The crazy Republican race just got a whole lot crazier — and a whole lot clearer — because of what happened in last night’s Florida candidate showdown.
After nine months of debating, someone finally scored several knockout blows against Mitt Romney on the statist health-care plan he championed when he was governor of Massachusetts.
But in doing so, Romney’s attacker likely sealed Romney’s victory in the Florida primary and possibly the Republican nomination.
For it was Romney’s luck that the person landing the blows wasn’t Newt Gingrich, who surged last week in South Carolina and seemed on track to win the Florida primary next Tuesday.
Instead, it was Rick Santorum.
Last night, Santorum put on a genuinely dazzling debate performance, in which he confidently attacked Romney, went after CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Newt-style for his failure to stick to issues, talked movingly about his wife and her accomplishments, spoke in a tough smart way about foreign policy, and concluded with a very strong peroration about the relation between faith and politics.
With Gingrich reeling from a bad debate performance on Monday night, and making an even worse showing last night under a withering onslaught from a very confident and aggressive Romney in the first hour, it seemed that Romney was on the verge of walking away with the evening.
Then Santorum, who had been so gentle in the first half-hour that it seemed as though he were implicitly sending a message to Romney about his potential as a vice-presidential pick, suddenly saw an opening and took it.
An audience member asked about her difficulty in securing health-care coverage. In response, Romney gave a smart and reasonable description of why the problem she faces is due to the fact that the federal government gives the tax break for such coverage not to individuals but to businesses, and why that should be changed.
Santorum would not allow Romney to go unchallenged. He launched into an accurate and telling broadside about how Romney’s own Massachusetts health-care plan was a model for Barack Obama’s and why his efforts to pretend otherwise are doomed to meet with scorn in the general election.
“It’s not worth getting angry about,” Romney said in his one major misstep of the evening — because if Republican voters are not supposed to get angry about ObamaCare, whose overreach helped bring about the shellacking Barack Obama received in the 2010 election, what exactly are they supposed to get angry about?
If Romney can’t channel that anger and harness it — and Santorum’s point was that he was uniquely ill-suited to do so — he will have trouble in the fall.
It’s amazing that it has taken this long for a potent attack on RomneyCare; perhaps it could only come about with a downsized GOP field that gave Santorum the time and breathing room to make his case.
But in so doing, he only helped Romney.
How? Santorum was so good, and Gingrich so bad, that Rick will surely take votes away from Newt in the coming days — as the Gingrich balloon continues to leak air with the former speaker wasting his time issuing foolish proposals about moon colonies.
If the not-Romney vote genuinely fractures and is divided between Gingrich and Santorum, Romney will score a major victory in Florida on Tuesday. And that victory will look even more impressive because he fell behind late last week and earlier this week.
But it is a great irony that Romney might have found his path to the nomination — the division of his right-wing opposition between Gingrich and Santorum — as a result of the most effective substantive attack yet launched against him.
Every time I think this race can no longer surprise me . . .