Rick Santorum throws in the towel

By Richard K. Barry

We all saw it coming, so there's no sense feigning surprise. By the time he got around to announcing the inevitable in his speech, everyone knew what to expect. Some of the words went like this:

We made a decision over the weekend, that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting.

He made the announcement at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania after a weekend of tending to his 3-year old daughter, Bella, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Whatever one thinks of Rick Santorum, and I'm not a big fan, I can image this has been an emotionally draining time for him all around and it wasn't surprising that he was quite emotional at the press conference. He noted that his daughter was making great progress and home after the weekend in the hospital. Terrific news.

The rest of his final moment in the brightest sun was fairly unremarkable, though he made no mention of Romney in his 12-minute speech nor did he, obviously, take the opportunity to say that he would be endorsing Romney, his party's de facto nominee. Maybe that was a little bit churlish. 

But let's give credit where credit is due. Santorum came from no where to give Mitt Romney a bit of a scare. Mostly that was about Romney's weakness, but Santorum did show himself to have some strength when he wasn't being a bat-shit crazy social conservative. If there had been any way Santorum could have presented himself solely as the "grandson of an Italian immigrant coal miner," as he liked to say, or as a meat-and-potatoes middle-America kind of guy, without all the preachy baggage that made people so afraid of him, things might have been different. 

As the New York Times wrote:

Mr. Santorum’s candidacy benefited from the comparison to Mr. Romney as the Republican candidates appealed to a conservative segment of the Republican Party during the primary process. Mr. Santorum regularly mocked Mr. Romney as a flip-flopper on social and conservative issues who could not be trusted. 

That helped Mr. Santorum win several Southern primaries in which evangelical voters and Tea Party supporters dominated the primary electorate. 

But Mr. Santorum also cast himself as the true economic conservative who understood the needs of the middle class. His campaign attacked Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire, as out of touch with the needs and interests of regular working Americans. 

Most take-aways on the relative success of the Santorum candidacy are fairly obvious, but maybe just to make the point, I will say this. We knew, coming out of the mid-term elections, that the Tea Party movement and other right-wing radicals would work hard to assert their influence on the GOP nomination process. They had some success in 2010, and they wanted more. We knew that whoever won, no matter how relatively moderate he or she wanted to be, the eventual nominee would be drawn to the far right to placate the activist hard-right, most vocal, wing of the party. 

We didn't know what the vehicle would be for pulling the party and the nomination process in that direction.   Few probably saw Rick Santorum as that vehicle, but that's the way it worked out. Again, to give him his due, he ended up being a pretty effective voice for that particular fringe. All things considered, he probably was the best of the rest when it came to articulating the new radicalism of the Republican Party. I don't know that this is a compliment, but there it is. 

Now that he's out, now that Romney's path to the nomination is more or less unimpeded, the only question remaining is, how quickly will Romney be able to move back to the centre to capture the necessary independent voters to compete in the general election, how effective will his Etch-A-Sketch candidacy be from here on out?

Santorum pulled Romney a long way over to the right and for that President Obama owes a great debt to the former Senator from Pennsylvania. 

Make no mistake, though, Rick Santorum has rejuvenated a political career that had been in the crapper. He's a player now amongst social conservatives in America in a way that he never was before. Maybe his support base going forward is even bigger than that. Oh, joy. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)