Dear Rick Santorum, You're Welcome

The subtext of the whole “Not Romney” campaign for GOP runner-up is the liberal media elite basically pushing the whole entire thing forward.

Gasp, you say? Look people, we’re just like you. We need to vet the entire pool of candidates, we need to make sure the facts are out there, and on a personal level, we need someone who’s a little less automatronic than the Mittster. We’ve got a cool-headed, hard-to-rile president in the Oval Office now; it’s almost a miracle The Daily Show survived.

So on behalf of the entire media, I’d like to issue a You’re Welcome to the latest Not Romney, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. How else would Iowa voters know that Santorum visited each of the state’s 99 counties if we hadn’t told them? Santorum’s late-breaking rise in the caucus? That corresponds pretty closely with the media really hammering the 99-counties campaign strategy. Granted, we couldn’t deliver a victory for the social conservative (so I’ll stop short of taking full credit), but darned if we weren’t close — close enough to infuse a bunch of cash into his campaign coffer and hopefully buy a new round of regionally appropriate sweater vests.

But the ruse is up. Iowa’s non-binding caucus is a pretty lousy predictor of Republican candidates (Huckabee who?). New Hampshire isn’t much better when it comes to reflecting what the average American wants, and even so, Santorum is a second-tier candidate in the Granite State.

Really, if you want to know who to vote for, all you have to do is look at his face and think about what you want in a chief executive. Do you want the chiseled good looks and strong chin of a quarterback (Romney), the round-headed pontification of a professor who’s into relativism (Gingrich), or one of the other people fellows?

Now, what’s all this noise about Ron Paul? Media machine, to the archives!