Visual source: Newseum
NY Times:
And when Mr. Santorum sought to turn the discussion back to Mr. Romney’s health care overhaul in Massachusetts, saying it was the precursor to “Obamacare,” Mr. Romney said Mr. Santorum’s support of Mr. Specter had helped make the health care plan law. (Mr. Specter, who switched parties to become a Democrat before the 2010 election, had voted for the national health care plan.)
“So don’t look at me,” Mr. Romney snapped. “Take a look in the mirror.”
But Mr. Santorum was prepared with a defense of his support for Mr. Specter, noting that Mr. Specter had helped shepherd the nominations of conservative Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito Jr.
WaPo:
Rick Santorum’s front-runner status in the GOP presidential race is predicated on the idea that he is the consistent conservative alternative in the field.
And that image had some serious holes poked in it at Wednesday’s debate in Arizona.
Jonathan Bernstein:
Since it’s the last one of these: The real losers here are Republican voters. Not just because none of these folks is very good at debating, although that’s certainly true. Santorum? He can’t seem to avoid getting bogged down in Senate-speak and unnecessary defenses of stuff that no one cares about. And he seems to have missed the day in candidacy school where they teach you to ignore the question and shift to something you would rather be talking about. The best example? At one point, he was on a roll attacking Romneycare fairly effectively, when Romney (talking over him) just said one thing: “Arlen Specter.” You see, he had previously attacked Romney for supporting Specter against…oh, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Santorum actually fell for it and switched from an effective attack into a long, nuanced defense of his actions in a long-ago Senate primary in Pennsylvania. All of which, first of all, didn’t do anything positive for him, but, more importantly, was off the main thing that he should have been pounding: Romneycare = Obamacare. A total Jedi Mind Trick moment. And it’s not just Santorum; at one point all three of the candidates who have served in Congress wound up giving extended defenses of earmarks. Perfectly reasonable ones, by the way — but surely clear losers in a GOP nomination battle.
Charles Blow:
Rick Santorum exposed his legislative underbelly during Wednesday’s debate and maybe revealed a weak spot.
When defending his support for No Child Left Behind during the Bush years, Santorum said:
I have to admit, I voted for that, it was against the principles I believed in, but you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake. You know, politics is a team sport, folks, and sometimes you’ve got to rally together and do something, and in this case I thought testing and finding out how bad the problem was wasn’t a bad idea.
Team sport? Rallying together? These are not things Republicans like to hear.
EJ Dionne:
They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist. His especially creative opponents see him as having a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview,” while the less adventurous say that he’s an elitist who spent too much time in Cambridge, Hyde Park and other excessively academic precincts.
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies. A significant part of his opposition still cannot accept that Obama is a rather moderate politician quite conventional in his tastes and his interests. And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
EJ,
I know how you feel.