DAYTONA BEACH SHORES -- The results of Tuesday’s primaries can be simply described: Santorum won – Gingrich lost – Romney forges ahead.

Barring cataclysms such as war nations, especially great nations, do not collapse overnight. Nations fall bit by painful bit, over many years, sometimes in such tiny slices that their own citizens do not realize what is happening around them. The Roman Empire’s fall took centuries. Europe collapsed between the years 1914-1945.

I just watched President Obama kick off his re-election campaign with the entire Congress as a backdrop. You have to give it to Obama, he is quite the showman. He may be short on substance and results but he certainly gives good theater.

The deficit: America needs selflessness and wisdom from its leaders

By Stanley Escudero of Daytona Beach Shores

Congress is congenitally incapable of agreeing on politically controversial issues like the debt ceiling until the last possible moment. Even then they can be counted on to seek the safest common denominator which usually means a partial agreement. That in turn kicks the hardest part of the problem into future congresses or leaves loopholes which future congresses can use to avoid making these same hard decisions.

The shadows dance around the flames. The Republicans walk out of the debt limit talks to dramatize their opposition to raising taxes. The president is dragged off the golf course and into the negotiations, whereupon he promptly makes a campaign speech promoting class warfare rather than seeking a debt crisis solution. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke scratches his head in puzzlement as his monetarist remedies fail to offset the damage to the economy exacerbated by the socialist policies of the Obama Administration.

And all of this is theater.

It is in the nature of these political confrontations that a solution will not be reached until the last possible second. The good of the nation be damned – there are too many political careers at stake to compromise before it is absolutely unavoidable.