63,826 votes…Running essentially unopposed in the extraordinarily low-profile Missouri Democratic primary, Obama won 64,405.”

The turnout figures for Santorum’s Tuesday trifecta should put a damper on his crowing. As Catalina Camia reports in USA Today On Politics: “In Colorado, where Romney campaigned heavily, turnout was down about 7% from 2008, according to data compiled by MSNBC’s First Read. In Minnesota, turnout was down by 24%. And in Missouri, which was a “beauty contest” primary with no impact on delegate allocation, voting was down 57%.”
“Turning the Tide in Ohio” a Campaigns & Elections post by by Dennis Willard & Melissa Fazekas addresses the successful campaign to defeat Governor Kasich’s assault on collective bargaining for public workers. The authors explain “how social media helped amplify our message, boost earned media efforts, and overturn an Ohio law.”
According to Gabriella Schwarz CNN.com post “Poll: Obama leads GOP candidates in Virginia,” in the latest Quinnipiac Poll of registered voters, “President Barack Obama edged out Mitt Romney in a hypothetical general election match-up in Virginia, according to a new poll. …Obama captured 47% to Romney’s 43%, a wider margin than the two percentage point difference in the December results. But Romney fared better than his GOP rivals in the likely swing state….Obama led Newt Gingrich 51% to 37%, Rick Santorum 49% to 41% and Ron Paul 47% to 40%.”
The same poll has former DNC Chairman Tim Kaine in a statistical tie with George Allen in the U.S. Senate race. “Kaine’s standing in the Senate race will almost certainly be tied to Virginia’s view of the president,” according to Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. This is a high priority race for the GOP, and Dems can help Kaine at his Act Blue page.
When the best Romney can do with a Pawlenty endorsement in MN (his home state), is a humiliating defeat, as Ben Jacobs notes at the Daily Beast, it’s probably a safe bet that TimPaw is not going to be seen as much of a veep asset on the GOP ticket.
As the 10th most populous state (close to tied with NC and NJ), Georgia is the biggest prize on Super Tuesday (March 6), and it’s a must-win for Newt, who never won a state-wide race in his former home state. (Gingrich now lives in VA, where he failed to qualify for the primary ballot). In 2008, 60 percent of GA GOP voters were white evangelicals. Romney and Santorum are reportedly joining the fray in GA.
Sara Kiff of Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog explains why the white house is prepared to hang tough on supporting health care coverage of contraceptives. “A poll out Tuesday from the Public Religion Research Institute finds 52 percent of Catholic voters agreed with the statement, “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” That’s pretty much in line with overall support for the provision, which hovers at 55 percent – likely because Catholics use contraceptives at rates similar to the rest of Americans.” Kiff reports that 60 percent of young voters and women support the measure.
E.J. Dionne’s WaPo op-ed, “Clint, Rick and the limits of pessimism” spotlights Rove’s blunder in criticizing Clint Eastwood for making a highly popular ad celebrating America’s moxie, as symptomatic of the GOP’s rut — “a constant doubling-down on glumness.”
Harold Meyerson has some fun with his WaPo op-ed “The GOP scrambles for a bogeyman,” holding the Republicans to account for their Europe-bashing as a way to trash President Obama. Meyerson asks Republicans, “If Europe is not a “free land,” why are we still in NATO? If Europe is home to the pernicious bureaucratic authoritarianism that Romney and Gingrich claim, why haven’t Republicans called for breaking our alliances with it? Why do we have close ties to Germany, where workers have considerable input into corporate decisions? Or to Britain, the home of national health? Is Europe friend or foe?”
TV still rules as the primary source for political news, according to TPM’s Kyle Leighton, who explains of a new survey: “The Pew study also shows that there is certainly overlap between those who watch newscasts and seek information online. Two thirds of Americans get their news either “regularly” or “sometimes” from cable, nearly the same as those who go to local television news, and 61 percent that look to the national nightly broadcasts for the same. About 52 percent say the regularly or sometimes go to the internet, and with 32 percent saying they never do.”

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Another week, another set of primaries–and soon enough, undoubtedly, another cascade of speculations about the prospect of a brokered convention. Predictions of an unpredictable fight-to-the-finish have become an unfortunate refrain–not to say, cliché–of our presidential election campaigns.
Enough! I hate to be the one to have to break it to my fellow political junkies, but the truth must be told: Not only isn’t there going to be no brokered convention this year–there probably isn’t going to be a brokered convention ever again.
For starters, there’s a reason it hasn’t happened in either party since the advent of the modern nomination system in 1972. With virtually all delegates being selected in scheduled primaries and caucuses, there are no longer any blocs of uncommitted or “favorite-son,” or machine-controlled delegates who can prevent a front-runner from accumulating a majority well before the convention. All the great “smoke-filled room” conventions–including the classic 1920 GOP session in Chicago which gave America a Harding administration, and the 1924 Democratic convention that required 103 ballots–occurred when primaries were marginal events that mainly consisted in influencing the party bosses who controlled a sizable majority of delegates.
The only way to produce a “deliberative” convention now–barring some cataclysmic event like the death, disability, or disqualification of the putative nominee–is via an extended primary season in which multiple candidates remain viable to the bitter end. Sure, it could happen, but only theoretically. Candidates on the edge of elimination often say they will stay in the contest until the bitter end (as noted in my last column on Gingrich’s actual odds of victory), but they typically don’t, because they quickly realize they’ve lost the media attention and the financial donors that they need to win primaries and delegates in significant numbers.
One element of confusion that has entered the conversation this year is the supposed adoption of “proportionality” in Republican delegate allocation rules, which, it is argued, will make it harder for front-runners to lock down a majority of delegates. As Davidson College’s Josh Putnam has explained repeatedly, while the first-ever intervention in state delegate selection systems by the RNC this cycle is a big deal, the actual changes in these systems required in 2012 are actually pretty small: states holding binding primaries and caucuses prior to April 1 cannot award delegates according to statewide winner-take-all procedures. But they can award (and one state, South Carolina, has already awarded) delegates by congressional district winner-take-all rules, which are a long way from “proportional” representation at the convention. Moreover, after April 1, the rules are exactly the same as before. In short, there hasn’t been any procedural revolution that has made a “brokered convention” more likely.
Another largely false issue is the scenario whereby a “late entry” candidate jumps into the primaries and hoovers up delegates in sufficient numbers to deny Romney a majority. Primary filing deadlines have now passed for nearly all the primaries before mid-April, with new deadlines popping up every week. As the failure of Newt Gingrich to get on the ballot in Virginia has shown, even well-established candidates often struggle to meet complex filing conditions. There is nobody out there who is going to jump in late and have enough general support to leap the barriers to entry; all the “white knights” usually mentioned–Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, etc.–didn’t run for very good reasons (Bush’s surname; Daniels’ “truce” insult to social conservatives; Christie’s various ideological heresies, from abortion to gun rights).
Finally, it’s worth examining the actual resistance to Mitt Romney’s nomination that is the essential premise for most of the “brokered convention” scenarios. Certainly he is not the ideal candidate for most conservative activists. But it is remarkable how few of them have failed to pledge allegiance to him if he does win the nomination. And he remains relatively popular among GOP voters: a NBC-Wall Street Journal survey of Republican voters taken well before the Florida primary, showing Gingrich leading Romney nationally, also showed Mitt with a better favorable/unfavorable ratio than Newt.
And even if you buy my learned TNR colleague Walter Shapiro’s idea that Gingrich could yet make a comeback and smite Romney in later primaries, that’s not the same as suggesting a “brokered convention” is likely. Should Newt somehow romp in February, March and April, then he might well romp all the way to the nomination, leaving Romney in the dust.
As still another TNR regular, Jonathan Bernstein, has noted, a “brokered convention” depends on “brokers.” Party leaders have a lot of ways to influence the selection of delegates in the primaries, but beyond that, their powers are limited. In the extremely unlikely event no winner heads to Tampa with a majority of delegates, we are looking not at a “brokered” convention, but a “deadlock” where the actual delegates, once their legal and moral commitments are discharged, can do what they want. “Brokering” is much too tame a metaphor for what would take place in that scenario. It would be a lot more like herding feral cats. Fortunately, it probably won’t–no, it definitely won’t–come to that.

Perhaps the most relevant implications of Santorum’s Tuesday trifecta are: 1. Romney’s support is weak 2. Santorum edges up in the GOP veepstakes, and 3. Newt’s support is much weaker than might be expected after his big SC win.
The votes in MN, CO and MO were two caucuses and a beauty contest, respectively, and the turnout was low in all three. It is tempting to dismiss their results entirely, except that these are swing states and Santorum did win them all. They may signal some movement in his direction. It’s nothing for Dems to lose sleep over yet, since Santorum’s views are pretty extreme across the spectrum of major issues.
Santorum does defend conservative economic policies more artfully than do his competitors for the GOP nod, which is why he has done better with blue collar voters in his congressional and senatorial elections than have most Republicans. He has on occasion supported causes championed by labor, such as a minimum wage hike and steel tariffs, and he has been the GOP field’s most vocal advocate of re-invigorating U.S. manufacturing.
But his smokescreen defenses of more tax breaks for the rich, de-regulation, partial privatization of social security and draconian cuts in social programs are not likely to hold up well under the light of increasingly intense national scrutiny. It is even harder to see how his extremist views on social issues, which include criticism of contraception, won’t alienate millions of swing voters, particularly Republicans of a libertarian bent. And he is not exactly ‘Mr. Clean’ when it comes to coddling with lobbyists.
Still, Santorum’s three wins make a case that he can generate some excitement with the conservative base, which is a good quality in a veep candidate. He just might be able to help Romney in PA, as well as with Catholic blue collar voters in general. He has earned a spot on the veep short list.
Newt wasn’t on the ballot in MO Tuesday. And his weak showings in CO (3rd) and MN (4th) suggest that his widely-ridiculed Occupy the Moon proposal may have damaged his chances. (Memo to Newt: Not every brain fart should be loudly trumpeted).
Santorum’s Fat Tuesday does nothing to dismiss the mounting evidence that the GOP field — each candidate included — is so flawed that their nominee will likely need a sudden economic downturn or some other disaster to get traction against the incumbent. At the very least, Santorum has increased the odds that the GOP field of presidential candidates is in for a long, grueling slog, while President Obama uses the opportunity raise money and shore up his coalition.