Political Round-Up

Some random throughts on the state of the 2012 campaign:

First, it looks like I really do have super-powers.  Whoever I vote for in a primary goes on to lose the nomination, even if it's a "sure thing."  Why I couldn't have gotten super-speed or invisibility, I don't know.  After voting for Romney because he was "better than Gingrich," I've managed to destroy both of their campaigns.  You're welcome, Rick Santorum.

Speaking of Romney, if he does happen to wind up the GOP nominee, he'll still be fine in the general election.  No, he doesn't excite the conservative base.  But when there is no choice besides Mitt and Obama, with potentially 2+ Supreme Court nominations in the next 4 years, the base will hold their nose and vote for him..

But Santorum, he's interesting.  I worried back in the SC primary that, even though I like him a great deal, his position on social issues makes him too easy for the left to caricature.  But now I'm having second thoughts.  First of all, if we conservatives honestly believe that having conservative views on social issues is a guaranteed loser, what does that say about us?  Secondly, for all of the talk about Romney (or McCain 4 years ago) being able to appeal to blue-state folks, that math only works in the primaries.  The RINO is always the moderate-to-liberal undecided voter's favorite Republican... until they get a chance to vote for the Democrat.  I'm beginning to wonder if Santorum might not actually be more electable with genuine "swing" voters that people think.  Put another way, I wonder if there might be more votes to be picked up on the margins of the issues like religious liberty than there really are from moderating those positions.  I don't know.

Along those same lines, I know Santorum is going to be savaged as a religious weirdo.  But really, the Mormon guy wasn't?  Indeed, let's take three different religious profiles and arrange them in order from most mainstream to most weird: Mormon, Catholic, Jeremiah Wright-style liberation theology.  Yeah, I know.  The problem is that Santorum actually seems to believe what his religion teaches.  Again, this is somehow supposed to be a negative, right?

Finally, I have been exasperated of late on the internet.  Darn facebook!  This is at least tangentially related to the Santorum thing, by the way.  Is it just me, or is there some rule that only conservatives and Christians can be lampooned as dumb hicks?  Maybe I've been unlucky lately, but several conversation threads I've been involved in have involved the assumption that conservatives, Tea Partiers, and religious people are just stupid.  I don't get it; I know that southerners, fundamentalists, red-states, etc. have to carry around the idea that we are the people of Wal-Mart.  But why is it that the equally-large number of uneducated people in inner cities don't get hung around the neck of the left as a similar albatross?  I never seem to see conservatives or Christians putting up posts online with the theme "point and laugh at those stupid liberals, boy are they dumb!"  But it's a daily occurence in reverse.  Perhaps this is because so many of my friends online are former students, many of whom are now college students (often at pretty elite schools). 

I posted the following article online, and nobody commented on it.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123492175917805451.html

I think it describes and analyzes that issue pretty well.  Anybody in this forum interested in it?