Pornography! Gays! Birth Control! Economy doesn't matter! Speak American! Did I mention pornography? (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
How bad a candidate is Mitt Romney? So bad that Rick Santorum is still (nominally) in this thing. I mean, let's take a look at Santorum's last week.
Last Tuesday, he rocked the political world by scoring solid victories in Alabama and Mississippi, giving him a massive boost and dealing Romney a deep wound. Theirs was a party divided, with base Republicans eager to find an alternative to the Etch-a-Sketch.
So how does Santorum celebrate his victories?
First, he spends days railing against pornography.
The Obama administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws. While the Obama Department of Justice seems to favor pornographers over children and families, that will change under a Santorum administration.
Yup, that's Rick Santorum—focused on the issues that
really matter to America!
But that was just the appetizer. Instead of camping out in Illinois, he decided to go down to Puerto Rico ... to tell them damn brown people to start talking American!
He would've gotten better than the 8 percent he got had he simply avoided the island. Instead, he bought into the fiction that Catholic voters like his brand of regressive Catholicism, and couldn't even pretend to pander for votes.
So boy, that was a rough bunch of days. But he decided that he hadn't taken enough body blows—so he went to Illinois and told people that unlike pornography, this campaign wasn't about the economy.
"The issue in this race is not the economy," Santorum said.
There's some debate about the proper context of those words (I'm not as charitable as others are to Santorum), but it doesn't matter. Headlines of you saying "the issue in this race is not the economy", while you blather on and on about pornography and birth control, tell people that your priorities are a bit whack.
So there you have it, Santorum's formula—win hard-fought primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, go off on tangents about pornography, waste valuable campaign time insulting voters in Puerto Rico so you can lose it 83-8, then tell people that the only thing they care about isn't what this race is about.
So who is the worst candidate? Santorum, for being hilariously inept, or Mitt Romney, because he hasn't put the nomination away?
