This article is from the archive of our partner .
The thing has happened that pretty much everyone knew would happen, though we didn't know when, or how, exactly. Rick Santorum has left the proverbial building, or, less proverbially, the election playing field upon which he'd been hoping to win the GOP nomination for president. This is by his choice, as he announced: "We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we'll suspend our campaign effective today... we are not done fighting we are going to continue to fight."
It's been something of a rocky round between women and Rick Santorum in the past, as he seemed to have had a special way of offending some female or another at nearly every turn. And now that he's gracefully bowed out, we'd like to gracefully thank him. Because, in as much as he said almost everything wrong that he possibly could—single moms are creating criminals! Birth control is immoral! Women cannot control their emotions! (Wah!)—he may have done more for women than the cool, collected, reasonable and pro-woman Barack Obama ever could. This is a counterintuitive argument, of course, but there's a truth here: When people say extreme things that showcase ignorance and irrelevance, other people are better able to counter their statements with rationality and intelligence, and tend to come out all the better for it. (See "Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke.") It throws the ridiculousness in high relief, if you will. So while many will say Santorum (and more broadly the entire GOP) set us back 50 years, or even 60, we're going to say, sure, maybe he thrust the conversation back into the Mad Men era for a moment...but in doing that, the rest of us have become that much more adamant about taking it back to 2012. Or at least, that's the upside.