Sam Stein and Jason Cherkis at Huffington Post blame Rick Santorum’s failures in the 2012 Republican primaries on the fact that he learned nothing from the 18-point loss he suffered in his campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006:
Interviews with more than a dozen former aides, adversaries, and close observers of the ‘06 contest, however, show that important lessons — about the need to stay on message, convey warmth to voters and appear less patronizing — haven’t been learned at all. The senator who stumbled so badly six years ago, many say, is the same candidate now locked in a hotly-contested race for the Republican presidential nomination: pugnacious and unscripted, talented at retail politics, but often his own worst enemy.
But this leaves out the fact that Rick Santorum never had a chance at becoming president because he is a narrow-minded jerk and a bully who is not intellectually or temperamentally suited for high office. It took Pennsylvania voters 12 years — the two terms he served in the Senate — to figure that out. A new Qunnipiac poll out yesterday finds that while Pres. Obama and Mitt Romney are virtually tied in Pennsylvania, 45 to 42 percent, the president beats native son Santorum, 48 to 41 percent.
