As Expected, Frothy Mix Wins Louisiana

The results of yesterday's GOP primary shouldn't be any surprise. As the returns from various parishes indicate, outside of the New Orleans area an areas around Baton Rouge (which went for Romney), Louisiana is Kool-Aid drinking Bible beater country. The pattern is repeated all over the South, including Virginia, where the larger and generally more educated cities vote more in touch with modernity while the rural areas vote for a return to the 19th century or earlier. These same rural areas then wonder why they are often economically depressed and have difficulty attracting new industry and businesses. It ought to be obvious to anyone rational, but then the GOP base which is increasingly rural and in the South isn't rational. Here are highlights from The Daily Beast of Santorum's win.

Rick Santorum easily won the Louisiana primary on Saturday, but the political stock market seems to have discounted his victory in advance.

Santorum took 49 percent of the vote, just shy of double Mitt Romney’s 26 percent. Newt Gingrich finished with 15 percent.

It was an impressive performance, with Santorum winning every income group except those earning more than $200,000 a year, who went for Romney, according to CNN exit polls. He even won a plurality among those who say the economy is the most important issue, usually a Romney strength, CBS found. Romney won among those who placed the most emphasis on electability in November.

[T]he contest drew strikingly little national media attention, even though all four candidates campaigned in Louisiana. Journalistic attention remains heavily focused on whether Romney can win enough delegates to wrap up the nomination before the convention, blunting the impact of any particular state.

Further deflating the primary’s importance is that only 20 of Louisiana’s 46 delegates were at stake in Saturday’s voting.

Still, Santorum’s strong showing in Louisiana could help him resist pressure to fold his campaign and get behind Romney as the inevitable nominee—an argument made most recently by Jeb Bush when he endorsed the former Massachusetts governor.

Romney now moves to more favorable territory. Wisconsin, Maryland, and D.C. vote April 3, and three weeks later it’s New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware, along with Santorum’s home state of Pennsylvania.

The longer Santorum stays in the race, the more batshitery we can expect and the more Romney will pander to the far right - making his Etch A Sketch routine before November all the more blatantly obvious.