"Hi, I'm Rick. I'll be your nemesis for the evening."
Those of us who appreciate a good dose of hilarity in politics should be in for a real treat, in the coming weeks, as the Romney team tries to ponder through how exactly they're going to attack Rick Santorum. I am quite sure that up until last Tuesday, the Romney camp did not spend a single minute of their lives thinking about Rick Santorum, but now he's the next candidate for Not-Mitt, and that means Mitt has to bring around another few dump trucks of money dedicated towards knocking the wind out of this latest Not-Mitt's sails.
What are they going with? Earmarks, apparently. It looks like the Romney campaign has decided that conservatives will be really, really turned off by all those naughty earmarks Rick Santorum got for his state when he was in the House. From the Romney press release:
"While Newt Gingrich may have opened the door to the abuse of earmark spending, Rick Santorum walked right through it. He renounced his belief that deficits are bad and voted to raise the debt ceiling by trillions – all while supporting billions in pork-barrel spending in Pennsylvania and across the country. That is not a record that fiscal conservatives will embrace once they know the facts.”
Yeah, um ... good luck with that. I really don't see the tea party or anyone else getting so worked up about earmarks that they haul off and decide to vote Mitt Romney. There are real issues among Republicans and there are fake ones, and "earmarks" is about as fake an issue as you could come up with. Everybody condemns them; nobody really cares.
The problem for Romney is that he's boxed in pretty well here. The obvious way to attack Rick Santorum is to point out that he is, in fact, batshit crazy, and an unapologetic right-wing theocrat, and about as electable as botulism. But those are the exact points that are causing some large percentage of the Republican base to vote for him right now. They want a theocrat. They want someone who will ignore the Constitution and just do what they think Jesus probably would want, as interpreted by some batshit crazy right-wing religious zealot. That's the appeal!
Mitt can't attack Santorum's radical stances, then, because it wouldn't work, and because Mitt has trouble enough already convincing the base that he is a "true" conservative. Mitt can't really attack on religious grounds at all, in fact. So what's left? Earmarks? Pfft.
Watching Romney try and out-rightwing Rick Sharia Santorum will be interesting, but I'm genuinely intrigued by the question of how Romney can effectively attack Santorum the way he has done to every other Not-Mitt. The Gingrich attacks wrote themselves. Bachmann, Cain and the others did themselves in with little help. But the Romney campaign (oh, and SuperPAC, which we all know is totally not coordinated with anybody) has only two modes, the first being to keep their heads down and wait for other candidates to self-destruct around them, and the second being to carpet bomb those other candidates with negative advertising. They suck at convincing people Romney is a true conservative, because he's not. They suck at making Mitt likable, because he just plain isn't. And they can't afford to presume Santorum is just going to self-immolate—not with the craziness of the current Republican base, who like extremism.
That leaves them with only the attack option. Can't wait to see what they make of it.