An End to a Divisive Presidential Campaign Rick Santorum's exit from the Republican presidential race deprives it of its most divisive and most sincere candidate. Where Newt Gingrich has sought new and increasingly cynical ways to pander, and Mitt Romney has desperately tried to swim away from his centrist past, Mr. Santorum seemed to believe what he was saying. He could stand at a microphone in a small Iowa town and make the preposterous claim that health care reform was a fundamental assault on American liberty and connect with voters who sensed that he shared their unfounded fear of government. Mr. Romney could never make that sale, having enacted his own version of universal health care as governor of Massachusetts. But the biggest reason for the improbable rise of Mr. Santorum was his appeal to the most extreme social conservatives and evangelical Christians. His problem, in the end, was that there just weren't enough of them. Mr. Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, sensed early on that Mr. Romney was not adequately feeding the fury of the religious right toward President Obama, and he found a singular way to combine contempt for government with the fervor of faith. When Mr. Obama would make a public-health argument in favor of prenatal testing, or insurance coverage for contraceptives, Mr. Santorum wouldn't just disagree with him. He would accuse the president of trampling on religious freedom. Mr. Obama's ideas of public policy constituted a "phony theology," he said, an incendiary charge in a volatile political environment, as was his skeptical statement that "the president says he's a Christian." Mr. Santorum didn't care about the damage he caused because it won him states with high concentrations of evangelical voters. Mr. Santorum's strategy was insufficient, however, in part because there were enough primary voters who recognized that an extremist social message would crumble against the president in the general election campaign. He was also unable to compete with Mr. Romney's vastly superior organization and money. With the race for the nomination now essentially over, Mr. Romney may be tempted to court Mr. Santorum's voters with a similar appeal. His embrace of the Paul Ryan budget, with its unconscionable cuts to the social safety net, represents an economic extremism not that different from Mr. Santorum's. But, for the most part, he has stayed away from trying to split the country along religious lines. The country will benefit if that kind of politics departs from the campaign along with the man who practiced it.