COMMENTARY | It must be pretty tough being the center of everything, the focal point of all direction, the reason everything happens -- especially when the universe is lining up against you. Take former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, for instance, who is running for the 2012 Republican nomination for president and who has gotten little to no traction thus far since his announcement that he was seeking the GOP nomination.
Even after a series of debates, he has barely managed to lift his numbers to just less than fewer than a handful of percentage points. And with Florida's announcement that the state primary would be moved up to the end of January, he told Fox News it was a "conspiracy" to shorten the primary season to favor the frontrunners.
"What I believe is going on is somebody in Florida is shilling for Mitt Romney, and probably Rick Perry," Santorum told Fox News' Greta van Susteren on Thursday evening, just hours before the news that Florida had pushed up its primary date to Jan. 31, a move that will undoubtedly set off a chain reaction that leads to Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina rescheduling their caucuses and primaries. "They want to shorten the playing field now that these guys are ahead. I'm sure they'd like to have the election tomorrow. So by moving up the calendar, you help the favorites. And there's somebody in Florida who wants to help the favorites. They certainly don't want to help the people because they're gonna be denied their delegates."
Shrouded in the mystical vagueries of "they" and "somebody," Santorum has put forth a conspiracy theory that might seem plausible to those not particularly interested in politics, those not well-versed in how the primary and caucus system works, and/or those who still have an ax to grind over the Warren Report and the Single Bullet Theory.
But Florida's move is purely political -- especially the financial part of it. Moving up the primary not only allows Florida and the other states to impact the presidential field and whoever eventually gets selected earlier in the election cycle, perhaps giving the chosen candidate more time to prepare against the incumbent Democratic president, but it also brings the money of the campaigns to Florida over a month earlier. That's a financial and economic consideration with the knowledge that most campaigns spend a greater portion if not all their ad and campaign money in the first few states, hoping for a win; many then drop out -- for obvious reasons -- and that potential money source is then lost to the following primary and caucus states.
But to Santorum, it is about him. Well, him and the other nonfavorites. It is a conspiracy to deny the people "their delegates," implying he is a people's delegate, the fact notwithstanding that only Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rep. Ron Paul are delegates of the people in the truest sense. He was denied his delegate status by the people of Pennsylvania in the 2006 senate race.
But Santorum has never been one to step back from be martyrdom. In June at the first Republican debate in New Hampshire, he told the audience to look at his record. "Not only have I been consistently pro-life, I have not just taken the pledge but I've taken the bullets to go out there and fight for this and lead on those issues."
"Lead" as in leading some to follow a false premise that abortions and the lack of those potential taxpayers were the reason behind Social Security's financial straits?
Perhaps it is such self-aggrandizing statements like those made to Fox News about the Florida primary that has kept Santorum virtually nonexistent on the Republican electorate's radar. In the latest Fox News poll, the former senator posted 3 percent support among Republican voters, the same number he posted at the end of August.
In fact, he has never scored above 6 percent support in national polling.
But that's probably due to the polling organizations conspiring to make certain "they" rig the polling methods with biases built into the questions in order to help their favorites.
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