Way to go beating Romney on practically his home turf.

Now hopefully we’ll see Santorum get properly vetted and take his share of heat from the Romney camp and the press.

Now we’ve got a real race.

this is devastating to the Romney camp’s “We’re the only ones who can compete in multiple states simultaneously” claim.

And to any notion that they’re somehow the ones running the smartest campaign:

Santorum announced that he was going to compete hard for the caucus states during the last week of January. The threat should’ve been obvious.

You could argue that Newt should’ve seen it too — but we don’t know that he didn’t. what could Newt have done about it? Low on money busy regrouping and rethinking his strategy, and making sure he finished respectably in Nevada, Newt made the strategic decision to allocate for resources to CO or MN and focus on Super Tuesday.

But Romney’s “inevitability” was largely based on the idea that he was the most organized and competent campaigner and his ability to outresource the other candidates. He could have easily allocated a couple million each to Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota running television ads attacking Santorum.

But they (clearly) underestimated Rick and found out that their attack-Newt-only strategy is not going to cut it.

Useful for them to know that going forward.

He had a much worse night than Newt. Yes, he finished higher overall — but February was *expected* to be a bad month for Newt and a very good month for Romney.

Romney won both Colorado and Minnesota in 2008 (CO with 60% of the vote) He had Pawlenty acting as a surrogate in Minnesota and Colorado is part of the “Mormon Belt” and has a caucus — the type of situation that he’s supposed to dominate.

To be fair, Romney didn’t give that much attention to CO or MN – but he supposedly had huge momentum now coming out of Florida and Nevada.

Romney went nuclear on the Speaker in Florida and then Newt spent 3 or 4 days shaking up and reorganizing his campaign doing just a little campaigning, then made a strategic decision to barely campaign in Colorado or Minnesota and instead to move on to Ohio/ prepare for Super Tuesday.

Santorum, on the other hand, skipped out early on the more hotly contested Florida and Nevada and he and Ron Paul had these states to themselves for about a week.( if Newt had made the same decision and bailed out early in Florida it would have been very bad for the not-Romney cause. ) he hasn’t been particularly under attack – almost certainly reaping the benefits of being the only plausible candidate neither launching a nuclear attack or withstanding one.

It’s not surprising to me that he should do somewhat well -and I’m glad he did.

But let’s put this in perspective. Santorum has shown he can win caucus states where he’s spent a ton more time physically present than anybody else ( I’d guess the number of events Santorum did in Colorado and Minnesota compared to Newt was likely 10 to 1) and whose contests take place shortly after Newt absorbs an unbelievable amount of attacks.

Newt won South Carolina while it was being hotly contested and he was personally under fire. Santorum also came in with the momentum and wound up losing to Newt by 23 points. Then he finished a distant last in the next 3 contests.

He hasn’t shown that he can win – or even perform decently – in primaries.

So we’ll see how he fares in future — but I don’t think we need to be panicking and calling for either not-Romney to get out. They both have a case for staying in – and Romney just had a pretty major setback.

Now we can see what happens as Santorum gets more scrutiny, Newt tries to string together multiple Super Tuesday victories, employees a new strategy at the next debate, etc.

Meanwhile for Romney, I’d say Arizona and Michigan just got reclassified as “Must win” (at least to maintain front runner status – if that’s even enough)

He won no delegates in tonight’s non-binding caucuses and had very little competition (in terms of candidates physically investing time in the states)

Newt made a strategic decision to pretty much skip this round.

Santorum also hasn’t really been vetted.

So, I don’t agree that he’s proven he’s the guy to beat Mitt Romney. That would require winning in primaries — that are hotly contested, while under intense attacks and Santorum hasn’t remotely shown he can do that yet.

before calling for Newt to drop out?

Yes, Santorum had a good night and probably has more momentum at the moment but he’s far from establishing himself as the clearly stronger candidate.

I could sight plenty of evidence that points to Newt being the stronger choice.

I don’t by into the idea that either of them need to drop out. Both Gingrich and Santorum have shown they deserve to stay in.

It’s possible that Gingrich will take several states on Super Tuesday, Santorum will take a few, Paul will take VA and Romney will massively underperform.

If that happens, I don’t think he has it in him to go the distance if he has to struggle.

There was no truth whatsoever to the claim that John McCain illegitimately fathered the little girl he adopted, but the lie was effective.

Propaganda masters like Stalin and Goebbles noted that if you told the same lie often enough people would believe it. And that the bigger the lie – the more likely that it would be believed.

Romney chose to re-use some lies that were told about Gingrich in the past and not forcefully cleared up. Repeated common misinformation is effective but not at all truthful.