Poppycock. He didn't have the MONEY. He was spending it all in Iowa. Santorum has done more with less than any other candidate. If Newt didn't have Sheldon Adelson behind him, we wouldn't be having this conversation and Romney would be toast.
Carry is right.
Politicians, like generals, routinely have problems because they're trying to fight with the lessons learned from the last war.
That's why we have the Army War College to try to figure out future threats, but even with billions of dollars in the Pentagon budget, that isn't enough to predict the dynamics of future wars with precision. Nobody could have anticipated the massive role of IEDs in the current conflict. Almost nobody had Islamofascism on their radar screens during the 2000 presidential campaign, way back before 9/11 hit us. Once Iraq did get on our radar screen, we made major mistakes about the presence of weapons of mass destruction, the likelihood of Saddam Hussein's generals revolting, and other things as well. It's not as if our military leaders are stupid; they simply have no way to know with certainty which of our enemies will pick a fight and how they'll choose to fight that fight.
Politics is the same way. Most of us understood that the collapse of the McCain-Feingold restrictions on campaign financing and the Citizens United decision enabling Super PACs would affect the 2012 presidential campaign, but it has done so in unanticipated ways.
What happened very late in the day, after the campaign was already beginning to see actual voters going to the polls, was that two key conservative donors, one each for Gingrich and Santorum, decided they would use the new financing rules under the Citizens United court decision to make it possible for their candidate to have a fighting chance, rather than being destroyed by massive negative advertising campaigns paid for by Mitt Romney's money. That money was not available to Santorum or Gingrich until recently, and both candidates are still struggling with screwups dating back to the days when they were running campaigns on a shoestring and Rick Perry was the only conservative candidate with any kind of significant financial backing.
It used to be that an underfinanced grassroots candidate who won Iowa, New Hampshire, or South Carolina would get a huge boost, not just in momentum but also in finances and volunteers, as donors flocked to a perceived winner who shared their values and supporters of withdrawn candidates signed up with others close to them on the ideological spectrum.
Now, however, the massive money that Mitt Romney has thrown into the campaign has changed the dynamics.
Yes, Santorum got money and supporters after his virtual tie in Iowa. Yes, Gingrich got the same after winning South Carolina. The problem is that this year, with Mitt Romney throwing money into massive negative advertising campaigns, the candidates have been forced to spend their money in high-dollar advertising costs. While money did come in after the early-state victories, it wasn't enough to buy ads as well as pay staffers for necessary duties like collecting signatures and other on-the-ground things.
From what I can tell, Newt Gingrich got snookered in Virginia by a deliberate screwup with one paid person. It looks like something somewhat similar happened in Illinois with a Santorum volunteer, though it appears to be an honest mistake rather than deliberate deception.
All of us in business have made bad hiring decisions. Stuff happens in campaigns, and when you don't have enough money to be double-sure everything has been done right, sooner or later your failure to double- and triple-check will blow up in your face.
I've written some severely critical things on Free Republic earlier about the signature screwup in Virginia. That is one of my biggest problems with both Santorum and Gingrich — it is simply inexcusable, even though it's understandable due to a lack of money. We simply do not have conservative candidates with the caliber of campaigns we should have had this year.
I'm very unhappy about that, and even if we don't hold it against Santorum and Gingrich, President Obama will.
What's the lesson to be learned? Apparently the lesson is that if you want to run for president as a challenger to the establishment, you have to find one or more key financial backers with very deep pockets long before the first votes are cast in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. I'm not sure I like that answer, but as of today, it looks like it's the only way to run a campaign if you're an insurgent going up against a moneyed powerhouse like Mitt Romney.