The Santorum Surge

If Santorum is gaining, he is the fifth candidate not named ?Mitt Romney? to experience an Iowa ?surge.? (That word, which fits so snugly on cable news chirons, is doomed for overuse in horse-race talk.) Four of these candidates have collapsed. Michele Bachmann, who surged first, spent Wednesday night losing her campaign chairman and theorizing that he was bought off. Rick Perry peaked the moment he entered the race, before voters actually listened to him talk. Herman Cain collapsed after a month of sex scandals?although, let?s be fair, he told the media he was ?done? with the scandals after the first week. Newt Gingrich, dive-bombed by ads from the Romney-aligned Restore Our Future PAC, just collapsed back into the low teens, and is reportedly burning $500,000?much of his liquid campaign cash?on some last-ditch positive TV ads.

The only candidate in Iowa who?s gained ground and avoided a complete implosion is Ron Paul. Hours before catching Santorum I drove to the offices of GuideOne Insurance, in West Des Moines. Paul was the afternoon speaker for a hundred or so employees. They gathered in the cafeteria, making space for a Christmas tree and a dozen or so TV cameras, to listen.

?It?s not that I?ve gotten to be a better speaker,? Paul says. He really hasn?t. Even as he?s moved up in polls, Paul has kept his habit of running sentence after idea after sentence, gluing them all together with ?ands,? and moving on. ?The message has been the same,? he says, ?and the message is very important, and the people are looking for a different message. I?ve been interested in economics for a long time, even when I was studying medicine. I came across a school of economic thought called Austrian economics. It?s free markets, is basically what it is. It?s different than monetarism, different than Keynesianism, different than socialism. ?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=f334ac1f4956b6172e767fb70dbc9c44

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