And then there were two. After months of increasingly arcane Republican in-fighting, the US presidency race has finally shaken down.
In the blue corner: America's first black president, bloodied after three and a half years of economic turmoil but as yet unbowed. In the red corner: the man seeking to bring the outlook of a venture capitalist – and Mormon – into the White House.
The departure of Rick Santorum from the Republican nomination contest pulls the starting gun for the presidential campaign proper. America will now be pummelled by a display of campaign spending unparalleled in its – or the world's – experience.
Barack Obama, a team of 300 already assembled in Chicago and offices primed across the country, will unleash what may turn out to be the first billion-dollar campaign in history. Facing him, armed with his own immense private equity wealth subsidised by the riches of newly-emoldened corporations and rightwing tycoons, Mitt Romney will be commanding his own war chest that is certain to stretch well above $500,000.
And for anyone who has been struck by how ugly the 2012 race has been so far, how negative in its tone, how ruthless in its backstabbing: truly, you have seen nothing yet.
In the world of 24/7 political coverage, where the news cycle is no longer measured by the week or even the day, but by the latest belch from Buzzfeed, Santorum will, by the time this piece is read, be confined to the dustbin of history. (There is already talk of a second coming in 2016, but that is four light years away.)
Pause a moment, though, to give this man his due. Rick Santorum transformed the reputation of the sweater vest, rendering it, if not cool, at least a symbol of conservative bloody-mindedness.
He also transformed the positioning of the Republican party, and with it that of its chosen candidate, Mitt Romney. Santorum dragged both his party and its nominee drastically – and possibly fatally – to the right.
Santorum himself called his campaign "as improbable as you'll ever see in this country", and to some degree it was. He came from nowhere, a failed senator from Pennsylvania, to take Iowa and 10 other states, in the process grabbing the Republican establishment by the neck and giving it a good shaking.
On another level, though, his campaign was highly predictable. He gave voice not to the voiceless, as he claimed in his valedictory speech, but to the all-too voluble – the men and women of the angry American heartlands, the tea partiers, who see a European-style socialist conspiracy around every corner and who want their country back.
Romney dealt with the threat of Santorum as every Republican frontrunner does in the primary stage of a presidential election: he prostrated himself in a shameless display of votemongering. Romney the centrist former-governor of Massachusetts turned overnight into Romney the tub-thumping anti-abortionist and Iran-bashing militarist. He vowed to overturn "Obamacare" without blinking, an impressive feat, bearing in mind that Obama's healthcare reforms were modelled on Massachusetts' and Romney's own.
Never mind all that. Romney will now do what his own aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, said he would do: he will grab the Etch A Sketch of his campaign, shake it up, and start all over again.
Welcome back Mitt Romney the moderate!
The problem is that Santorum's legacy from the 2012 election race will make it that much more difficult for the all-but-crowned Republican nominee to crawl his way back from the scourge of social conservatism to the political middle ground where presidential elections are lost or won. Obama's attack dogs – as ruthless as any pack that the Koch brothers or Karl Rove can muster – have not been sleeping while the Republican party has been fighting itself; they have been gathering ammunition.
They are now well armed with Romney's professed opposition to public funding for contraception – forced out of him by Santorum on the campaign trail – that could prove costly with women voters. Or Santorum's comment that Romney was a "weak candidate" who could not beat Obama http://crooksandliars.com/blue-texan/rick-santorum-republicans-cant-win-we-0 , not to mention the advert from Santorum's Super Pac, warning conservative voters that Romney was not to be trusted.
Santorum may also have made Romney's job that much harder in one other regard. With his sweater vest, pick-up truck and plain talkin', Santorum opened the door to a display of working-class pique against the rich that should make Romney, with his $250m and 15% tax rate, deeply uncomfortable.
Obama has spotted the opening and is already shoving at it. At the same moment Santorum was announcing the suspension of his campaign, Obama was addressing students in Florida and telling them that America "will be better off when everybody pays a fair share and everybody plays by the same rules."
Let the presidential rumpus begin!
