Why is it always someone else’s fault when their candidate doesn’t win? The idea between a primary is for all the candidates to showcase who they are and may the best man (or woman) win. Honestly, after the whole porn fiasco (part of the vetting) it’s obvious Santorum would go down in the polls. It’s not that it’s not an important issue, it’s that he took his eye off the ball (it’s the economy stupid). You simply can’t legislate morality no matter how much you try. He lost sight of what’s important to the majority of Americans RIGHT NOW. His morals are in the right place but he simply doesn’t have the experience necessary to be president. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, he just might want to start with something smaller, like governor of PA. That would give him executive experience and the opportunity to learn to deal with the press in a smaller venue.
Cindie
The obscenity issue is Rick’s opponents taking a policy position off his web site that’s been there for months and trying to make it sound like it’s something he’s bringing up now. Are you saying you want every candidate to remove anything related to cultural/moral issues off of their platforms and web sites, period? That’s what it would require to stop their opponents from trumping up stories that they’re “focusing” on these issues.
If the moderates in the GOP wanted to wage all out internal war to remove cultural/moral issues from the platform, the effort would look exactly like this primary. They’re handing us a moderate and trying to convince the voters that talking about cultural/moral issues makes our candidates unelectable.
How would they react if someone tried to do the same with a Republican candidate who was saying the U.S. needed to go communist, because talking about capitalism right now would make our candidate unelectable? Obama is more ready to make the argument against capitalism than anything else. He’s been doing it for most of his presidency.
Cultural/moral “wedge” issues could arguably be our best shot at winning the presidency. With economic issues, you’re also taking the risk that the economy is doing better or gas prices are lower by November, in which case Obama has all the credibility in the world to claim that his economic policies are the right ones. But what’s morally right doesn’t change.
If you put 4 exact clones of Rick Santorum into the primary up against one Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney was winning every primary with 21% of the vote vs. 20%, 20%, 20% and 19%, would you still say that it wasn't the fault of the Rick Santorum clones? We've already lived this story once with Ross Perot and Bush Sr. and apparently learned nothing. Splitting the vote among similar candidates hands the minority candidate a win. It represents a flaw in our voting system (being able to score candidates on the ballot on a scale of 1 to 5 would solve the problem), but we have to work with the system we have and build our strategy around it. The candidates who are similar need to work together, not compete against each other if they want a candidate who is closer to them on the issues to win.