Oklahoma Republicans voted for Rick Santorum. Tennessee, the home of moderate Republican Howard Baker and his even-more-moderate wife, Nancy Kassebaum Baker, also put itself solidly in the Santorum camp. More significantly, the former senator who couldn’t win re-election in his own state, came within a single percentage point of taking Ohio on this Super Tuesday.
Mitt Romney emerged with the most states and the most new delegates pledged to him. He also emerged facing a much-strengthened Santorum and a still-cocky Newt Gingrich, who piled up a commanding win in his home state of Georgia and promises to be a factor in the rest of the South.
To the certain delight of the networks’ business staffs, the battle for the Republican nomination will go on and on and on, perhaps until the convention settles the matter in late August.
To a neutral bystander, the decisions Republican voters are making grows ever more puzzling. Taken as a whole, a majority of those casting votes in the elections or caucuses favor someone other than Mitt Romney, who is the party’s leading candidate. Of those winning support, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul don’t have a snowball’s chance in a Kansas August of winning in November. But they keep winning votes anyway. Their supporters apparently disagree with the proposition that one must have political power in order to achieve political goals.
A similar charge can be leveled against Santorum’s legions. Mr. Santorum has turned off women, the largest voting group in the country. His stands against contraception, public schools and women in the workplace put him outside the boundaries of modern America’s thoughts and values. To be sure, he is now backing away from those ideological positions as fast as he can without calling himself a liar, but those flip-flops won’t sell come November.
Because he is who he is, Mr. Santorum is not electable. And that makes three of the four highly unlikely to move into the White House next January.
If this is the case, then why did only 37 percent of the Republican voters in Ohio vote for Mitt Romney, who seems destined to be their nominee? Why did a very solid majority vote for someone else?
Super Tuesday was, in short, another anyone-but-Romney day. The only states he won were already in the bag. And even some of those results raised troubling questions: Why, for example, would the Texas libertarian, Ron Paul, win 25 percent of the votes in Vermont, a state which is fast moving into state-financed medical care?
POLITICAL CURRENTS this year rush like white water rapids. With eight months still to go, predictions are a fool’s game. Today’s frontrunner can hit a rock tomorrow, shatter and sink.
What can safely be said, however, is that the Republican Party is pushing itself farther and farther to the right, primary by primary. Inside the GOP’s thickening walls, moderates and independents are made to feel less and less respected, less and less welcome.
The wisdom of these choices will be tested in the fall.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
