Luck? or is there really no such thing…Santorum Lost Michigan…Karma?
Some would say that there is no such thing as luck, maybe just good or bad karma. In the case of Michigan we agree with Charles Krauthammer that father Santorum certainly had a chance, but kismet as it be he could not help but blow it. The gravitational heart strings that pull a man to the right are just to strong. Santorum quite frankly, got to full of himself thinking that people were actually buying into his right wing brand of social rhetoric, that was not the case. It was just another go round of Bachman, Cain, Perry, Newt and now father Santorum’s turn to rise and fall. It is indicative of Romney not being the idea candidate, but he is by far the stronger and better candidate. Time will ultimately tell.
Romney’s luck
It’s been a wild ride, but the story line of the Republican race remains remarkably simple and constant: It’s Mitt Romney and the perishable pretenders.
Five have come and gone, if you count the Donald’s aborted proto-candidacy. And now the sixth and most plausibly presidential challenger just had his moment — and blew it in Michigan.
It’s no use arguing that Rick Santorum won nearly as many Michigan delegates as Romney. He lost the state. Wasn’t Santorum claiming a great victory just three weeks ago when he shockingly swept Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado — without a single convention delegate being selected?
He was right. It was a great victory. Delegate counts were beside the point. These three wins instantly propelled him to the front of the field nationally and to a double-digit lead in Romney’s Michigan back yard.
Then Santorum went ahead and lost it. Rather than sticking to his considerable working-class, Reagan-Democrat appeal, he kept wandering back to his austere social conservatism. Rather than placing himself in “Grandpa’s hands,” his moving tribute to his immigrant coal miner grandfather as representative of the America that Santorum pledges to restore, he insisted on launching himself into culture-war thickets: Kennedy, college and contraception.
He averred that John Kennedy’s 1960 Houston speech on separation of church and state makes him “throw up.” Whatever the virtues of Santorum’s expansive view of the role of religion, the insulting tone toward Kennedy, who, living at a time of frank anti-Catholic bigotry, understandably offered a more attenuated view of religion in the public square, was jarring, intemperate and utterly unnecessary. Continue reading
