It seems silly that Rick "Show Me The Fetus" Santorum placed so strongly in Iowa. A mediocre candidate who was a mediocre Senator should have performed in mediocrity, but I suppose all this indicates is the level of dislike Mitt Romney has to endure to be the Republican candidate.
Indeed, part of my thinking is that Rick pleaded for the pity vote when he made a kerfuffle over the Google meme. After all, Santorum has been starving for campaign contributions and ran his Iowa office on a shoestring.
The rough vote tallies show Romney and Santorum in a dead heat at 24.5%, with Ron Paul closely stalking both at 21.5%
Paul's totals suggest that there are indeed about 20% of the Republican party who are fucking loons. I suspect that, since the caucuses were open affairs, the balance were Democratic pranksters.
No one else cracked 15%, which basically tells me that people settled on Santorum as the least exposed candidate in the field. They don't want Romney, but they also don't want the tin-plated dictators, the egg-headed serial misogynist, or the crackpot grandmother who's just one divorce from being the crazy cat lady.
How sad is it that Mitt Romney, who by his own admission had lowered expectations for this year's caucus, couldn't even match his percentage from the last caucus in 2008, when he ran against five other Republicans who had national reputations already?
Almost as sad as Rick Perry, who's headed back to Texas to lick his wounds. The guy did the fund-raising, had the splashy entrance and....what was the third thing?
Um, oops?
Oh. Right. Couldn't stand toe-to-toe in a single debate. He's out. He never struck me as the kind of guy who would put in an honest day's work to win the thing and if you can't do that, if you can't organize your life that much, how do you expect to run an administration?
Mickey Mouse-- er, I mean, Bachmann, finished dead last, and didn't come close to cracking double digits. She's toast, altho she doesn't know it yet. I suspect her strategy is to hang in there until South Carolina (indeed, she's already announced she'll skip New Hampshire,) and then pray that Nikki Haley can pull her bacon out of the fire.
Oh. She's already endorsed Romney?
Then Bachmann's even dumber than I thought: she's going to have to go head-to-head with Santorum without the Tea Party organization and with a sudden drain of campaign contributions.
Back to Ron Paul for a moment: he has some ideas that have some attraction to me and every other liberal I've talked to. In a perfect world, he'd be an advisor to Presidents on a limited range of issues and nothing else. That he's within striking distance in 2012 of the party nomination speaks volumes about two things:
1) The fervent desire of right-wing "libertarians" to see this nation burn and
b) The shallow gene pool the Republican party has to draw on.
You'd think after four years of inactivity in the Congress, Republicans would repudiate people who would make them even more marginal, but you'd be wrong.
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