"A Catholic missionary"

This captivating portrait of Rick Santorum should send a signal loud and clear that this guy will not go gently into that good night next year, no matter how many bloggers line up against him. What's worse for Democrats, he may be indicative of a Republican Party that having cemented its own base, is eager to chip away at the opposition's:

When he last ran in 2000, he was endorsed by The Philadelphia Tribune, the city's largest black newspaper, and also by the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity. The support did not translate into many votes, but in a ''light blue'' state like Pennsylvania, it is enough for a Republican just to chip away, to cut into the huge plurality that a Democrat must take away from a city like Philadelphia -- much as President Bush did in November in the decisive state of Ohio, where his narrow victory was partly attributed to winning 16 percent of the black vote, better than the 9 percent he won in 2000. ...

I talked to Santorum several times over the course of a month in Washington, and I also traveled with him one day to Allentown, a struggling, midsize city about an hour north of Philadelphia. The core of the city has become largely Hispanic, mainly Puerto Rican. The people he encountered spoke to him, at times, as if he were a visiting holy man. ''You're a man of Christian principles and values, and our people will embrace you because your values are our values,'' Wanda Mercado-Arroyo, a Republican and community activist, told him as they rode in a car between events. Santorum just sort of nodded and smiled.

I know he's far behind in the polls, and I hope they prove to be prophetic, but it's just hard for me to believe that either this guy or this guy are the ones to bring him down.