Cruising the Web

Kimberley Strassel notes that both Romney and Santorum are targeting specific appeals to the working class, but that this is part for the same sorts of class-warfare arguments that the Democrats make. They should have a message for all people, not just the working class. When it comes to class warfare, the Democrats will always be better at using the government to reward one set of people over another.

James Pethokoukis has been channeling Charles Murray to make the argument that we are making a mistake if we tell students that they all should be going to a four-year college. There are plenty of well-paying jobs that should not necessitate a four-year degree.

Conservatives want to band together behind one candidate in South Carolina, but they still can't decide who is their guy. And that's been the problem all along.

Newt is still a cry baby.

John Podhoretz marvels at how Obama seems to think that voters who are angry that he has exercised too much power in his policies will find it appealing that he is now doing things without congressional approval. His recess appointments are a sign of his weakness in getting his agenda adopted by Congress. Is he going to have any more luck if he wins reelection and still faces GOP leadership in the House and perhaps the Senate and is himself immediately dubbed a lame duck as he goes into a second term? Do people want to vote for four more years of an imperial executive who just asserts right without any constitutional precedent?

Sweden now recognizes the Church of Kopimism when thinks copying and pasting are sacraments. When anything can be a religion, there is no meaning in the word.

David Brooks admits that Obama was more liberal than he originally thought. Glad he finally bought a clue.

Even hard-scrabble Rick Santorum was able to become a millionaire upon leaving Congress. Nothing wrong with that, but it is an indication of the cozy world within which politicians operate. Just think of how much money Obama will be able to make once he leaves office.

Cruising the Web

Here is some interesting data on how many voters each candidate got in Iowa per money spent.

Votes received per $1,000 spent:

1. Rick Santorum, 49
2. Newt Gingrich, 11
3. Ron Paul, 10
4. Mitt Romney, 6
5. Rick Perry, 2

You can also check out the money spent on advertising for and against candidates. You can see why Gingrich is so ticked off. However, as Major Garrett at the National Journal argues, it's his own dang fault and he lost due to his own political malpractice.

Noemie Emery is also fed up with the idea that there is some Republican establishment that was out there to prop up Mitt Romney. As she points out, it wasn't the fault of this mythical establishment that its preferred candidates chose not to run or that so many less-than-optimal candidates did choose to run. And this really only became a line of argument when people started speaking out against Newt Gingrich. This is the sort of vetting that party leaders would have done before the reforms of the McGovern Commission changed how party nominees were chosen. We should be glad to have them speak up about what they knew about Newt Gingrich before voters, through their ignorance, went further in choosing him as the nominee.

For one thing, this Establishment includes Rich Lowry, Ann Coulter, Tom Coburn and others, a collection of squishes if ever there was one, along with useful idiots such as George Will.

For another, it was a welcome attempt to revive the tradition of peer review in selection of nominees to be president, which has been in eclipse since the "reforms" of the McGovern Commission. Those were the reforms that eliminated the process of candidate-vetting by the professionals, and let the candidates in effect vet themselves.

As Robert Merry explains, the system in which pros asked themselves if nominees had scandals, were honest in dealing with others, or had weaknesses that would reveal themselves under the pressure, gave way to one in which "candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers."

When this system, which nearly gave us Presidents Gary Hart and John Edwards, seemed in danger of producing a nominee, Gingrich, his peers and his cohorts jumped into action, and committed out loud and in public the dimension of vetting once done in private, and behind closed doors.

Ilya Somin gives a well-argued defense of negative campaigning, especially in nomination battles. And he has a good response to those who complain that such campaigning turns voters off from politics and inculcates cynicism in government. Perhaps a bit of cynicism about our government is a good thing.

If voters have a more negative view of politicians and government, it might lead them to be more hesitant about entrusting those same politicians with ever-greater power. The dubious nature of most politicians is one of the reasons why it is important to restrict the size and scope of government.

Exactly.

Leon Wolf at Red State chides his fellow conservatives for their over-the-top enmity to Mitt Romney by pointing out that he is more conservative than any other GOP nominee since Reagan and that all his flip-flops have been to the right, something conservatives should celebrate.

Obama wins two "awards" for the worst product failures of 2011. Way to go. And the high-speed train for California will join that list if the California decides to allocate the money to build this billion-dollar boondoggle.

If you want to know what liberals will be saying about Rick Santorum if he stays at the top, here is a dump of accusations against Santorum. And here are some more ethical complaints against Santorum. These are the attacks that Santorum avoided by being below the radar until this week.

Meanwhile, Daniel Henninger posits that the votes for Santorum and Paul in Iowa indicate that voters rewarded consistency in those candidates. Not Romney's forte.

John Steele Gordon takes us on a walk through the history of negative campaigning in America.

Obama's contempt for the Constitution

How ironic that our president who once was a professor of the Constitution should have such a cavalier approach to that document as he is placing his nominee, Richard Cordray as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as three people to the NLRB, through a supposed recess appointment. Previously, when Bush did this with John Bolton to the United Nations, Senator Obama was appalled, calling Bolton "damaged goods." Harry Reid was similarly angry,

‘An end run around the Senate and the Constitution.’ “I will keep the Senate in pro forma session to block the president from doing an end run around the Senate and the Constitution with his controversial nominations.”

However, the Congress was in recess at that time so, even as Obama recognized at the time, this was within the President's constitutional powers. That is why Reid then adopted the tactic of not going out of session in order to block Bush from any more recess appointments.

Now Obama has done an even bigger end-run around the Constitution since the Congress is not in recess. John Steele Gordon explains how the House blocked this from happening.

The Constitution requires that neither house of Congress can recess for more than three days without the consent of the other house. The House of Representatives has not given that consent and has been holding pro forma sessions every three days, forcing the Senate to do likewise. When Democrats controlled the Senate in the last two years of the Bush administration, they held these pro forma sessions during recesses precisely to prevent President Bush from using the recess appointment power, which he didn’t.

And according to Clinton's Justice Department, these three days are enough to determine that the Congress is indeed in session.

In 1993, however, a Department of Justice brief implied that the President may make a recess appointment during a recess of more than three days. In doing so, the brief linked the minimum recess length with Article I, Section 5, clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution. This “Adjournments Clause” provides that “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days ….”Arguing that the recess during which the appointment at issue in the case was made was of sufficient length, the brief stated: “If the recess here at issue were of three days or less, a closer question would be presented. The Constitution restricts the Senate’’s ability to adjourn its session for more than three days without obtaining the consent of the House of Representatives. … It might be argued that this means that the Framers did not consider one, two and three day recesses to be constitutionally significant. …Apart from the three-day requirement noted above, the Constitution provides no basis for limiting the recess to a specific number of days. Whatever number of days is deemed required, that number would of necessity be completely arbitrary.”

Remember that this recess appointment provision was put in the Constitution in the 18th century when it was envisioned that Congress would be part-time and out of session much of the year. In those days before mass communication and quick transportation, the Founders thought that we needed a way for the President to put people into place when Congress was back home and couldn't be expected back for a long time. It was certainly never envisioned that three days would be a long enough break to assert that Congress, without having formally going into recess, could be asserted to be in recess unilaterally by the President. That would be a total violation of the separation of powers, the sort of thing that Democrats were always warning about George W. Bush, but now seem not to worry about Obama doing.

Oh, and by the way, Obama's own Solicitor General, Neal Katyal, has argued the opposite view before the Supreme Court of whether a president can make recess appointments when the Congress is out for three or fewer days.

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: And the recess appointment power doesn't work why?

MR. KATYAL: The -- the recess appointment power can work in -- in a recess. I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days. And -- and so, it is potentially available to avert the future crisis that -- that could -- that could take place with respect to the board. If there are no other questions –

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Thank you, counsel.

But what's a little consistency and respect for the Constitution when you're trying to win political support from your base?

As Gordon writes,

It will be interesting to see if a court challenge develops. Courts hate getting in the middle of a dispute between the other two branches. But is the president not arrogating to himself the power to decide when Congress is in recess? If he has that power, what else can he dictate to Congress?

Do the Democrats really want this to stick as a precedent the next time there is a Republican president, perhaps even a little over a year from now?

And the whole question about whether or not the Congress is truly in session isn't Obama's only problem with this appointment. Mark A. Calabria at CATO looks at the actual wording of the law establishing this position.

More importantly the “recess” appointment of Cordray doesn’t solve the President’s problem. The Dodd-Frank Act is very clear, even a law professor can probably under[stand] this section, that authorities under the Act remain with the Treasury Secretary until the Director is “confirmed by the Senate”. A recess appointment is not a Senate confirmation. Now don’t ask me why Dodd and Frank included such unusual language, they could have just given the Bureau the new authorities, but they didn’t.

But hey, what does Obama care about the actual wording of a law? He certainly doesn't care about the wording of the Constitution.

UPDATE: Over at Volokh, John Elwood argues in favor of the president to be able to make appointments despite these pro forma sessions since, otherwise, the Senate would be able to block the president's nomination powers. I wonder if that is enough of an objection. If Elwood is correct, than the use of the filibuster of a nomination would also be interfering with the power of appointment.

What Romney was spending his money on

This is a fascinating look at the techniques that the Romney campaign was using to identify potential voters and then target them with specific messages tailored to their concerns. I hadn't realized that it was Romney who pioneered the micro-targeting techniques that Bush used so successfully in 2004, but it fits that someone with his background in executive management would have bought into what was a new idea at the time.

Meyers and Gage first worked with Romney on his 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts. The two Michigan Republican operatives had grown frustrated with campaign targeting that was restricted by the limited individual information available on the electoral rolls (party registration and vote history) and historical tallies at the precinct level, where actual results are available. Gage noticed that commercial marketers and credit-scorers had begun to organize reams of demographic and consumer data—from information on education levels to who had a hunting license—that made it possible to profile an individual across hundreds of variables at once. A former pollster, he designed large-scale surveys that would allow him to tether those individual profiles to topical political attitudes to reveal patterns in electoral behavior. Advances in computing power had made it possible to manipulate tens of millions of those records at once, and Meyers and Gage let algorithms find relationships between them. Their approach allowed them to analyze voters with far more nuance than had previously been possible. When Gage visited Romney’s Cambridge campaign headquarters with a PowerPoint presentation describing his untested method, a former venture capitalist serving as Romney’s deputy campaign manager spoke up. “You mean you don’t do this in politics?”

Romney won that campaign, aided by Gage’s ability to pick out Massachusetts independents and Democrats who would be receptive to the candidate’s positions on specific issues like taxes and education. That success, along with similar projects for Republican tickets in two other states, helped Meyers and Gage win a lucrative contract to perform such “microtargeting”—as Gage successfully branded the technique—for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Bush’s advisers wanted to identify segments of nontraditional Republican voters, like Latino women or church-going African-Americans, who could be pulled over to Bush with targeted appeals. In 2007, Gage’s firm, TargetPoint Consulting, signed on with Romney’s first presidential campaign, and set to work finding friendly caucus-goers in Iowa.

By now this is standard procedure and I'm sure that the Democrats are doing something very similar.

What helped Romney was that he had run before and so had all the data from 2008 that his team could feed into the computer and then use to target those same voters again this time around. They didn't need the big staff that they had used before in Iowa. They could plug in their information and have volunteers work from home and then set up telephone town hall discussions targeted to a particular voter's interests and candidate preferences.

Instead of trying to win over potential Romney voters with broadcast or online ads, conspicuous direct mail, or cultivating media coverage, the campaign used a new tool to narrowly target potential 2012 voters. So-called tele-town halls would ring an individual voter’s phone with a recorded message inviting him or her to participate in a conference call with the candidate. When a voter chose to participate, an automated prompt would ask for the same information that would be solicited by volunteer ID calls: who a voter supported, how likely they were to caucus. Romney’s team was able to put together different universes for each. Supporters would be invited to “friends and allies” calls (in one, Romney assuaged those made uneasy about attacks on his health care record). Persuasion targets who were modeled to care about the economy were invited to hear Romney introduce his jobs plan; those concerned about immigration were alerted to a call with Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu, a Romney surrogate.

The tele-town halls proved popular—often tens of thousands of voters would listen in—and, at only pennies each, fused a persuasive medium like a radio ad or a candidate visit with the ability of automated survey calls to measure response. Most of the Republican caucus campaigns used these tele-town halls to inexpensively reach voters spread out geographically, but they had a particular value to Romney as he tried to add voters who hadn’t been with him in 2008. The tele-town halls allowed him to make his case to targeted groups of Iowans on specific issues without raising media alerts that he was aggressively contesting the state.

It was the information garnered from their specific targeting and tele-townhalls that gave them the confidence to go all out the last week of the race in Iowa. They might not have predicted that Santorum would be the one to rise and how many votes that he would get, but they had a lot of information on who would turn out for Romney.

That fits with Jay Cost's analysis that Romney got just about the exact same votes that he'd gotten in 2008. That was the strategy all along.

And this is the kind of operation that will be hard for someone like Santorum who is basically starting up from scratch in states like New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Florida to compete with. President Obama is probably already doing much the same thing with all the data that I'm sure they have from 2008. If Romney were to be the GOP nominee, it would be a real battle of techno-campaigns. However, if someone else beats Romney out for the nomination, it will be an indication that it takes a lot more than a snazzy approach to gathering information about voters and delivering them targeted messages to win a campaign.

I love process stories like this to find out how campaigns operated. Not only is it interesting, but it helps me in teaching politics to my AP Government and politics class. However, I'm always flummoxed about why campaigns brag like this to the media. Why pull back the curtain to let opponents know what they're doing. I understand that this sort of campaigning is a business and operatives are always looking for their next job. But can't they wait until their guy has either lost or won before they tell everyone how it's done.

Cruising the Web

Mona Charen refutes the storyline that there is some sort of Republican establishment that is forcing the GOP electorate to select Romney. Just who is in that establishment? It never made sense.

The Republican Establishment, like the “international community,” is more of a figment than a reality. Whom did the so-called establishment support in 2008? Do conservative voters believe that Republican elites somehow engineered the selection of the least loyal and reliable Republican in the U.S. Senate? And how did that work exactly? John McCain was considered the frontrunner in early 2007. Yet by the summer he was languishing in the polls and so broke that he was forced to take out loans. Was it the establishment that earned McCain the nomination or was it the fact that Rudolph Giuliani ran a terrible campaign, Fred Thompson never got airborne, and Mike Huckabee undermined Mitt Romney’s Iowa sling-shot strategy?

Jay Cost looks at the data and demonstrates that those who voted for Romney yesterday fit the same demographic framework as those who voted for him last time.

Thus, Iowa is a metaphor for the whole 2012 Republican nomination campaign. It is not as though Mitt Romney has increased the breadth or depth of his support relative to 2012. At least not yet. Instead, his advantage is due primarily to the weakness of his opposition.

Richard Epstein highlights an interesting attempt to challenge rent control laws before the Supreme Court.

Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, grades the GOP candidates on their speaking ability.

Why didn't Santorum do better earlier?

Congratulations to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum for their performances in Iowa. And especially to Rick Santorum who no one, including myself, ever gave much of a chance. Santorum did the old-fashioned thing by spending his time and doing the retail campaigning to come from back of the pack to rocket to the top of the heap. He peaked at just the right time. And winning by just eight votes isn't much of a victory for Romney, but it sure does a lot for the future of Iowa caucuses to convince people that their individual votes count.

And who would have thought that the evangelicals of Iowa would pick a Catholic and a Mormon as their two top candidates. It rather explodes that myth that evangelicals vote only for another evangelical rather than on the issues and other qualities. Otherwise, Rick Perry would have done a lot better than he did. In fact, they split their vote just like other demographic groups split up their vote.

Santorum captured the most of them, according to this round of exit polls, but only reached 32 percent. After that, Iowa evangelicals split between Paul (19 percent), Gingrich and Romney at (14 percent) and Perry at 13 percent. (Michele Bachmann, who ran a campaign aimed heavily at those voters, won just 6 percent of them.)

That precedent suggests Santorum may leave Iowa as a powerful competitor for evangelical votes, but as a Northern Catholic is unlikely to win as preponderant a share of them as did Huckabee, a Southern Baptist.

We'll see. I might be totally off base, but I sense that the candidate's religion matters a whole lot less than voters sensing that he has a sincere belief in some religion.

And, at least, Ron Paul didn't come in first. I can't see him repeating his strength among a larger GOP electorate. Rick Perry was humiliated since he'd spent time and money there. He and Michele Bachmann need to reassess the logic of their candidacies. They each had their moments in the spotlight and didn't appeal. Iowa seems to have fulfilled its traditional role of winnowing the list down for the rest of the country. I still wonder what would have happened if Pawlenty had persevered. I know he's regretting his decision to drop out early. I suspect that he would have done much better if he'd stayed in and would have been a reasonable candidate to be the anti-Mitt for voters who aren't thrilled with Romney but still wanted someone who had executive experience and strong conservative credentials. No one else in the race fits that profile. Oh, well. Just another disappointment for us.

And Newt Gingrich demonstrated that his lead was ephemeral and couldn't stand the exposure of his personality and record. He can whine and complain, but complaints never do much to help candidates. He should be talking about his message and toning down the less-appealing parts of his personality that have been on display the past few weeks. But I suspect that it is already too late for Newt and I am not disappointed with that.

I couldn't help thinking about why Santorum took so long to emerge as the lead anti-Mitt candidate. Surely he is a more feasible conservative candidate than Bachmann and Cain. He is a better debater by far than many of the other candidates. He can express his conservative beliefs with a credibility that Romney lacks. In fact I thought he did as well when he got a chance in the debates as Gingrich although he came out as whiny about not getting attention, but that won't be a problem in future debates. Santorum seemed to stick out mostly as a social conservative and hawk on foreign policy.

I've listened to Santorum for a few years since he was a substitute host on Bill Bennett's morning radio show which I often listen to. I found him very conservative and able to use his congressional experience to clarify what was going on in fights in Congress. But he also struck me as more focused on those social issues that don't move me.

He's a lot more socially conservative than I am and how previous GOP candidates going back for several decades have been. It's not that his positions are that different from other Republican candidates; it's the emphasis that Santorum puts on those issues. They are primary with him while they were secondary or even tertiary for Romney, McCain, probably both Bushes, Dole, or Reagan. Those are positions that help in GOP primaries, but probably won't help him in the general election. However, Santorum does do a great job of linking the social issues to the economic issues by pointing out that strong families do more for a good education and a strong economy than any government program. He argues that three things will do more to help young people succeed than government policies: graduate high school, get a job, and wait until you get married before having children. It would be worthwhile to have that message reach more people.

So why did the GOP electorate toy with all these other problematic candidates instead of Santorum?

It could be that he lacks the pizazz that some of the other candidates who rose up to the top had. He doesn't have the gregarious, good humor that Cain has. He doesn't have the job-creating record that made Perry initially so appealing. He doesn't have the ability to shine in debates with that patina of professorial confidence and humor that Gingrich does. Santorum comes across as earnest and somewhat plodding. But sometimes plodding wins the race - ask the tortoise.

My only guess is that he just doesn't seem electable against Obama. He suffered a deep defeat in 2006 in Pennsylvania. It was a Democratic year and Santorum was very vocal in his support for the war in Iraq at a time when it was going particularly badly. And if Romney had run for reelection in that year, he would also have suffered a big loss. One could argue, and I believe Santorum does, that it took guts for him to run his uphill campaign without sacrificing his principles. That's a contrast to Romney.

And their backgrounds are a deep contrast between the wealthy scion of a successful man and the son of the laboring class who can relate to working people and their concerns.

We'll see how Santorum does now under the klieg lights. If other candidates start dropping out and the money really pours in to the Santorum campaign, he has the chance to make it a two-man race against Romney. Then look for some of those imaginary polls putting Obama up against both Romney and Santorum. If Santorum is way behind in those polls and Romney is competitive, that could be enough to convince those Republican voters whose main concern is defeating Obama. It would be interesting to see polls contrasting how both do against Obama in Sanotrum's home state of Pennsylvania. I think those polls are quite problematic for their predicative power. The atmosphere will be very different when it is one man against another and they're both aiming their best shots against each other. However, problematic as those polls are, I do believe that they influence voters' perceptions of how electable a candidate is. So it will be interesting to see how Santorum does after he's been pounded by the media and other candidates for a while.

I would recommend to Romney not to start attacking Santorum and for his super PAC to hold back also. Santorum isn't as rich a target as Gingrich was and Romney needs to stay focused on his tactic of concentrating on Obama since that is what most GOP voters are most interested in.

I don't think that Santorum is all that vulnerable on the pork-barrel complaint that Perry was aiming at him. People expect those in Congress to get what they can for their own states so it's not much of a surprise that Santorum did that for Pennsylvania. And he voted as a loyal Republican for big votes that came up during his term in the Senate. Are Republican voters going to penalize him for supporting President Bush? I don't think so. And then there are the people who are still angry at him for supporting his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Arlen Specter. Is that really a reason to oppose him now given the competition? I don't think so, but I know there are some diehard conservatives who won't forgive him. But if it is a two-man battle between Romney and Santorum, are they really going to base their vote on something that happened six years ago?

So congratulations to Rick Santorum and welcome to the spotlight. He now has to demonstrate his staying power is longer than all those candidates who climbed to the top of the greasy pole only to slide back down.

Cruising the Web

Ah, the answer to a question many people had: why does Rick Santorum keep wearing a sweater vest?

The GOP strategy against Obama is to use his own words against him contrasting his promises and the results. This will be very effective and is the problem that any incumbent would face. Obama, however, has been so grandiose and so much of his appeal was simply his own rhetoric that he is especially vulnerable to this strategy. Of course, the Democrats will try to do the same to Romney, if he's their opponent. I suspect that the charge of someone changing their position to whatever is more popular will be less deadly than the charge of falling so far short of the promises that Obama made. Without out that rhetoric what else did Obama have?

Charles Lane goes through the the numbers and finds lots of bad news for Obama.

Will Obama single-handedly rewrite the definition of "recess" in order to make recess appointments of nominees that have been blocked in the Senate? Somehow I don't think that the provision in the Constitution written in 1787 allowing the president to make recess appointments due to the difficulties in travel back in the 18th century and the expectation that Congress would be in session only part of the year would extend to the two or three-day breaks between sessions when the minority is explicitly trying to block the possibility of recess appointments.

Explaining why Best Buy is slowly going out of business and why you repeatedly get irritated when you shop there.

Here is the perfect example of over-regulation by unelected bureaucrats. The EEOC is warning employers that they may be in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act if they require a high school diploma for employment. Amazing.

The Washington Post celebrates the end of the tax credit for corn-based ethanol and the tariff on imported ethanol as well as the tax credit for purchasing electric cars. It's a good start.

Who would think that it was a good idea to send a police officer to tell a five-year old that she had overdue books at the library? Great job in turning a child off from libraries as well as wasting the time of a policeman.

Philip Klein explains why we should be skeptical of reports of "packed rooms" in Iowa (or New Hampshire) campaign events.

Michael Barone explains the real reasons why Rick Santorum endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004. Then Barone has an interesting post looking back in history for an example of a major party having a weaker field for the presidency in a year when that party also had a great chance of taking the White House. His choice? The Democrats in 1932.

Kimberley Strassel argues that Romney seems headed for a victory as a result of his careful strategy this year as well as by seeming "good enough" for voters. And most of all, by his great luck that more popular possible candidates did not choose to run.

If you're such a political junkie that you can't wait for the final vote tonight to come in, here are 10 Iowa counties that might indicate how the vote will end up.

When you hear people lamenting the advent of super PACs this year and those nasty negative ads, just remember that this is the result of all those attempts at campaign finance reform by limiting the money that a candidate can raise for his or her own campaign.

Keep an eye on the efforts to transform Indiana into a right-to-work state.

What makes a map the best map of the United States?

Did Alan Colmes just help out Santorum?

So will Iowans give Rick Santorum a sympathy vote in response to Alan Colmes' heartless comments about the way that the Santorums chose to deal with the death of their infant son? Colmes has since apologized to the Santorums, but it still boggles the mind that any media figure would think that it was appropriate to bring up such a private moment to discuss in a political context. Is that what they were talking about on the lefty blogs or was this just something that Colmes came up with on his own? It's reminiscent of the way in which leftist bloggers happily jumped into a debate of whether Sarah Palin's baby, Trig, was actually hers or not. Average people would instantly recognize that such comments are totally off-base,but that was the main point that Colmes had when he tried to argue that voters would find Santorum weird.

Colmes would have been better off making the sort of argument that Dana Milbank makes about problematic statements that Santorum has made in the past to explain why the Santorum surge won't last any longer than all the other non-Mitts have lasted.

The irony is that the attention paid to this non-issue in the last moments of the campaign in Iowa could benefit Santorum. There is nothing that charges up Republicans like some good, healthy media bashing.