Last night’s debate in Arizona made me particularly sad because rather than celebrate the fact that the viewers got a pretty interesting and involved conversation about how the legislative process works, the media has to frame it in terms of a sporting event and talk about how Romney pained Santorum as an “insider” for defending earmarks. It’s particularly maddening to me that we can’t just sit back and let perceptions of the event unfold without injecting a baked-in-the-cake narrative about who “got punked.” What I like about Santorum is that he’s pretty up front about what it means to be a US Senator. The “I took one for the team” rationale for his No Child Left Behind vote should be seen as a politician being honest about what it means to pass legislation in a two party system with multiple checks. We are so ridiculously removed from what public life actually is that a Senator doing what a Senator is supposed to do is seen as duplicitous. The only Senator that can win the presidency seems to be one that has no interest in working with their party or engaging in the earmark process, in other words an awful Senator.

In some ways, it makes me wish we could create an alternative universe where we’d have five candidates running. You seem to have three distinct clusters of voters. Traditional fiscally conservative, mainstream, establishment Republicans who like the cut of Mitt Romney’s jib, evangelicals who are converging around Rick Santorum and libertarians who like Ron Paul’s endearing looniness. You could break up the Democratic party into at least two clusters. A communitarian who believes that government has a role to play in both social and economic life and a progressive that might want government to reduce inequality but wants government out of the bedroom. What would a debate look like with those five….. Paul, Romney, Santorum, Obama and Russ Feingold? As it is, you have to feel for libertarians and evangelicals. The ways the system is set up, they are unlikely to be able to vote for “their guy” come November. They’ll have to vote for the guy who isn’t the guy they hate.