After winning Oklahoma, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Kansas on saturday, Rick Santorum won the religious right-wing of the Republican party, but his victory came at the price of becoming nationally unpopular (44.5% disapproval and 33% approval of Santorum) and allowing Mitt Romney to squeak out wins in Michigan and Ohio. Just enough Republican voters have been buying Mitt Romney's claim that he can reinvigorate the US economy to edge him toward the nomination, no matter how successful Santorum is with thrilling social conservatives. To win the nomination, Santorum must hammer into public consciousness that Mitt Romney failed miserably to create jobs as Governor of Massachusetts.
Massachusetts under Romney ranked 47th in job creation; by 2006 Massachusetts had 16,000 less jobs than in 2002. Job growth in New York was three times faster; in California jobs growth was 5 times faster; and jobs growth in North Carolina was 8 times faster than in Massachusetts during Romney's tenure. See Wall Street journal article at: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2010-02-23/commentary/30748666_1_mitt_romney_jobs_growth_massachusetts.
The people of Massachusetts hired Mitt Romney to do for them what Romney now says he will do for the America--create jobs and economic growth. Romney failed and would have been fired by the voters had he run for re-election.
Yet fixated on ideology and so misses Romney's jugular, Newt Gingrich calls Romney a "moderate" or "liberal" Governor of Massachusetts and heads off on one more riff about Romneycare. A better adjective is "failed," and it still is the jobs issue that will decide the nomination and the general election.
If Republican voters become aware of Romney's lousy jobs record as Governor of Massachusetts, Romney's last claim to the nomination will meltdown.
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