With Rick Santorum’s “suspension” of his campaign yesterday, Mitt Romney is all but guaranteed the Republican nomination for president now (sorry, Newt) (oh, Ron, are you still here? Sorry, I didn’t see you way over there.)

Here’s my brief take on Romney: he is an out of touch buffoon, and the kind of elitist that Republicans usually love, unless they’re tryin’ to be folksy. He is also quite good at telling people what they want to hear. He morphed from a somewhat-centrist conservative to a faux-right-wing wackjob over the course of a few months, and presumably now he is going to try to dial it back. For my part, at least, I hope everyone remembers that Mitt Romney passed a bill much like Obamacare first, but at least Obama had the cojones to stand up for his version of health care reform.

I will say this for Santorum: he is principled, and he is (mostly) disciplined in standing up for those principles. I won’t call his principles “psychotic,” because mental illness is a real problem that deserves attention and care. Santorum’s principles are regressive, authoritarian, divisive, antiquated, unrealistic, misogynistic, racist, ethnocentric, heteronormative, homophobic, fearful, cowardly, inconsistent, hypocritical, elitist, ignorant, insensitive, oppressive, boring, prudish, and just plain wrong.

An article this morning at The Daily Beast by apparent-crazy-person Patricia Murphy purports to highlight Santorum’s strengths and outline how Romney can emulate them. It is a virtuoso performance of misused words:

As Santorum showed during his speech earlier, and Romney reinforced later, the GOP field has lost something very important with Santorum’s departure—a passionate conservative who speaks from the heart, talking not only about his own life, but the lives of people across America who face the same struggles. The GOP is now left with Romney, a man at odds with his party’s base, but more important, a likely nominee at arm’s length from his party’s heart and soul.

I really hope she defines “the same struggles,” because Santorum tends to speak for the dwindling evangelical white ostensibly-conservative faction of America, and few others.

Even as he withdrew from the race, Santorum framed improving the economy as a fight for a country like the one his grandfather left Italy for, when the American Dream was still possible, a country “willing to raise us up instead of trying to provide for us and do for us what we can better do for ourselves.” He also talked about people who have been left behind during the downturn: “Those who are out there paddling alone, who are feeling left behind and in some respects feeling hopeless.”

At first, I just assumed he meant that he had a grandfather who fought on the Italian campaign in World War II. Oh snap! World War II reference brings instant voter support, right? Actually, through the power of Google and an investment of fifteen seconds (less time than it took to type this paragraph), I learned that he probably means his grandfather Pietro Santorum, who left Italy for America in 1920. This was before Mussolini came to power and during the time the United States was gearing up for the Great Depression. I don’t know what the elder Santorum endured as an immigrant in the United States, but he probably had to deal with demagogue politicians seeking to exploit immigrant populations to score political points. That sort of politician is still around today. Let me think of an example…..Rick Santorum comes to mind.

With a set of core beliefs, it has been easy for Santorum throughout the course of the campaign to stay consistent. While Romney has been defined by the changes in his positions over the years, Santorum’s speech Tuesday was remarkably like every town hall he held in Iowa and like the speech he gave to kick off his campaign nearly a year ago.

There is nothing inherently wrong with changing positions on an issue, but it should be for a valid reason, i.e. new information or evidence, changing circumstances, etc. Romney, by and large, has not had good reasons for changing his positions, unless “this is what I think you want to hear” is a good reason (SPOILER ALERT: It’s not a good reason). Santorum, on the other hand, has had good reasons to change his position on many issues. For example, he would be entirely justified in changing his position on contraception on the grounds that it is the 21st century (or the fact that there are no valid non-Biblical grounds for opposing the legality of contraception, and even the Biblical ground is shaky).

As we all learned, painfully at times, from the George W. Bush administration, being steadfast and resolute does no good if you are wrong.

In June 2011, with his family by his side again, he spoke about his grandfather and the American Dream. He talked about “moral currency,” gas prices, the Obama administration’s record on federal spending, and “the rest of America out here trying to survive.”