How Professional Conservatism Works

Digby nails it.

Rick Santorum at the end of January:

So I went up to NYC a couple of days ago for some meetings, and I was coming back yesterday on Amtrak. Sitting behind me I hear some guy coming up and greeting another guy, sitting behind me. I don't know who it is because they were sitting behind me, but I can hear the conversation. The one guy is being kind of a suck-up, and they start talking about being in conservative politics and that they need to deal with McCain. Then the other guy says great to see ya and walks away. So then the guy sitting behind me starts making phone calls on his cell. He's got a fairly loud and authoritative voice, so I can't help but overhear, and he's making call after call after call to tell various people that we've gotta find a way to beat McCain, just would be just awful, and going on and on about how much McCain sucks and that even having Hillary or Obama would be better than having McCain because he would just be horrible for the conservative movement because he just doesn't get the movement and he's always using liberal language to talk about things and how that's a terrible thing. And in one conversation with one person he was talking to, he was trying to talk him into coming out with a terrible story about McCain from five or six years ago, and he's like yeah, what he did to you was just incredible, and you should go public with that story, etc.

After a while I got up to go get something from the café cart, and it turns out the guy sitting behind me was Rick Santorum....

Rick Santorum at the end of April:

Here’s my final argument for John McCain. He’s not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.... Now is the time to come together.

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