What Rick Santorum Wrought

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

Rick Santorum is a party crasher.

He has helped crash the Republican Party into a wall of public resentment. He suspended his campaign this week, but not before doing incalculable damage to the Republican brand and to the party’s presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

For months, Santorum became the favored face of the most conservative faction of the party, the one person who gave them a viable chance at resisting Romney.

Santorum surged by dragging the debate so far to the right he couldn’t see the middle with a telescope. The base dropped all pretense of moderation or even modernity and followed Santorum down a slippery path that led to a political abyss of social regression. The rest of America watched in stunned disbelief and was left to wonder: Was this the rise of some sort of “Judeo-Christian Shariah” movement, as the political comedian Dean Obeidallah pointed out on CNN.com?
David Maxwell/European Pressphoto AgencyRick Santorum on April 3.

Instead of small government and fiscal conservatism, Santorum overwhelmingly promoted — and the public overwhelmingly focused on — his apparent obsession with sex and religion.

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