Down goes Santorum, leaving GOP with what?

Now that McRick Santorum has given up his solemn clerical quest for the presidency (while promising to keep fighting for the values that make us American!), we can turn to the genius of Hollywood casting: Willard Romney. Lean, board-room looks - fair skin and very good hair - possessor of a couple of hundred million dollars (not that much, really), a business resume corporate America could trust, robotically engaging, and a four-car elevator in the plans for fixing up his beach-front home in California, which even Bush didn't have. He now has the least encumbered hand to go after President Obama. We await, in his spokesman's words, the Etch a Sketched New Romney.

So far, what we have been told by the former Massachusetts governor is that Obama is a "failure", that as the economy inches up, Obama has made it worse, that there is no connection between his trademark RomneyCare as governor and ObamaCare, which can and will be easily shown as the offspring of...eh...RomneyCare.

Wall Street, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Republican establishment ganged up on the unfortunate Santorum while the Bush Supreme Court unplugged a sea of campaign money that was of no small assistance to Romney's contributors. Not that they were enthusiastically drawn to the GOP's presumptive nominee, but what palatable options did they have?

So here we go. Obama vs. Romney. Or Obama vs. Obama in the eyes of his delirious critics with Romney along for the ride? Delirious? Iowa's Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley just described the President as "stupid". And a federal judge in Montana didn't mind forwarding a joke suggesting Obama's mother had sex with a dog.

When Obama was elected, people around the world were impressed that American democracy had finally reached a new level of maturity in making a black man its leader. But at that very moment, Republicans set out to dash our historic progress, casting aside any thought of how they might help to clean up George W. Bush's mess. Instead, with monstrous intensity, they set out on a single goal, publicly declared, to destroy Obama's presidency without a moment's delay. Inasmuch as Obama had yet to sit at his new desk, their best weapon was to build an impervious wall against him on Capitol Hill while also driven by racial motives in an obvious return of Nixon's Southern Strategy. They simply found, as did this season's GOP candidates, various ways to encode them.

You got hints of it in Romney's assertion that he wasn't "concerned about the very poor" because they had a safety net (that they would make more porous along the way); or Santorum's word that he didn't want to help people with other people's money; or Newt Gingrich's cynical contention that Obama was the "food stamp president". It all was funneled into the Tea Party mentality and embellished by the birthers. What a mucky way to present yourself as the honorable wave of the future.

As Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night: "Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them"... We won't know until Election day, whether Romney will manage to qualify for the third category.

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