James Carville chose these colorful words to describe Rick Santorum after Mitt Romney swept three Republican primaries Tuesday: "He was like a chicken with his head chopped off. The chicken is dead. The only person that don't know it is the chicken."
The Democratic strategist, not known to mince his words, said in a late-night interview with CNN that Santorum "can flop around all he wants to [but] they're not going to nominate him."
Romney seemed to come ever closer to clinching the GOP nomination when he emerged victorious in Maryland, Washington, D.C. and Wisconsin on Tuesday. Santorum signaled, however, that he would not be deterred, telling supporters in his home state of Pennsylvania that he is hoping to kick his campaign into high gear with a win in the April 24 contest there.
But Carville maintained that there is absolutely no chance of Santorum catching up to Romney.
"Republicans since 1944 have always nominated the frontrunner and they've done it again," he said. "There's really no surprise here, Romney just happens to be a little weaker and more limp than most of them - probably all of them - but Santorum can--he's going to go through and do what he has to do to understand that but Romney was the nominee from the get go in this thing."
And while the former Clinton aide didn't draw any comparisons between a dead animal and Romney, Carville also had some harsh words of criticism for the former Massachusetts governor, as he rejected the suggestion from some that the candidate has been growing stronger.
"He's probably going into it by most calculations the weakest Republican challenger in modern American history," Carville said. "So I don't know what the case exactly is that he's getting stronger. He just doesn't look like a very strong candidate to me."
