Santorum quits

We must confess that we haven't kept much more than a passing interest in the race for the GOP nomination for the upcoming US Presidential election. But Rick Santorum is making a big announcement this morning; CBS News reports:

Rick Santorum is poised to suspend his bid for the presidency on Tuesday, removing the last significant obstacle in Mitt Romney's now all-but-certain march to the Republican presidential nomination.

Santorum will make the announcement at a press conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania shortly, a senior member of his campaign staff told CBS News.

An unapologetic social and fiscal conservative, Santorum spent much of the 2012 campaign cycle as an also-ran, toiling in relative obscurity while a succession of contenders - Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich among them - rose to the top of the Republican presidential polls before falling back to earth.

He finally began gaining traction in Iowa shortly before the January 3 caucuses, when social conservatives eager for a candidate to call their own started to coalesce around him. Santorum effectively tied Romney in Iowa before going on to win another ten states and claim the mantle of conservative alternative to the frontrunner.

Yet Romney was able to leverage his organizational and financial advantage over Santorum to build up a delegate lead and keep his rival from victories in states like Ohio and Michigan that would have signaled that Santorum held appeal outside the conservative base. And Santorum was never able to shake the perception that he could not beat President Obama in the fall, with GOP primary voters overwhelmingly citing Romney as the most electable candidate in exit poll after exit poll.

Santorum's better-than-anyone-expected finish amounts to a political resurrection for the two-term senator following his crushing loss in his bid for a third term in 2006, and sets him up as a major figure in the Republican Party representing its sizable social conservative wing. It also reflects lingering distrust of Romney on the part of the GOP's most conservative voters, who have pointed to Romney's relatively-moderate record as Massachusetts governor to suggest Romney does not truly represent them.

Santorum's campaign had insisted earlier in the day that the former Pennsylvania senator was not leaving the race despite a last-minute decision to cancel his Tuesday morning campaign events. Early Tuesday morning, the campaign announced that Santorum's three-year-old daughter Bella, who suffers from a genetic condition called Trisomy 18, had been released from the hospital after falling ill over the weekend. The campaign said that the morning events had been cancelled so Santorum could help his family "settle in at home." 

On his Facebook page just hours before the expected announcement, Santorum had posted a message that he was "back on the campaign trail" in his home state. He had been set to participate in a "Faith, Family, and American Values forum" at Lancaster Bible College Tuesday evening.

There had been widespread speculation that Santorum would leave the race before Pennsylvania's April 24 primary in order to avoid a possible loss in his home state, which he had deemed must-win. Recent polls in the Keystone state have shown a tight race between Santorum and Romney, with Romney having significantly narrowed what in early March was a double-digit Santorum lead. 

As the story above suggests, the likely beneficiary of Santorum's suspension of his campaign is Mitt Romney. The prospect of losing to Romney in Santorum's home state may have been the final straw in his candidacy this time around.

The Republicans need a strong candidate in order to unseat Barack Obama. We're not convinced that Romney is that candidate, and Obama may well end up back in the White House almost by default. That is bad news for the USA.