Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Small Gains in Santorum's Big Night

The media narrative of Republican primaries keeps producing excited headlines of Rick victories that obscure a mundane reality of Mitt inching his way under the radar toward nomination.

This morning’s AP estimate is that, in Mississippi and Alabama combined, Santorum will take away perhaps four or five more delegates than either Romney or Gingrich each, with late news showing Romney picking up nine in American Samoa and 8 out of 12 in Hawaii to go with the 18 he won in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands last weekend.

For the frontrunner to stay almost even with two rivals in hard-core Southern states looks like bigger news than trumpeting Santorum narrow W’s in those conservative redoubts to pump up headlines and fill in cable news’ dead hours.

Yet here is Santorum whining on, of all places, Fox News that Rupert Murdoch’s minions are ”shilling” for his rival:

“I can tell you, we watch the coverage there and you know, look you guys are allowed to cover what you want to cover. But I can tell you, we want to make sure a conservative is nominated. And we’re going to go out there and focus on, not mathematics--we’re not going to focus on the process. We’re going to focus on the issues that are going to help us win and that’s what our campaign has been about.”

Someday should explain to the former Senator that focusing on the process rather than the math has, rather than denying him attention, given him more visibility than he realistically deserves, such as labeling February “beauty contests” with a tiny percentage of voters as victories for him in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota where no delegates were at stake.

Mathematics, in fact, are what it’s all about and, unless Santorum can put up numbers in Illinois next week, Romney will be well on his boring way to winning at the Convention.

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