“He’s Gone Far Enough”: Why The Republican “Establishment” Can’t Stomach Rick Santorum
While winning big in Alabama and Mississippi, Rick Santorum has also swept some other important primaries of late—the magazine primaries—picking up the enthusiastic support of Bill Kristol and other conservative editors and writers who think the former Pennsylvania senator is the real deal.
I am a conservative who has worked for Republicans in the Republican National Committee, Senate, White House, and California governor’s office. I guess that makes me an “establishment Republican.” To paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, if Rick Santroum is what you want, then include me out.
Why do so many Republicans with political experience shudder so at the thought of Rick Santorum as our party’s standard-bearer?
After all, Rick Santroum is prolife. But then, so am I.
He’s prodefense? So am I.
Skeptical of the regulatory state? Check.
Budget-cutter? True, Santorum was an earmark enthusiast, but he makes an articulate case against the budgetary incontinence of the Obama administration.
Moreover, he generates real enthusiasm with his base and can connect with blue-collar folks in the Midwest we used to call Reagan Democrats.
Why, then, can’t I go there?
I couldn’t define it until I recently read Mark Twain’s account of his return to Hannibal, Missouri, in Life on the Mississippi.
Twain wrote:
The Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie, and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.
As for the contents of Santorum’s skull, I see not pie-filling but a zest for culture war. Launching a culture war now would fracture the Republican Party, while striking independent voters as massively beside-the-point with near 9 percent unemployment and an international situation pregnant with danger.
In the face of such a simple political target as President Obama, Santorum simply cannot stay on message. He and his people feel compelled to go beyond the issue of religious liberty to let us know that he believes contraception is morally wrong. I respect his right to that belief—and I join him in passionately upholding the right of the Catholic Church not to be coerced into acting against its doctrine on contraception. But that doesn’t mean I embrace that belief itself. I don’t. And I sure don’t want to hear about contraception from the bully pulpit of the White House—neither do tens of millions of other Republicans, many of them Catholics.
Or take Santorum’s strange denouncement of President Obama as a “snob” for wanting people to go to college. Or his odd diatribe against John F. Kennedy over his classic speech on separation of church and state. Both statements may contain many yeasty issues and fine distinctions—all of them are irrelevant to beating Obama.
And really, how tone-deaf do you have to be to launch an out-of-the-blue attack on JFK?
Like the Model Boy, Santorum is divisively pure. Such purity cannot win because it cannot command a coalition. And the key to a coalition is acceptance of people who share your basic objectives but who are not like you.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt repeatedly won the presidency by stitching together a coalition of Northern liberals and segregationist southerners who shared a belief in a stronger role for government. Ronald Reagan won two terms with his “big tent” of southern conservatives, blue-collar voters in the Midwest, and Western libertarians. Some avid Reagan supporters wanted to change the Constitution to re-establish school prayer. Other avid Reagan supporters legalized prostitution in Nevada.
The Reagan coalition may have frayed, but it remained together because everyone in the tent wanted smaller government and an end to Communism.
A winning Republican campaign today would have to bring together evangelicals, libertarians, defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and Tea Party enthusiasts united against Obama. Then it would have to move independents disaffected from Obama—but not if they are scared away by Rick Santorum.
Santorum, chastened by the loss of Ohio, is visibly struggling to stay on the economic message. But there always seems to be yet another strange observation suppressed behind those pursed lips. He can’t keep it under wraps. Count on it. A Santorum nomination would be guaranteed to blow up the party by focusing on the wrong issues at the wrong time.
Twain ended his riff on the Model Boy thusly:
This fellow’s reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life.
Santorum has already succeeded in life. He’s gone far enough.
By: Mark W. Davis, U. S. News and World Report, March 16, 2012
“A Campaign Of Denial”: Mitt Romney Meets “Peasants With Pitchforks”
Political revolutions leave chaos in their wake. Republicans cannot shut down their presidential nominating contest just because the party is in the midst of an upheaval wrought by the growing dominance of its right wing, its unresolved attitudes toward George W. Bush’s presidency, and the terror that the GOP rank and file has stirred among the more moderately conservative politicians who once ran things.
When Pat Buchanan ran for president in the 1990s, the conservative commentator lovingly referred to his partisans as “peasants with pitchforks.” The pitchfork brigade now enjoys more power in Republican politics than even Buchanan thought possible.
Mitt Romney is still the Republican front-runner by virtue of the delegates he relentlessly piles up. But Romney keeps failing to bring this slugfest to a close. No matter how much he panders and grovels to the party’s right, its supporters will never see him as one of their own.
One senses that the conservative ultras are resigned to having to vote for Romney in November against President Obama. They are determined not to vote for him twice, using the primaries to give voice to their hearts and their guts. They will keep signaling their refusal to surrender to the Romney machine with its torrent of nasty advertisements and its continuing education courses in delegate math designed to prove that resistance is futile.
The more they are told this, the more they want to resist.
Rick Santorum is a superb vehicle for this cry of protest. He is articulate but unpolished. He has pitifully few resources compared with the vast treasury at Romney’s disposal, but this only feeds Santorum’s David narrative against the Goliath that is Team Romney.
Santorum’s purity as a social and religious conservative is unrivaled, and his traditional family life — he’s always surrounded on primary nights by a passel of kids — contrasts nicely with Newt Gingrich’s rather messy personal history. It is no accident that, while Gingrich narrowly carried the ballots of men in Tuesday’s Alabama and Mississippi primaries, he was routed among Republican women who were decisive in Santorum’s twin triumphs. It was the conservative version of the personal being the political.
And while Republicans shout to the heavens against class warfare, they are as affected as anyone by the old Jacksonian mistrust of the privileged whose football knowledge comes not from experience or ESPN but from their friendship with the owners of NFL franchises. In Mississippi and Alabama, Romney again prevailed among those with postgraduate educations and incomes of more than $100,000 a year. He was defeated by those with less money and fewer years in school.
The revolt of the right-wing masses means that Romney stands alone as the less than ideal representative of a relatively restrained brand of conservatism. The growing might of the conservative hard core, reflected in its primary victories in 2010, led other potential establishmentarians to sit out the race in the hope that the storm will eventually pass.
But having decided to run, Romney must wage a campaign of denial. He buries his old Massachusetts self and misleads about what he once believed. He even tries to run to Santorum’s right. Recently, he denounced Santorum for voting in favor of federal support for Planned Parenthood, a group to which Romney’s family once made a donation. It is an unseemly spectacle.
Bush’s efforts to craft a “compassionate conservatism” friendlier toward those in the political middle collapsed into ruins years ago. This year’s Republican candidates almost never speak Bush’s name. It is to Santorum’s discredit that he did not dare defend his perfectly defensible vote in favor of Bush’s No Child Left Behind education program. Santorum, too, fears the pitchforks wielded by those who see any exertion of federal authority as leading down a road to serfdom.
And so it is on to Illinois, the next place Romney has to win to keep the resistance at bay. The Land of Lincoln would be a fine setting for a stand in favor of a more measured form of conservatism. But it won’t happen. Romney is anxious about the power of the Republican right in downstate Illinois — the very region that opposed Honest Abe in his celebrated Senate race 154 years ago.
Once again, Romney will take the moderates for granted, ignoring the last remnants of the old Lincoln party as he chases after an elusive right. And once again, Santorum’s battle cry will challenge conservatives to have the courage to complete the revolution they started the day Barack Obama took office.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 14, 2012
“Turning Back The Clock”: What The South’s Scary Republican Electorate Says About The GOP
There has been a lot written about the make-up of the Republican primary electorate in 2012. By now, it has become clear how very conservative they are, how many of them are evangelicals, how social issues motivate many of them, and how truly angry they are at President Obama.
As I have written before, this is not your mother’s Republican Party.
But the latest polls by the reputable and respected Public Policy Polling group in Tuesday’s primary states of Alabama and Mississippi tell a pretty disturbing story. They surveyed 656 likely Republican voters in Mississippi and 600 in Alabama this past week.
In Alabama, 45 percent described themselves as “very conservative” and 36 percent as “somewhat conservative”; in Mississippi, those numbers were 44 percent and 34 percent respectively. Not a huge shock there.
In Alabama, 68 percent describe themselves as “Evangelical Christian.” In Mississippi, that percentage was 70 percent. Again, not that surprising in the deep South.
But here comes the more disturbing news: In Alabama, 60 percent do not believe in evolution. In Mississippi, the figure is 66 percent.
When it comes to interracial marriage, 29 percent of Republican primary voters in Mississippi believe it should be illegal. In Alabama, 21 percent think it should be illegal.
Now, both of those last two answers would really mean turning back the clock!
And on Barack Obama’s religion, in response to the straightforward question, “Do you think Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim or are you not sure?” the answers are scary. In Alabama, 14 percent say Christian, 45 percent say Muslim, 41 percent are not sure. In Mississippi, 12 percent say Christian, 52 percent say Muslim, and 36 percent are not sure.
Several years ago we saw disturbing numbers on the Muslim question, but there has been enough publicity, enough coverage, enough debunking of the false accusations, that one would think that people would have moved on. Not so.
Why do the most engaged voters in Republican primaries seem to hold views that are outright false? Is the hatred of Obama so visceral that they will believe anything that comes across the Internet? Are their views reinforced by friends and neighbors? Do they simply not believe any facts when they are presented?
The truly scary thing is that though these numbers are from two states, this is looking less like an aberration. The Republican primary voters over the last few decades have become increasing more radically conservative, the delegates to the conventions more far right, the Republican Party more rigid. It was impossible for Sen. John McCain to nominate a Tom Ridge or a Joe Lieberman as vice president—too pro-choice. The platform at each convention has become more conservative, especially on social issues. The no-tax pledge has become a needless straight-jacket, yet signed by virtually all Republicans in Congress.
But, these two polls show a remarkable closed-mindedness when it comes to issues of race and religion that many thought were settled with open-mindedness. Apparently not.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
“Keeping Things In Tumult”: Newt Gingrich Is Mitt Romney’s Secret Weapon
For someone who thinks the “elite media” has “anointed” Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich is doing a pretty good job of helping the former Massachusetts governor get the nomination.
Gingrich, a former House Speaker, has virtually no real hope of amassing the number of delegates needed to sew up the GOP nomination ahead of the convention in Tampa. His only chance is to keep things so in tumult that the party doesn’t know what to do, and then—well, anoints Gingrich at the convention. But staying in the race is arguably having the opposite effect, since Gingrich’s presence in the race serves largely to divide the anti-Romney vote. That deprives former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum of delegates in many states, especially southern states where evangelicals and social conservatives are wary of Romney. Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama, with Gingrich second and Romney a close third in both states. But if Gingrich hadn’t been in the race, it’s likely that the votes—and the delegates proportionately assigned—would have gone to Santorum.
Santorum, too, is highly unlikely to get the delegates needed to secure the nomination. But if he was established as the single, conservative alternative to Romney, he’d be picking up more votes and delegates. And the more he gets, the more he can try to convince people that Romney’s biggest political asset—his electability—is not unique to him in the field.
It’s frustrating for candidates when the media calls someone a “front-runner” early on, because it makes it harder for so-called back-benchers to get taken seriously. It’s particularly irritating when the moniker is assigned before a single vote is cast. Hillary Clinton, for example, was deemed the “front-runner” for the Democratic nomination in 2008 even before a single primary was held. The determination was based on early polls, which themselves were driven a good deal by name recognition. But Barack Obama overcame early expectations and won both the nomination and the presidency.
Gingrich, perhaps, had a legitimate gripe about the way his chances were described last year—though staff exoduses and bad judgment (that Tiffany’s revolving line of credit? The luxury cruise vacation in the middle of a campaign?) had something to do with it, too. But Republicans are now halfway through their primary campaign, and Gingrich has won only two states—his home state of Georgia and the neighboring state of South Carolina. That’s not the fault of an “elite media” bent on nominating Romney. That’s what GOP voters are deciding.
Gingrich seems to want to stay in the race, and as long as he can do so financially, why not? But if he doesn’t make it, he should look at the primary results—not the newspapers.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, March 14, 2012
“Invested In Economic Failure”: The GOP Plans To Sink The Economy
We’re just under eight months away from Election Day now, which means that the GOP is starting to run out of time to think up new ways to ruin the economy so that Barack Obama doesn’t get reelected. The Republicans have to do this delicately, of course; they can’t be open about it lest it become too obvious that harming the economy is their goal. But they have to be aggressive enough about it for their efforts to bear some actual (rotten) fruit. There are three fronts—gas prices, jobs, and the budget—on which we should keep our eyes open for signs that the Republicans are trying to achieve Mitch McConnell’s No. 1 goal for America.
Let’s take them in order. The Republicans received joyous news Monday in the form of the Washington Post poll that showed Obama’s numbers sinking in inverse proportion to rising gas prices. The gas situation is perfect for the GOP for two reasons. First, there’s very little a president can actually do about gas prices. Second, even though those prices don’t really tell us much about the more general economy, most people have the impression that they do, so for the out-party, it’s just a free whack.
No one can blame Republicans for using Obama as a piñata on the issue. But here’s what they can be blamed for. What is causing these high prices? Not low supply and high demand, which is what they teach you in school. In fact, supply is high—domestic oil production is at its highest point in years, higher under this allegedly business-hating president than under oilmen Bush and Cheney. And demand has been low because of the economy, although it’s now picking up.
No, experts blame a lot of the increase on fervid speculation in the oil markets, and a chief reason for a lot of that speculation is anxiety in those markets about a possible war with Iran. Said anxiety, in turn, is heightened every time a politician blusters about how we have no choice now but to go start that war. So this kind of rhetoric is a nice little two-fer for Republicans, who get to sound like tough guys and can also take comfort in knowing that the more they talk up attacking Iran, the more they’re doing their small part to keep prices high.
Now let’s look to jobs. As you may know, while we’ve been getting these hopeful job reports these last few months, there is one sector that’s been lagging notably: the public sector. In fact, during 2011 the public sector across the country—state and local governments, in addition to the feds—laid off massive numbers of people. Public-sector job losses averaged 22,000 a month in 2011. State and municipal governments are laying people off mainly for two reasons: the economy, which means they’re bringing in less revenue, and the drastic cuts in federal aid, which have forced the layoffs and firings of nearly half a million public-sector workers in the last two years.
True, Republicans want smaller budgets on ideological grounds. But they also know very well that the more domestic discretionary spending cuts they can force, and the more public employees they can make states and cities shave off their payrolls, the greater the negative effect on the overall employment picture. If those nearly half-million people were still working, what would the unemployment rate be? Maybe down to a flat 8 percent.
Lately, though, things are starting to look worrisome on that front for Republicans. In February, the public sector cut just 6,000 workers, well down from last year’s average. This indicates that the party might not be able to count for long on the public-sector numbers dragging down the private-sector ones. Hmmm. What to do about that?
Interestingly and conveniently, exactly what the Republicans on Capitol Hill are doing right now! They have been signaling lately that the budget numbers they agreed to with Democrats last year in the debt deal need to be revisited, and the cuts must be even deeper. Speaker John Boehner is open about the possibility of reneging. He has sent some mixed signals—he’s also talked about trying to get the House to accept a transportation bill that the Senate has already passed by the eye-poppingly bipartisan margin of 85–11. New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer says the bill can create 3 million jobs. The House returns to Washington next Monday. Where would you put the odds that this House of Representatives will vote, less than eight months before the election, to support a bill that Chuck Schumer boasts can produce 3 million jobs?
Every out-party does a little discreet cheering for the economy to be weak. But the GOP has put itself in a unique position. By opposing everything Obama wanted with such ferocity; by saying all those thousands of times that he had no clue about the economy; by sending out a parade of presidential candidates, from the semi-serious to the clown posse, all of whose central criticism of Obama is that he killed the economy—in all of these ways the party has more invested in economic failure than any out-party I can remember in my lifetime. Its best hope for now is gas prices, but even they eventually get lower, usually by late summer. Beyond that, all the GOP has to rely on is Mitt Romney’s unstoppable charisma.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 13, 2012
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