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Once-hot Santorum up in smoke

Last night, in the 20th GOP debate, national front-runner Rick Santorum spoke these potentially prophetic words: “Everything’s not going to be fine.” He was trying to explain why he’s been speaking so sourly about the condition of American society, but that sentence may prove to be his epitaph following a truly disastrous debate performance.

Sometimes, politics is hand-to-hand combat, as when Santorum and Mitt Romney scuffled a few times, with Romney mostly getting the better of the exchanges. And sometimes, as Santorum said in defending his unpopular votes in his 12 years as a senator, “Politics is a team sport and you have to take one for the team.“

But sometimes, politics is like golf, with every candidate playing parallel to every other — in which case, the most formidable foe each faces is the one inside his own head. That’s especially true of someone like Santorum, who took the lead unexpectedly a few weeks ago. He had to keep his wits about him last night. If he’d stayed steady, calm and unruffled, he might’ve run away with it.

Santorum didn’t. He overthought. He overcorrected. He overdid. He spent so much time explaining the process by which he voted for this, or why he’d originally done that, and the difficulty in his position that led him to do the other, that he never made a positive case for himself.

Some of the choices he made were frankly baffling. He found himself spending precious minutes trying to explain the problematic congressional behavior known as “earmarking” — basically, individual addenda to big spending bills through which congressmen and senators bring home the bacon to their districts and states — in order to defend his own use of them.

Rather than brush the matter aside and discuss how he would change Washington, Santorum bizarrely put himself in the position of defending congressional behavior in Washington.

After CNN’s John King tried to bait the Republicans into getting into it on the matter of contraception, Romney and Gingrich successfully steered the conversation away from that touchy subject to the issue that concerns Republicans — religious liberty and governmental coercion.

And then Santorum somehow found himself defending a spending vote involving something called Title X — which has something to do with family planning and which even I couldn’t begin to understand, and I do this for a living. In golf terms, he bogeyed another hole in exactly the same way he’d bogeyed the earlier one.

Going forward, his prospects were also damaged by a surprisingly relaxed and attractive performance from Newt Gingrich — who again showed his mastery of detail and ability to control the discussion in a way he hasn’t since he surged in South Carolina in January, perhaps because he has fallen so far in the polls that he’s no longer tormented by the front-running anxiety that undid Santorum last night.

Any gain Gingrich is likely to see from the debate will almost surely come from voters who were considering a Santorum vote. Many of them will be flummoxed by what they saw last night, which played perfectly into Mitt Romney’s effort to paint him as just another Washington insider and big spender.

And Romney? You have to hand it to him. He never delivers a knockout punch. He never gets off the best line. He never dazzles. But he never loses his purpose, he says everything he wants and needs to say, he doesn’t get flustered, and he is fluent and purposeful.

He could give a master class in how to get a B-plus/A-minus in nationally televised debates.

That won’t be enough against President Obama; should Romney get the nomination, he’ll have to get A’s. Can he? Well, it’s true that Romney has failed to rally the GOP behind him. It’s also true that, unlike everyone else in this ludicrous process, he hasn’t immolated himself. Which is what Santorum did last night.