Santorum exits after a campaign that beat all expectations

Everyone who had Rick Santorum making it until the Tuesday after Easter, not giving up his presidential campaign until he’d contested 26 of the 56 primaries/caucuses and won the second-most delegates in them, take your bow.

Or maybe we should just leave the applause to Santorum himself.

A campaign that started with little money and few believers, on the ashes of a blowout of a failed Senate re-election six years ago, pushed Mitt Romney to the brink in such key states as Michigan and Ohio and defeated Newt Gingrich across much of the Deep South. Santorum won Iowa by a hair — though he wasn’t recognized as the winner for a couple of weeks — then used a trifecta of upsets over Romney to become the last serious challenger to him.

He didn’t always help himself by talking at length about social issues in an election year bound to be dominated by dollars and cents, but that’s who he is — and Santorum’s authenticity is part of what drew more than 3 million GOP primary voters to him. Like Mike Huckabee in 2008, he proved there’s still a sizable contingent of evangelicals who are willing to buck the establishment and vote their consciences in a Republican primary. And he may have gone farther than Huckabee in demonstrating an economic platform that conservatives could embrace.

What ultimately did him in were two things. First, he had a way of talking about social issues that, in my view, was unnecessarily abrasive. As I considered whether to vote for him, I couldn’t escape the belief that he could have made the same points in a more appealing way — and that the way he made those points endangered his ability to win the presidency and act on them.

Second, he couldn’t shake his association with the 2000-2006 era of the GOP-led Congress, when Republicans lost their fiscal bearings and turned spendthrift — losing the gains made after 1994 and setting the stage for even bigger blowouts once the Democrats took control in 2007. His votes for big-government Republican policies, and his wince-inducing defense of them as unavoidable in the “team sport” of politics, couldn’t be reconciled with the necessity of paring back government.

It will be crucial now for Romney to woo the voters who chose Santorum instead of him during the past three months. There is some debate about whether they would actually sit out the election, possibly handing it to President Obama. Romney can’t take them for granted, and can’t take that chance. He would do well to be very visible in reaching out to Santorum and to do whatever it takes to get Santorum to bury the hatchet — it was a very ugly primary at times — and work to elect him.

– By Kyle Wingfield

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