The path to a Romney-Santorum ticket
THE DAILY BLADE: Rep. Ron Paul (TX) has lately taken to calling former Sen. Rick Santorum (PA) a “fake conservative,” but voters in AL and MS, who know a fake conservative when they see one, disagree. Santorum won primaries in both states, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (GA) coming in second; former MA Gov. Mitt Romney in third place; and Paul dead last.
Romney’s campaign brushes off Santorum’s wins, pointing to an “insurmountable” lead in delegates:
“While Rick Santorum is taking a victory lap after Alabama and Mississippi, the fact remains that nothing has changed or advanced his chances of getting the Republican nomination,” Rich Beeson, the Romney campaign’s political director, wrote in a memo ... “Tuesday’s results actually increased Governor Romney’s delegate lead, while his opponents only moved closer to their date of mathematical elimination.”
But in an interview with former MO Sen. Jim Talent, a Romney campaign adviser, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien used a different calculus to measure Romney’s progress:
[O]utspending Rick Santorum, over $2 million is what your campaign spent on TV ad spending to Rick Santorum’s just under $400,000, at some point there’s a different kind of math, maybe not delegate math, that says “That’s bad math. He won and spent under $400 million. We took a $2 million hit.”
While acknowledging that the “delegate math will not be altered much,” Commentary posits that “Santorum is now in a position to do some real damage to the Romney juggernaut in the upcoming weeks”:
If Santorum ends March by stacking up victories in Illinois, Louisiana and Missouri, then although he will still be trailing badly in the delegate count, his path to the nomination won’t look quite so much of a fantasy as it did a few weeks ago. Though Romney will still have impressive advantages, so long as the votes are still be [sic] counted state by state, momentum has a way of overwhelming math.
The rationale of Romney’s campaign is that ideology has nothing to do with electability – an argument he has no choice but to make because conservatives think his ideology is, as one of Santorum’s surrogates puts it, “Barack Obama Lite.” For Santorum and his supporters, ideology and electability are intertwined.
Math and momentum will be battling it out for the next three months, and WaPo political handicapper Chris Cillizza notes that whether Gingrich likes it or not, the race is between Romney and Santorum now, and that “[i]t’s a game of “Survivor” now:
April looks to be Romney's best month yet in terms of the state’s set to vote. May holds good news for Santorum. June looks to be a good Romney month. …
Both will have to weather bad patches in which a series of losses will force them to live off the political land for a time. Both will have streaks in which they appear to be unbeatable.
It’s not just super-PAC money keeping the race going. Erick Erickson of RedStateNews observes, “the base does not want this primary to end”:
The roller coaster continues. The one sure thing out of this is that, though Romney is not becoming a better candidate as the primaries continue, Rick Santorum sure is. As for Newt? He is becoming less relevant.
It is time for Newt Gingrich to exit. It is time for Santorum v. Romney and let the chips fall where they may.
But Gingrich “has certainly demonstrated … the will to slog on with little money, driven by – pick a word – stubbornness or commitment to carry a message even when voters are not responding,” The New York Times reports:
Mr. Gingrich’s campaign rejected the logic that if he stepped aside, his supporters would go to Mr. Santorum. Many conservatives for whom social issues are not paramount would most likely back Mr. Romney, said Bob Walker, a Gingrich adviser and a former House member from Pennsylvania. But voter surveys on Tuesday showed that Tea Party supporters had divided their votes between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi.
Richard Viguerie thinks that Gingrich “can either be a kingmaker or a spoiler” and argues that if Gingrich drops out now, “the odds strongly favor Santorum to get the nomination, because the Republican Party is a conservative party.”
But can anything short of being promised a cabinet position or the veep spot by Santorum induce Gingrich to drop out – and should Santorum cut such a deal to finally get his chance to run against Romney one-on-one? Commentary makes the case that Santorum should just bide his time:
[I]t is possible Gingrich is about to fade out of the picture anyway. Why pay a high price for his support when it might not be worth much in the coming months? …
Having seen what Gingrich was like when he was Speaker of the House, could Santorum really bring himself to put such an inconsistent and often unfocused person only a heartbeat away from the presidency?
For his part, Gingrich – who no longer has a path to the nomination – has convinced himself that he can be a kingmaker at the Republican convention by spoiling Romney’s chances of winning the necessary 1,144 delegates to win the nomination, Politico reports:
By continuing to split the delegates in states that award them proportionally, Gingrich’s campaign believes it could force a contested convention.
“If we get to the end of this process and no one has the numbers, you go to a convention where two-out-of-three delegates want a conservative nominee,” said Randy Evans, a senior campaign adviser. “This may not get settled until July or August heading into Tampa.”
Perhaps, but Gingrich is deluding himself if he thinks he will be the compromise candidate everyone can settle on. As he has routinely taken on the role of the party’s elder statesman in the debates, The Stiletto can only hope that Gingrich is thinking of using whatever clout he has to bring the party together by brokering a deal that results in a Romney-Santorum ticket. Both men will have proved they have a national constituency, the combination will be ideologically and geographically balanced and the divisiveness of the campaign will be forgotten as Republicans flock to the polls with renewed enthusiasm to defeat Obama.
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