Game Not On: Santorum Exit Left

Rick Santorum is not our man any more; the Republican candidate tree has been pruned, and suddenly, we are left with Mitt Romney (and, I believe, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul). Now is the time for Rick to swallow the bile, and get on with the business of beating the Anti-Christ, er, Barack Obama, in alliance with Mitt Romney. This is bad news for the writers at the Daily Show and the Colbert show, and for those that like watching long, protracted primary campaigns, all the while fantasizing about dramatic nomination battles at party conventions. Santorum’s exit means, most visibly, an attenuation of the entertaining quasi-fratricidal disputes between Romney and Santorum.  We will now see another side of Santorum–the Supporter of the Party–as opposed to Distinctive Maverick, and this is bound to be far less likely to tickle the funny bone.

But I have to admit, at this moment, my concerns lie elsewhere. More specifically they are centered around a pair of teenage girls in Oklahoma. Haley and Camille Harris must be very upset. For weeks now, they–and the rest of the Harris brood i.e., four other siblings and their pastor father–have been celebrating Rick Santorum’s efforts to put the White back into the White House, with a memorable video of a song whose lyrics, go, uh, a something little like this:

If you aren’t a Santorum fan, want to understand this nation’s political diversity and get some insight into the nature of Santorum’s constituency, this song and its video are genuinely illustrative: this is what you’re up against. When I first saw the video, my mind boggled, but it did serve to inform me of why this man, who I took to have the intelligence of an anemone, was doing as well as he was in the Republican primaries.

On a more serious note, while Santorum’s divisive campaign has come to an end, and provided some relief from the endless displays of ignorance that he specialized in, it also means his energies will not be diverted any more by Romney and can now be devoted elsewhere. If anything, his campaign suspension means that his atavistic pronouncements will have more of a focus, and that is bad news for anyone that, bizarrely enough, still holds out hope for elevated political discourse once the primaries are over.