Last night Rick Santorum became the latest Republican to fall in the pursuit of the Republican Maltese Falcon, the 2012 front runner status. He bet his chips on a long shot, going for a win in Mitt Romney’s boyhood (can we stop calling it his home? He hasn’t lived there in decades) state.
He gave it everything he had, just like Casper Gutman, he thought he had the prize in his hands, but as the dawn is breaking, the pursuit of the Black Bird has once again turned to dust in his hands.
Lil’ Ricky basically wrote off Arizona in his attempt to win Michigan. Sure, the folks in the Grand Canyon State were holding a winner-take-all primary in violation of their parties rules, but leaving the playing field never looks good.
The reason that the front-runner status has become like the Falcon is that to even come close to achieving it one has to do everything and anything to beat the money and organization that is the Mitt Romney campaign.
It is not that the former governor of Massachusetts is a great politician, far from it. He is neither hot nor cold and because of this many Republicans would cast him from their mouth, but he does have a ton of money and is willing to spend it copiously in his own quest for the Falcon.
That leaves his opponents in the position of relying on wilder and wilder statements designed to gin-up support from a base that starts at bat-shit and wants to progress quickly to barking insane.
There are votes to be had along this path, but it is a path along a sheer cliff face and the line between acceptable insanity and a step into the abyss is one that not a single Not-Mitt has been able to negotiate. Perry fell because he didn’t realize that he was on a cliff. Cain fell because women didn’t like his philandering and sexual harassment, but also because 9-9-9 might have been just too dumb to be believed.
Newt Gingrich fell because while the Not-Mitt voters like that he went after Romney, the way that he came at him from the Left was not acceptable in their orthodoxy.
And now Rick Santorum has fallen because he has shown that he is a total and utter religious zealot, who thinks going to college makes one a snob and who is willing to say out loud that a speech by a beloved and assassinated President (well he was a Senator at the time) made him want to puke.
But like Cain before him, it was the fact of losing women voters that snatched the Falcon from his grasping fingers. It should be a huge, red flashing sign for the Republicans, but they are probably going to miss it (probably too subtle for them).
Women are, correctly, aghast at the laws that Republicans have put in place and are incensed that men are once again lining up to tell them that they should not have access to birth-control based on some religious belief. They are just not going to vote for a candidate who wants to put them back in the kitchen, bare of feet and heavy with child.
This morning there will be talk of how Ohio will be Santorum’s come back state, but the reality is that he has probably taken a fatal wound political wound. The rest will just be him bleeding out.
He doesn’t really have the money or organization to go past Super Tuesday. It just is not in the cards. Even while campaigning in Michigan he was not doing the organizing (basic collection of e-mail addresses and phone numbers) that are needed to sustain a nation wide campaign. There is only one reason why you would not do that, namely that you don’t have the money for staff to do it or correlate it and turn it into money and volunteers.
So we’ll have at least one and maybe as many as four more weeks as the Not-Mitt’s all fall to the ground exhausted and unable to make up in earned media (getting the press to report on you) that is their only hope of countering the giant Mitt money machine.
It is a little sad, from a Democratic perspective (which I definitely have). The longer the Goat Rodeo went on the better things are for us. Sure Mitt has the ear, and more importantly the pocketbooks of the GOP money men, but having him spend 60 million plus in only two months of voting is good news for the general election.
But since his campaign has figured out that debates cost him more votes (in both the primaries and general) than they ever earn him and are not going to let him participate in anymore things were going to calm down anyway.
The Republicans will have the rest of their primaries, and the field will probably stay the way it is now, but the writing is pretty much on the wall. The Republicans are going to go to Tampa (in the middle of the freaking summer!) and they are going to nominate a gut-shot Mitt for their candidate.
They might, like John McCain, the last gut shot Republican, put some fire-brand in the VP slot. Unfortunately for them if they do that, they will once again have a upside-down ticket where the more attractive candidate for their base is not on the top. It is likely that it will not cause quite as much disruption as Caribou Barbie did, but it is not the way to win an election.
Still it is always enjoyable to see the scheming, backstabbing and ultimate failures of those who chase the Maltese Falcon. We have to play our part though. Sam Spade did not come out on top by just standing around, he had to struggle for his own goals, and we’ll have to be sure to fight hard to re-elect President Obama.
But in the end that will make it all the sweeter, the bad folks get to take the elevator to the ground floor with the cops, while we walk down, with the Falcon in our hands.
The floor is yours.