After much anxiety and strain, it would appear that the Republican establishment has finally managed to squeeze out Santorum. The Hill reports:
Rick Santorum dropped out of the presidential race Tuesday afternoon, essentially guaranteeing Mitt Romney the GOP nomination.
Santorum announced that he is suspending his campaign at an event in his home state of Pennsylvania — his first public appearance following the release of his daughter Bella from the hospital and after he took a break from the campaign trail for a long Easter weekend.
"While this presidential race is over for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting," he said from Gettysburg, Pa., flanked by his family.
The former senator thanked his supporters for what he called the campaign's "improbable" success. But Santorum's poll numbers were dropping ahead of Pennsylvania's April 24 primary, with Romney throwing the full weight of his campaign into a push to win there.
A Pennsylvania loss would have been a humiliating defeat for Santorum, especially since he argued that his last loss — he lost his seat by 18 points to Sen. Bob Casey (D) in 2008 — was because of a general unpopularity with Republicans at the time.
Santorum cited Bella's recent hospitalization as part of his thought process on suspending his campaign.
Hmmm... this is all curiously happening two weeks before the primary contest in Santorum's own home state of Pennsylvania, where polls indicate that he would have lost, just like he did in his last failed bid for U.S. Senate, where as an incumbent from PA, he lost in a landslide defeat to the Democrat by a margin of nearly 20%. Losing again in PA to the likes of Mitt etch-a-sketch Romney would have been humiliating. Curious that he should drop out now, isn't it? Well good riddance. I only wish he would have stayed in so that we could have had our brokered convention.
Wes Messamore,
Editor in Chief, THL
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