Santorum Has Victories; Now He Needs Money

After two important victories in Alabama and Mississippi, the rhetoric of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has changed in two important ways (apart from the habitual bevy of arguments against Barack Obama). One has to do with the inevitability of the nomination of Mitt Romney, and the other is about money, and Santorum links the two topics in the same sentence: “Well, for someone who thinks this race is inevitable, (Romney) has spent a whole lot of money against me for being inevitable.” And even so, he ended up getting beaten.

Santorum was smart about how he approached this delicate question. The candidate noted that he had been able to win the two primaries despite the enormous disparity in their campaign backing and the fact that his rival Mitt Romney, either through his own means or through the Super-PAC which supports his candidacy, has spent five times more money in negative ads against the Santorum campaign.

Apart from it being mathematically impossible to win the 1,144 delegates needed to seal the nomination, with yesterday’s result Santorum proved that his candidacy could still be competitive. His strategy is to continue to battle for delegates, so that no candidate arrives at the National Convention in Tampa with the nomination sealed. It will then truly be a fight between the heart and the mind of the Republican Party. The ultra-conservative is betting that, if he hangs in the fight until the end, he will be able to prevail.

Last night was terrible for Romney, who did not bother to make a statement after the announcement of the results. In the aftermath the next day, however, one had to say that, despite everything, the dynamic of the race had not changed. The defeat of Romney in the South was more than was expected, his difficulty in convincing the evangelical bloc recognized. Yet the ex-governor of Massachusetts is still the one in the running with the most delegates and he has not stopped being the favorite, but the possibility that everything will be decided at the Convention increased slightly.

To prolong his campaign, Santorum needs money, and the bad news for him is the stubbornness of Newt Gingrich, who refuses to leave the way open for the conservative factions — electors and financiers — to rally around Santorum’s candidacy. Sheldon Adelson, the millionaire who bankrolls Gingrich’s campaign, still has not turned off the tap, but the pressure on the former speaker of the house to finally stop is only going to intensify in the coming days. Even the establishment on Romney’s side concedes that at the polls Santorum won the right to fight for the nomination in a duel with Romney.