Santorum Signs Off

This afternoon, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum announced that he was suspending his campaign.  The senator made the announcement from Gettysburg, Pa.

According to CBS News, the announcement came a day after Santorum’s daughter Bella was released from a Virginia hospital. Bella, the youngest of seven children, suffers from a rare genetic condition called Trisomy 18. She was hospitalized Friday. It was her second hospitalization in recent months. She had been hospitalized in January with pneumonia.

“We were very concerned about our roles as being the very best parents that we can be to our children,” Santorum said. “We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, we will suspend our campaign effective today. We are not done fighting.”

“Against all odds we won 11 states, millions of votes,” said Santorum, who said he found more support and a deeper love for this country than he could imagine. “It was a love affair for me, going state to state, and seeing the difference. I care deeply about where this country is going and the people who are feeling left behind or hopeless.”

While Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich are still in the race, it’s all but certain that moderate Mitt Romney will win the nomination.  The GOP contends that he was the only candidate with a chance to beat Obama in November.  To Conservatives, their anybody-but-Obama strategy only means that if Romney wins, the inevitable socialization of the United States will be deferred.

All the fiscally-conservative Romney will do is take us down that road at a slower pace.  He’s still a Big Government candidate; it’s unlikely he’ll do anything to release its strangle-hold on the American people and the American culture.  Getting us out of debt is a giant step towards retaining our liberty so that no other nation controls the American people.  We’re far from any guarantee that our own government won’t go on regulating us into submission.

Santorum was our only hope, and he was a faint hope, at that.  If he isn’t a Big Government Guy, he is a Big Union guy.  His finances and his family’s health problems precluded him from staging any significant campaign against the well-financed Romney and the GOP machine.

So it seems we must accept Romney whether we like it or not, just as we were forced to accept McCain.  Sadly, the GOP, in its arrogance, sees nothing wrong with this, nothing wrong with rejecting Conservative values, nothing wrong in negotiating with Progressive Liberals (mainly because they’re Progressive Republicans).  No wonder they get along so well with Big Business and even Small Business.  They figure they have us over the electoral barrel, thanks to the brainwashing of several generations by Progressive Radicals.

Once again, we must sit and fume, and either pull the lever for a candidate we don’t want or stay home.  Here in New Jersey, we never even got a chance to decide, unless we just write in Santorum’s name on the primary ballot as a vote of no-confidence.  If we really want Conservatives to win, more Conservatives are going to have to get themselves onto the county and state primary boards, where the decisions about who will run are made.  If you are a delegate, do your job.  As for the GOP, they’ll never get another donation from me again.  They’ve sent enough mailings to wallpaper my study; they’ve all gone in the trash.

Whoever the candidate is, we Conservatives still have a lot of work to do.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell those I know within the Tea Party:  it’s not about the candidates; it’s about the people who vote.  Visibility is everything.  We will not change anyone’s minds hiding behind closed doors or beggaring ourselves to politicians whose votes have already been bought.

It’s all about we the people, not them, the politicians.