SANTORUM: SERIOUS AS A HEART ATTACK

Yeah, Rick is out of the presidential race. Jamelle Bouie says what most people believe about Santorum:

Indeed, there's a reason why every pundit, myself included, dismissed Santorum as a long shot in the race for the Republican nomination. As a candidate, Santorum combined doctrinaire conservative beliefs with a hostile, combative persona.

But why should that have been a problem for him? If you've been watching the right in recent years, it would seem that that's precisely what they'd want in a presidential candidate. In the end, that is what the crazy base wanted; Romney just eked out wins by building a fragile coalition out of not-fully-crazy Republicans and Republicans who are unusually susceptible to what they see on TV (or at least in millions of dollars' worth of attack ads).

Santorum was bellicose, doctrinaire, and pretty much humorless -- that's precisely why he was the last not-Romney standing. Look at his predecessors: Trump, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich. Every one of them had moments of light-heartedness -- and every one of them was (consequently) easily turned into a laughingstock, in a way that got to even the folks in the crazy base. Santorum, by contrast, though he was mercilessly mocked by liberals, never loosened up, never stopped seeming dour and humorless and angry and dead in earnest about what he was doing. That, on the right, made him seem more serious, and more formidable, than the other not-Romneys. Even the sentimental center of his campaign, a daughter with multiple birth defects who suffered repeated hospitalizations, made his campaign seem (to the base, at least) grave and tragic.

GOP base voters want heroes and victims. They want someone who seems to have bled for the cause, and who seems to be bleeding even now, preferably from a wound inflicted by liberals. They found that in Santorum. I don't know if they'll turn to him in four years, but I bet they'll want someone who portrays his own life, and theirs, as a tragedy.