As political experts weigh in on how Rick Santorum was able to sweep all three primary contests yesterday, a multitude of factors come into play. Mitt Romney’s recent verbal gaffes, the White House’s clash with Catholic hospitals over contraceptive healthcare coverage, the Komen for the Cure vs. Planned Parenthood controversy, and even yesterday’s appeals court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage have all been cited by various pundits as factors in Santorum’s unexpected surge at Romney’s expense.
But one key factor that has been overlooked is the exceptionally strong employment report announced last week.
Those numbers may have fatally punctured Romney’s main campaign rationale: the alleged failure of President Obama’s economic policies. Voters in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado (and across the nation) may be reconsidering Romney’s over-the-top rhetoric lambasting the president’s record on job creation and finding it wanting in logic and fact.
Conservatives in general have been in a snit all week trying to deny the validity of the economic recovery shown by 23 months of positive job growth, 3.7 million private sector jobs created, and other improving indicators. Regardless of the desperate political spin on the right, Americans can sense that Obama is actually doing a passable job of turning around the floundering economy he inherited.
While many may still believe that a disciplined program of deficit reduction and tax cuts might work better, they reject the hysterical Romney rants against Obama’s job creation policies that fly in the face of the current trends. When you piggyback that with the totally baseless conspiracy theories about the January jobs report being espoused by Rush Limbaugh and his fellow Kool-Aid drinkers on the right, you get a political argument that turns off voters instead of energizing them.
And when Romney brags about creating “over 100,000 jobs” in the 28 years since he first joined Bain Capital, informed voters in Tuesday’s caucuses may have weighed that against the 3.7 million jobs Obama created in three years and found Romney’s stats and boasts somewhat less impressive.
So yes, values issues and other conservative litmus tests may have factored into Romney’s weak showing this week. But don’t be surprised if his electoral strength continues to erode as the key argument for his “outsider businessman” campaign starts to sound more and more dubious.
Which could be a bad omen for Romney in the short run and a disasterous one in the fall campaign.
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