Daily Santorum 5/10/11
It's Rick Santorum's birthday today, and as a present, the rather attractive actress Keira Knightley now knows all about him! Well, that might not be a good thing.
In today's very not award-winning daily roundup of Rick Santorum news we turn, as we often do, to The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart had some fun at the Republican debate's expense last night. He said the field was so unknown that you should probably Google them, though Santorum would prefer you not. "If you didn't get that joke, go Google Santorum right now. I'll wait. ... Yeah. Can you ^&*$@# believe that?"
Stewart's guest, waiting in the green room, decided to Google Our Rick herself. "I just Googled Santorum," Knightley said to open the segment. "I feel like my innocence has been taken away. It was the use of the word frothy that I think was really quite," and she trails off as she scrunches her face into an adorable expression of British disgust. (h/t faithful DS reader Elliott Dube for the Knightley clip)
But the news wasn't all bad for Rick as he turns the big 5-3. Catholic Online declared him the winner of the South Carolina debate and said he "keeps getting better and better." Slate's David Weigel, who covers the Right with a kind of Jane Goodall fascination and intensity, attended the same Aiken, S.C. campaign appearance I did and came away with the sense that Santorum could have a broad appeal:
Santorum's pitch is reductive. It assumes that his audience is angry that Republican candidates aren't passionate enough about explaining and defending what the party stands for. This makes a kind of sense. A Republican voter can watch Fox News, listen to talk radio, read the Drudge Report, and then listen to the people claiming to lead the party who don't seem nearly as worried as they do. Not so with Santorum.
Santorum also appeared on the Glenn Beck show on Fox News yesterday, though we couldn't track down a video, the Inquirer reported he made a similar pitch to his stumping in S.C.
The Schedule: Still laying low this week.