Assuming Santorum isn’t the VP candidate, he’ll be watching this person very closely because they will be a rival.
But as Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin have shown, there are limits to what even the modern GOP considers an acceptable Presidential candidate.
The fact that 2003 wasn’t the last we saw of him is one of the most depressing political developments of my lifetime.
He’s the Peter Popoff of Politics.
Santorum is finished politically. He only lasted this long because every other non-Romney flamed out so spectacularly. He never had a chance this year and he’ll be long forgotten in 2016.
I’m only slightly kidding about the VP selection. There were a number of serious Republicans - Tim Pawlenty and Mitch Daniels primarily - who dropped out early presumably after reaching the rational conclusion that the economy would improve by Nov. 2012 and the sitting president couldn’t be touched. Their second rational decision was understanding that those tainted with loser stink do not get a second chance in today’s political world. They have been spared the slime of the fiasco that followed. Running a good campaign for vice president would get them vetted in advance for 2016 and create markers all over the country, which count tremendously in the real world of on-the-ground politics. Nor would they be blamed for a loss, given that they’d be running with the least liked major party nominee in a generation.
Romney will pick someone serious, someone whom the press will anoint as worthy of the presidency. He absolutely has to, after Palin. No matter how much the right-wing of the party would thrill to a barnburner, the media will crush anyone without gravitas. The same objections that kept names like Crist and Rubio from entering the race this year will keep them from from becoming the nominee. The moderate cool heads have their best chance.
I am pointedly not getting into the game of predicting a name. That’s a sucker’s bet. I’m just saying that the campaign so far has hemmed Romney to a much greater extent than usual. He may stick his foot into his mouth regularly but he saw the path to the nomination and never got far from it. He’ll stay on that path until November. With the odds only slightly in Obama’s favor - right where they have been for a year - he’ll make a perfectly safe, logical, and acceptable choice.
And perfectly safe, logical, and acceptable choices are what the Republican Establishment love. Now and in 2016.
Now it’s the primaries on April 24, then primaries on May 8, primaries on June 5, the Republican National Convention in August and the Democratic National Convention in September and then finally Election Day on November 6. Will it be settled at the end of April? Now it’s Romney, Gingrich and Paul. Paul won’t be getting out. Romney should get out but won’t. That leaves Gingrich. What’s Gingrich’s move? I heard on CNN today that Gingrich might be angling for a brokered convention. April is the cruellest month. It looks like it will be a cruel summer also.
Invite Santorum’s supporters to his website:
As I’ve said before, there is 0% chance of a brokered convention. Not a small chance. Zero chance.
It’s over. It’s been over for a long time, assuming that it was ever not over. There will be as many brokered conventions in our future as there are invisible pink unicorns in my garage.
Romney should get out? He’s won, why should he get out?
I mean, sure, they should all get out and just admit that the Obama and the Democrats are better for the country, but do you expect them to tell the TRUTH?
Santorum was simply lucky enough to have peaked at the right time, just before the Iowa Caucus, and did a decent job of building up momentum from his performance there.
If the caucus had been held two weeks prior, it likely would have been Gingrich giving Romney a run for his money. If the caucus had been held two weeks later, it would have been someone else.
Santorum was just the latest in a long string of non-Romneys who managed to get a fair amount of traction with the GOP base, but never had a real chance of clinching the nomination.
Sarah Palin – Not a contender
Dick Cheney – Not a contender
Jack Kemp – Not a contender
Dan Quayle – Not a contender
George HW Bush – Served as VP, nominated in next election
Bob Dole – Contender, won nomination 20 years later
Spiro Agnew – Not a contender
William E. Miller – Not a contender
Henry Cabot Lodge – Sort of a contender next time around
Richard Nixon – Unfortunately for the US…
I don’t think there’s much special about being a VP nominee for the Republicans.
I disagree. Potential candidates like Jeb Bush, Christie, Daniels, Jindal, Pawlenty, Rubio, Ryan, and Thune will all have to face the Rick Perry question: they make look good on paper, but what if it turns out they can’t win the votes? Santorum’s the only one who won’t have to worry about that.
This was Santorum’s vetting and he succeeded. In thirty-one primaries and caucuses, he won eleven (and came in second in thirteen others). Santorum has shown he’s got broad national support. When he announces next time, the donors will line up and he’ll start with a major lead on any competitors. He’ll be the “safe, logical, and acceptable” choice.
Just gotta say, Exapno Mapcase’s track record is depressingly accurate.
Well yeah, now it’s zero percent.
All the hopes and dreams of news junkies everywhere, ruined. :
:
Prediction
Evaluating the this thread, I don’t think Santorum will ever be nominated for the Presidency as his appeal is too narrow and he shows no signs of wanting to broaden it. I would bet even money (in quatloos) that he will never gather as many delegates as he did this time around (currently estimated by AP at 285 and subject to change). This is a compound bet about both Santorum and future Republican primary rules.
Five?
Cook is right that a second term is partially a referendum on the President’s first term. But I think he’s ignoring some other important factors.
One if the perceived stereotypes of what each party is good at. The Republicans are perceived as being good on national defense and security issues. The Democrats are perceived as being good with social programs.
Bush got a bump for the first stereotype in 2004. Even though he held responsible for some of the military and security issues the country was facing in 2004, the fact that these issues existed led some people to prefer a Republican to a Democrat in the Oval Office.
The same effect will mitigate Obama’s re-election problem with the economy. Yes, some people may feel that Obama is responsible for some of the economic problems the country is facing in 2012. But during a period of perceived economic uncertainty, some people will prefer a Democrat to a Republican in the Oval Office.
This is handicapping Romney on economic issues. If he claims the economy is bad in order to put some blame on Obama, he’s also pushing people towards the Democrats. He’s got the tough sell of trying to convince people who are out of work that the key to fixing their problems is cutting their unemployment benefits.
(And, as I’ve pointed out in past threads, the normal Republican advantage in national defense has been flipped in this election. Obama had done a credible job in defense and security. Romney is a former governor with no particular foreign experience he can point to. Plus people still remember the troubled foreign policy of the Bush years. So Romney doesn’t have the automatic lead on defense and security issues that Republican candidates usually have. He has to convince people he’d be as good as Obama rather than the reverse.)
So, even though he led us into a blazing clusterfuck in a fever swamp, the voters figured that the best guy to get us out was the one who led us in?
The horror, the horror.
It’s meaningful when the person selected is seen as a realistic candidate for president. When that happens the odds of a future nomination are near 100%. It doesn’t mean that any and every selection is realistic.
I wish I could claim it’s because I have some sort of deep, special perception and understanding. Just the reverse. It all seemed so blindingly obvious to me that I couldn’t understand how, besides wishful thinking, people could make other forecasts.
Yep, wishful thinking.
It’s annoying that you quoted so much of my post and left out: “With the odds only slightly in Obama’s favor - right where they have been for a year -” How is that not exactly what Intrade is saying? And Charlie Cook? And me for the past year?
Your garage, maybe. Not mine. I double-checked.
Coming in second often meant getting 30-odd percent of the vote, and sometimes less than that. Santorum got more than 50 percent in any contest all of two times, and one of those was the meaningless Missouri primary. Romney did it eight times, and it’s a big reason he stayed ahead. The bottom line is this: due to luck, timing, and persistence, Santorum beat out Newt Gingrich to become the rightwing protest candidate, which meant he was able to finish a very distant second to a candidate most Republican primary voters were not excited about. That’s not a strong base of support for 2016. It’s the same thing that Mike Huckabee was in 2008: he appealed to evangelicals, but on most other issues, he was far off the prevailing GOP orthodoxy - he’s a big government conservative.
He made the race last a bit longer than people expected, but he’s not “vetted” and he didn’t build up a big national base. He can and did appeal to a limited number of voters, but four years from now, it won’t be that hard for a similar candidate to appeal to the same group of voters and take them away. If that candidate can do a better job of appealing to other groups and not constantly bring up culture war issues, that person has a very good chance of being nominated.
Please don’t use the words safe and logical in connection with Rick Santorum. It’s giving me a migraine.
Why is there no chance of a brokered convention?
I don’t think that Romney will have Gingrich as his running mate, though it would be an interesting move. Romney won’t admit it, but now all focus is on Gingrich. I will be watching closely to see how the rest of April plays out.
There’s no chance of a brokered convention because Romney is going to get the 1,144 delegates he needs to lock up the nomination. He’ll get there in early June. I agree the odds of that happening were always extremely low, and it’s been clear for at least a month that it wasn’t going to happen at all. For a little while the Gingrich campaign was kidding itself about getting enough delegates combined with Santorum to deny Romney the nomination, but that wasn’t happening either. It doesn’t matter what Gingrich does now. He has no chance of winning or of stopping Romney.
So will Gingrich drop out at the end of April?