Whether we're Gingrich or Santorum supporters, seeing Romney's numbers drop is very good news.
Much of Romney's support has been coming from people who (wrongly) thought his win was inevitable or people who (wrongly) thought he's the best guy to defeat Romney. South Carolina poked the hot air out of that balloon.
I want to see Romney in third place, not just second.
12 posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 2:31:35 PM by PAConservative1: “I doubt Santorum is going anywhere anytime soon. The GOP Establishment is pumping him up so he can continue to siphon votes away from Newt.”
(Also pinged to County Agent Hank Kimball and ez with similar views)
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Santorum was a senator and developed personal relationships with colleagues, which is what people have to do to succeed in the Senate, but many of his followers are regarded as the “great unwashed” by Republican elites. There's no love lost there.
If you need a recent example, don't forget what happened when the Republican National Committee sent the “Young Eagles” to bondage sex clubs as paybacks for donations. Maybe secular conservatives laughed that off as stupidity. We didn't, and our fury over that was a big part of why the Republican National Committee chairman lost his job.
Outside the South, evangelicals have a long history of bad relationships with the Republican Party establishment, and the same is even more true of ethnic blue-collar Roman Catholics, despite the role of both groups as a key part of the “Reagan Democrat” movement into the Republican Party because of opposition to abortion, anti-Communism, and related issues. The only reason the bad relationships don't exist in the South is that the Republican Party for all practical purposes didn't exist in the South before the conservative migration out of the Democratic Party into the Republican Party, and conservative evangelicals have been a part of that migration almost from the beginning.
Rick Santorum was part of that generation, and while I can't speak for what he experienced in Pennsylvania, I know from long and bitter personal experience what happened in other midwestern industrial states when lots of newcomers started trying to join the Republican Party.
Lots of the old Republican leaders are long since dead or retired, and I wouldn't name names anyway, but I had a front-row seat in the audience during those fights and even a “bit player” role in person as a state convention delegate during the struggle for control of the Michigan Republican Party in the 1980s. I was viewed as a “safe” evangelical because of my family ties and prior personal history in Republican activism, but things would have gotten bad if I'd ever sought a leadership position where my vote would have counted.
Much of the venom being directed today by the Republican leadership toward the Tea Partiers was directed toward us a generation ago, and let's just say bad memories die hard. It hurt me personally to see party leaders I respected quoted in the newspapers telling reporters that so-and-so “needs to remember they're running for political office, not for Pope,” and it angered me when I saw blasphemous comments deliberately being said to Christian conservative leaders in their face with the intent of provoking an angry response that would get them branded as extremists for their outbursts.
Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics have our problems and I'm definitely not trying to minimize them. Our biggest problem is a failure to understand that holding out for the best candidate sometimes means we end up getting the worst possible candidate by making the perfect into the enemy of the good. Let's just say overly cozy relationships with the Republican leadership are not something that flows out of a focus on trying to demand perfection in candidates.
TYPO ALERT: I meant to say this: “Much of Romney’s support has been coming from people who (wrongly) thought his win was inevitable or people who (wrongly) thought he’s the best guy to defeat Obama. South Carolina poked the hot air out of that balloon.”