Sayonara, Santorum. Buenos Noches, Newt.

Arsen Darnay asked me Sunday why I hadn't written any posts on the Republican primary since March 20th. The answer was twofold:

1) I blew my free time for the past few weeks on my Rotisserie baseball drafts instead of blogging.  I'm in three fantasy baseball leagues this year, which is just freaking nuts. And while I did write a four-post 10,000-word self-evaluation of my draft in the HQ Forum Masters League for a draft discussion on the Baseball HQ forums, I can't possibly imagine any of the ol' Patio Boat crowd possibly wants to read it.

(I'll prove that right now. If anybody asks for it, I'll be glad to copy it and paste it up here.  But only if you all promise to read it in its entirety then comment in depth afterwards. ... Do you hear that sound, blogosphere? 'Tis the sound of sparse crickets amid sheer silence. My post-draft manifesto shall apparently remain unread by the broader world.)

2) More importantly, nothing really happened in the last three weeks.  So what was there really to comment on?  Think back and compare the news of the last three weeks to the Weirdsville Carnival that was unleashed on Iowa just a few short months ago.

So, the primary's been in a bit of a holding pattern as Romney continued to put the squeeze on with greater resources and fundraising, while the party establishment accelerated its concession to the inevitable with endorsements, increasing structural support, and calls for Gingrich and Santorum to shut things down.  This week the political math finally finished its work as Gingrich scaled down his campaign and Santorum suspended operations altogether.

Newt Gingrich essentially conceded the campaign a few days ago, saying that he is now campaigning with a skeleton staff to "have an impact on the platform."  His campaign has long since lost its fundraising clout and is now $4.5 million in debt, and my guess is that the rest of this campaign will essentially be a campaign to pay off that $4.5 million.

How broke is Gingrich's campaign? He just bounced his $500 check for his Utah Primary filing fee.  Meanwhile, his health-care think tank just filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with less than $100,000 in assets and up to $10 million in debt.

The good news here is that we've all gained valuable insight into why Newt thought that additional tax cuts for the wealthy would fix the budget deficit.  He's apparently very bad at math that involves dollar signs.

Meanwhile, Rick Santorum's window of opportunity to win the nomination closed in mid-March.  After his surprise wins in Colorado and Minnesota on Feb. 7, he had finally emerged as the candidate who was not Mitt Romney.

"Not being Mitt Romney" has been an enormously popular position in this year's GOP primary. It's rather like being the backup quarterback on an NFL team with an iffy starter.  Everybody looks at the starter, says, "Meh," then professes undying love for the backup, sure that if he could only get off the bench he would prove the coaches wrong and lead the team to the Super Bowl.

Except then you watch the backup finally get into a game and it turns out that he really is worse than the guy with the first-team job.  After February 7 Santorum became the presidential candidate equivalent of Tyler Palko or Caleb Haney, ineptly tossing inexplicable interceptions and fumbling away opportunities. In the case of Santorum's campaign, his campaign's ineptitude ranged from repeated failures to file delegate slates in important states to the inexplicable decision to campaign for days in Puerto Rico on a platform of "you should speak English" while the Illinois primary hung in the balance.

Santorum went on to lose Puerto Rico to Romney by 88-13, the sort of final score that one expects to see in the Monday morning box scores when Curtis Painter or Luke McCown takes the field.

Tactical ineptitude aside, Santorum also tried to overtake Romney by shifting the campaign ground away from economic issues to social conservatism, a shift that may have done some lasting damage to the image of the entire GOP, especially with women.

Santorum surged to his surprise win in Iowa by projecting the image of a genial fellow in a sweater vest who wanted to return us to the good times of the 50's.  But as he tried to overtake Romney, Santorum decided that if a teaspoon of social conservatism was good campaign medicine, a two-ton helping of it was just the right dose. By late February he was still projecting the image of a fellow who wanted to return us to the 50s ... the pre-Reformation 1350s.

Worse yet for the Republican Party's general election hopes, Mitt Romney happily followed him out on that far-right limb, providing soundbites aplenty that I'm sure we will see replayed over and over again in September and October.

After Santorum missed his opportunities in Michigan, Alaska, Ohio, and Virginia the end game was upon us. By the time he began using "Reagan in 1976" analogy as his rallying cry in Illinois and Wisconsin, it was clear to everybody that even Rick Santorum understood that he'd missed his chance at the nomination.

And so ... what more was there for me to say until today, when the inevitable became official?

P.S. One final tidbit of sheer speculation.  I wouldn't be surprised if we learn one day that the last straw for Santorum was polling that showed him increasingly likely to lose to Romney in his home state of Pennsylvania.  For the last few weeks it's been clear that Santorum's campaign has been more about 2016 than 2012.  At this point Santorum has done enough to position himself well for another run in 2016 if Romney fails to win in November.  But losing his home state to a candidate who goes on to lose the general election would be a real setback, one that really could hurt him when it comes time to line up backers in four years. Just a thought.

Coming attractions: This might be about it for me in terms of blogging about this year's presidential campaign, though I might have an additional post or two looking back at the odd factual and political bubble in which this primary campaign was conducted. I might also have a few thoughts to share about SuperPACs.

For those who may be new here, the ol' Patio Boat has always been more of a friends-and-family blog than a hotbed of political commentary, and I aim to keep it that way.  So I'll probably keep the Patio Boat out of the heart of the impending partisan storm (though I'll be spending plenty of my own time campaigning for Obama's re-election.)

For example, it would be pretty easy for me to put together a long and rather pointed analysis of Mitt Romney's utter lack of conviction on any issue.  But frankly, I can't do better than his own campaign adviser's Etch-A-Sketch analogy.  And I guarantee that there will be no lack of clever commentary on that topic 'twixt now and November.

But it's been fun to write about this year's Republican presidential primary because our primary process is so strange; because it involved such an incredibly odd and colorful cast of characters; and because I didn't have a dog in this race, which left me free to comment impartially on the whole strange process.

And while I won't be steering the Patio Boat into the general election waters, this won't mark an end to political content here.  Now that the post-census redistricting process is wrapping up, I expect I'll return to that topic soon -- especially since I have some things to say that will be of interest to my friends and family members across the political spectrum.

Gerrymandering is disenfranchising you and wrecking our democracy.  And we can fix it.