Santorum Is Out

Last Tuesday brought nearly conclusive clarity to the question of who will compete with U.S. President Barack Obama in November. The most conservative of the four Republican candidates, Rick Santorum, has dropped out of the race. Now the leader of the race, Mitt Romney, takes a decisive lead over Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, for whom the remaining primaries will mean practically nothing.

Paul, having only 71 delegates’ votes for the Republican National Convention in August, is an absolute outsider. Gingrich, having collected 140 votes, can only hope that Romney might not manage to arrive at the Convention already having 659 of the 1,144 votes needed to guarantee him the nomination. In that case, Gingrich would have one last chance to attempt to win over the Convention. As the Republican veteran himself recognizes, that would be completely unbelievable.

Well, admittedly, everything is going that way, although not smoothly by any means, nor automatically.

After the brutal defeat of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the last election, Republicans were in a state of “confusion and vacillation” for a long time. “Sarah Barracuda,” who said that the only difference between herself and a pit bull was that she wore lipstick, tried to re-energize the party on the basis of the “tea party” movement, but was unsuccessful. And although the Republicans managed to gain the majority in the House of Representatives and even considerably shook the president’s nerves last August in connection with raising the national debt ceiling, the Democratic administration’s domination of the Senate provides the best prospects for a second Obama term.

In fact, the Republican presidential campaign began in a somewhat tragicomic way, with one of the candidates [Rick Perry] forgetting one of the three key points of his program live and on the air. And with a characteristic “Oops!” he was out of the race. Then Herman Cain, who is more dark-skinned than Obama but very conservative, was accused of sexual harassment from 20 years ago. From the beginning, even the very character of the campaign seemed more like a search for compromising information against each other, rather than seeking to identify who would be best able to oppose Obama.

However, the Republican campaign gradually took on a sensible, sane character. The curiosities and personal squabbles are past and the basic, long-established conflict within the GOP has come into the foreground. Namely, there is a presence in the party of two quite different ideological platforms: the religious fundamentalists on the one hand, and the market fundamentalists on the other. In the terminology of the opponents, it is a contest between the “paleoconservatives” and the “neoconservatives.”

The foundation of both platforms lies in the fact that in its own time (around 200 years ago), they made up a single, indivisible whole. But in more recent times, around 100 years ago, the “American Dream” sprang up from that very unity of traditional religious and moral values and the values of the market.

However, today little remains of that erstwhile unity. That does not mean that Republicans who are oriented toward the values of religious morals have stopped being “marketeers,” nor that Republican marketeers have practically turned into libertines. The difference now lies in their choices of priorities. And that is embodied in the figures of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, respectively.

What does the victory of Romney over Santorum mean? The victory of the “marketeers” over the “moralists”? In a way, yes. But at the same time, no. In Santorum’s decision to leave the race, one sees not so much a defeat of one side as a victory for Republican common sense. After all, the goal of the campaign from the beginning was and still is to determine who can really oppose the Democratic president. And the most recent polls show that among the Republicans, the only real competitor is, in fact, Mitt Romney.

Yes, now 51 percent would vote for Obama, and only 44 percent for Romney (according to a poll by the Washington Post and ABC News). But that is only within a “statistical error.” Take away 3.5 percent from Obama and you get equal figures. And that’s even before the Republican campaign is officially over! And this time, Obama will not be able to cast his “Yes, we can!” spell. Quite the contrary, he will have to account for what he has done and not done. For the “President of Hope,” getting into the White House for a second time won’t be so simple!

And it seems that in this game, Romney has a serious trump card against Obama: his image as a successful entrepreneur who knows the market from the inside, a man who could “reset” not the relationship with Russia, but rather that which is absolutely the first and foremost worry of every American. As a certain saxophone-playing president said in his day on this subject, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

It would seem that this Bill Clinton brand of campaign has returned like a boomerang to his successor, Obama. And Obama evidently does not know what to do with this boomerang. Specifically, 47 percent of Americans would vote for Romney on economic issues, against 43 percent for Obama. And 51 percent of Americans believe that Romney can reduce the federal budget deficit, while only 38 percent are for Obama on this issue.

In general, it would seem that the race is easier for Romney with Santorum out of it. How much easier, we will see in November.