Weigel

Howard Kurtz gets a great nugget in his story about Fox News and the 2012 GOP conversation.

Hours before last week’s presidential debate in Orlando, Ailes’s anchors sat in a cavernous back room, hunched over laptops, and plotted how to trap the candidates. Chris Wallace said he would aim squarely at Rick Perry’s weakness: “How do you feel about being criticized by some of your rivals as being too soft on illegal immigration? Then I go to Rick Santorum: is Perry too soft?”

“That’s going to get some fireworks going,” said managing editor Bill Sammon, grinning.

This would explain why Santorum, who is at 3 percent nationally in the latest CNN poll, and would probably lose the nomination to a gay soldier, got nine debate questions, while Ron Paul, who is in the high single digits nationally, got six. No one's saying this is a bad way of determining who is and isn't in debates, and who does and doesn't want to get called on. It's just to demonstrate that Santorum is a hurdle, not a candidate.