Daily Santorum: It ain't over
A little over a month ago -- yes, just a month ago -- the pre-mortems were rolling in for the floundering Rick Santorum campaign in Florida. "Tired and broke, Santorum heads home to do taxes," went one AP story.
It's a similar feeling today, but with a more certain sense that if Romney rolls to a victory in Ohio after prevailing in Michigan -- after Santorum led the polls in both states -- that it really will be over. (Santorum had lost leads in Ohio and Tennessee in most of the latest polling, though he was a close second to Romney in both. Rasmussen had him up by 4 in Tenn., though.)
The Santorum camp knows that too, so is sending the message that he's really in it for the long haul -- he has events scheduled through next Monday in Biloxi and is buying air time in Alabama on Wednesday. The GOP choice for president "may end up at the convention," he insisted over the weekend.
They're also struggling (after failing) to keep the candidate on message: after all the family-values/Satan stuff crumbled the Michigan cookie, the campaign committed to refocusing on his blue-collar economic message, only to see his comments about college and Obama's snobbery get all the headlines.
As usual, the Onion summed up the truth best with satire:
WASHINGTON—As Rick Santorum has emerged to become Mitt Romney's leading opponent for the Republican presidential nomination, the American electorate said Monday it had slowly begun to realize that the former Pennsylvania senator sincerely believes every deranged word that exits his mouth.
Uneasy voters told reporters it was becoming more and more evident that comments from Santorum defending sodomy laws as acceptable restrictions on "wants and passions" and characterizing pregnancy occurring through rape as a "gift" from God were not politically calculated but were, in fact, spoken out of sincere, startling conviction.
"I honestly thought he was just playing up to the far-right voters, because that's what Republicans are supposed to do in the primaries," said Grand Rapids, MI resident Dan Banks, who explained he had dismissed as manipulative campaign rhetoric Santorum's assertion that President Obama would send Christians to the guillotine. "But now it's dawning on me that this guy means it, all of it. Every single thing he says is an accurate depiction of how he sees the world."
Even his wife Karen is worried about the messaging, and sat down with Politico to give her first print interview of the campaign:
The day after the Michigan primary, Karen scolded her husband for answering too many questions on the stump about birth control, rather than focusing on how, at that point, he had picked up as many delegates as Mitt Romney.
“My advice to him was stop answering the question,” she said. “Tell ‘em, ‘I’m not going to answer this question, let me tell you what I know about national security. I know a lot about national security.’”
Schedule below:
Monday, March 5:
9:30am ET: Senator Santorum will hold a rally in Dayton, OH.
Location:
Dayton Christian School
9391 Washington Church Raod
Miamisburg, OH
2:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will hold a rally in Columbus, OH.
Location:
American Legion
393 East College Avenue
Westerville, OH
6:30pm ET: Senator Santorum will hold a rally in Cuyahoga Falls, OH.
Location:
The Pavilion at Falls River Square
2085 Front Street
Cuyahoga Falls, OH
Tuesday, March 6:
8:00pm ET: Senator Santorum will hold an election night party in Steubenville, OH.
Location
420 North Fourth Street
Steubenville, OH