Michael Brendan Dougherty dismisses Santorum’s plans to seek the presidency again:
Rick Santorum is a political stiff whose entire 2016 campaign is premised on a historical accident: He was the last clown out of the anti-Romney clown car in 2012. His last statewide election in Pennsylvania was a 59–41 percent disaster for him, a politician swallowed up whole by the anti-Bush, anti–Iraq War wave of discontent.
On the campaign trail, Santorum’s true conviction is often his most unappealing feature. He believes so much in the power of his reasoning and in the truth of his conclusions, that he often attempts to argue his hecklers into agreeing with him. In town-hall environments he becomes the caffeinated leader of your college’s Henry Newman Center, debating theology with you until you fall asleep. He gives people the uncomfortable impression that he doesn’t possess ideas, but that his ideas possess him.
Larison sees little room for moralists like Santorum in today’s GOP:
I don’t know why Santorum would want to run again, but if he does he will find a party that is increasingly uninterested in or openly opposed to many of the things he has to say.
I’m not referring to his views on social issues, but to his blatant hostility to anything remotely libertarian on virtually every other kind of issue. Santorum remains a holdover from a time when some Republicans were proud to identify as supporters of an activist and growing government, he seems to have a visceral loathing for libertarians in the party, and he is arguably the most hawkish politician likely to run in 2016. In the next election, he would be running for the nomination of a party that has become considerably more libertarian, more skeptical of government, and less inclined to intervene militarily overseas. Santorum is the embodiment of all the things that many on the right have disliked about the GOP over the last fifteen years, and he is personally abrasive enough that he manages to make all of his favorite causes less appealing than they might otherwise be.
Savage laughs, but he isn’t letting down his guard:
Rick Santorum is a joke, I realize. My readers helped to make him one. But Ronald Reagan was a joke in 1965 when Tom Leher recorded “George Murphy.” If we don’t want the joke to be on us, we had better pay attention to—and continue to heap mockery upon—the joke that is Rick Santorum.
The Dish 