A “Bell Hop For The Wealthy”: Rick Santorum’s Dubious Working-Class Creds
The latest polls show a Huntsman surge, and Santorum tanking in NH, so Santorum’s 15 minutes may be up sooner than later. But we shouldn’t let this political moment pass without a comment on the ‘Santorum as working-class hero’ snowjob.
Google Santorum +”working-class,” and you’ll pull up headlines like “Santorum fits working class bill,” “Like Rocky Balboa, Rick Santorum is a working class hero” and “Santorum: The Blue-collar Candidate – The former senator touts his working-class roots” etc. The conservative echo chamber is parroting the meme with impressive message discipline. Top conservative pundits, including Brooks, Will and Krauthammer have jumped on the Santorum as working-class hero bandwagon.
It’s not hard to understand why. One of the largest swing constituencies, the white working-class has trended toward the GOP in recent elections. According to Wall St. Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel
…Barack Obama did better than John Kerry or Al Gore with these voters, though even he earned just 43% of their vote…That was Mr. Obama’s high point. In 2010 a record 63% of this bloc voted for the GOP. And there are signs that, whether out of calculation or desperation, Team Obama may be abandoning them altogether–instead looking for 2012 victory in a progressive coalition of educated, socially liberal voters, combined with poorer ethnic voters, in particular Hispanics.The white working class will make up as much as 55% of the vote in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Front-runner Mitt Romney knows it, as does Mr. Santorum. Their fight in New Hampshire and beyond will increasingly be over who can earn more points with this group. Their styles are very different, if equally damaging to the conservative growth message.
Santorum is making a hard-sell pitch for the blue collar vote, as Strassel reports:
Mr. Santorum surged in Iowa as the “I’m One of You” candidate. On the stump, and in his victory speech in Iowa, he’s highlighted his working-class roots. He kicked off his campaign near the Pennsylvania coal mines where his grandfather worked, and he talks frequently of struggling steel towns…He’s the frugal guy, the man of faith, the person who understands the financial worries of average Americans. He’s directly contrasting his own blue-collar bona fides with those of the more privileged Mr. Romney.
In reality, however, Santorum’s working-class creds are awfully thin. His father was a clinical psychologist and his mother was an administrative nurse — clearly more of an upper middle-class upbringing than a blue collar culture. Yeah, he had a grandfather who was a miner, but it’s not like he grew up in a mining family as the GOP meme-propagators would have us believe.
Worse, much of his career in public office has been dedicated to serving as an eager bell-hop for the wealthy. More recently, as the Washington Post reported,
Santorum earned $1.3 million in 2010 and the first half of 2011, according to his most recent financial disclosure form. The largest chunk of his employment earnings — $332,000 — came from his work as a consultant for groups advocating and lobbying for industry interests. That included $142,500 to help advise a Pennsylvania natural gas firm, Consol Energy, and $65,000 to consult with lobby firm American Continental Group, and its insurance services client.
And, as Marcus Stern and Kristina Cooke recently reported for Reuters,
As a senator, Santorum went further, playing a key role in an effort by Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the political loyalties, of Washington’s deep-pocketed lobbying firms and trade associations, which had previously been bipartisan.Dubbed “the K Street Project” for the Washington street that houses most of these groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage lobbying firms to “hire people who agree with your worldview, not hire for access.”
…Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.”
Santorum has won some blue collar support by promoting his message of “industrial renewal,” and supporting protectionist measures, as John Nichols reports in The Nation. But, as Nichols, says, “There is no reason to overplay Santorum’s commitments. He is an economic conservative who would side more often with Wall Street than Main Street.”
In 2002, for example, Senator Santorum received a 15 percent rating from the AFL-CIO. Not many Senators had a lower score.
Republican strategists are so desperate for a candidate who can relate to the blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” that casting an arch conservative, silk-stocking lawyer like Santorum as a working class hero seems a reasonable stretch. If Santorum does recover from his latest poll dive, it shouldn’t be too hard for Dems to expose his policy agenda as more anti-worker than not.
Note from James Vega:
Using exactly the same, utterly and shamelessly idiotic “grandfather’s history plus general geographical area” theory of social class, Mitt Romney can claim to be “the authentic descendent and representative of Mexican-American autoworkers” – his grandfather lived in Chihuahua, Mexico most of his life and Romney himself grew up “in the shadows of the automobile factories of Detroit”
Newt, on the other hand, can polish his credentials in the African-American community by claiming to be “a scholar of African society whose congressional district was a short distance from Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement”.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, January 9, 2012
GOP Class Warfare: Make The Middle Class Pay
For viewers of Saturday night’s Republican presidential candidate debate, drawing distinctions between the leading candidates wasn’t hard. We may disagree on whether these men are presidential caliber, but as cartoon caricatures, they’re deliciously unique. Rick Santorum’s sexual obsessions, Rick Perry’s Texas war-mongering, Newt Gingrich’s ego, and Mitt Romney’s profound commitment to flip-flop, any time, anywhere, are all drawn in big, bright, Day-Glo colors. (Ron Paul is, of course, Ron Paul.)
But on one topic they are as alike as genetically modified peas in a pod. In an era in which Americans are paying historically low taxes and the government faces huge budget deficits, they are all fervently determined to give the richest Americans another huge tax break.
The Citizens for Tax Justice have crunched the numbers, and they are remarkable.
The cost of the tax plans proposed by Republican presidential candidates would range from $6.6 trillion to $18 trillion over a decade. The share of tax cuts going to the richest one percent of Americans under these plans would range from over a third to almost half. The average tax cuts received by the richest one percent would be up to 270 times as large as the average tax cut received by middle-income Americans.
The figures are staggering. Here’s a quick breakdown of how the richest one percent of Americans would stand to benefit under the different plans.
- Newt Gingrich: An average tax cut of $391,330
- Rick Perry: An average tax cut of $272,730
- Mitt Romney: An average tax cut of $126,450
- Rick Santorum: An average tax cut of $217,500
Ron Paul’s tax plan isn’t detailed enough to make the same analysis, but he has proposed repealing the federal income tax altogether, which, ideologically speaking, makes him a clear fellow traveler with the rest of his colleagues.
The CTJ report makes a little bit too much of the relative size of the tax cuts enjoyed by the richest Americans compared to the rest of us (for example, under Gingrich’s plan the middle fifth of Americans would get a $1,990 tax cut, a mere pittance compared to the $391,300 delivered to the rich.) In a proportional system, the numbers are always going to be much bigger for the richest Americans, whether we’re measuring hikes or cuts. But the report is right on the money when it points out who ends up really paying for the cuts. Affording the huge tax cuts plans proposed by the leading Republican presidential contenders will require massive cuts to government programs that primarily benefit the lower and middle classes.
Even the meager tax cuts that would go to low-income and middle-income taxpayers under these plans would almost surely be offset by the huge cuts in public services that would become necessary as a result.
GOP lawmakers in Washington are already calling for ending Medicare as guaranteed health insurance for seniors and reducing Social Security benefits, and these tax plans would make necessary even more draconian reductions in the types of public services that middle-income Americans depend on.
Rich Santorum told debate watchers Saturday night that he’d prefer it we just abolished the term “middle class” from the popular lexicon. Dividing up Americans according to their income levels just serves Obama’s “class warfare” agenda, claimed Santorum.
But it’s impossible to look at the tax plans proposed by Gingrich, Romney, et al. and not understand how class warfare really works in the United States today. The rich get a huge windfall — and the rest of us are supposed to pay for it.
By: Andrew Leonard, Salon, January 9, 2012
Mitt Romney And The Privileges Of The Very Wealthy: “Thanks, Much Obliged”
What better person than the French-speaking Mitt Romney to lay bare the pure beating heart of noblesse oblige.
Sunday morning’s NBC debate in Concord, N.H. was a vast improvement over the ABC one the night before — it occurred to the non-Romney candidates that they might want to train their fire on the man who’s up 20 points in the New Hampshire polls. Their focus trailed off as the debate progressed, but Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich did manage to produce a revealing exchange at the outset regarding Romney’s motivations to enter politics. They challenged Romney’s oft-repeated claim that he, unlike they, was no career politician but rather a man who saw running for office as the duty of a good citizen who, when his work is complete, returns like Cincinnatus to his plow, or to his carried-interest loophole for private equity investment managers, as the case may be. In the best zinger of the debate, Gingrich chalked this up as a bunch of “pious baloney.” But it is these lines of Romney that should get the attention. From Ben Smith’s writeup:
Mitt Romney suggested in today’s debate that only rich people should run for office, and then quickly celebrated the fact that he’d forced a rival to take out a loan against his house. Romney said his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, had told him, “Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage.”
“If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference,” he recalled his father telling him. “Also, don’t get in politics if your kids are still young because it might turn their heads.”
A few seconds later, he bragged about his run against Teddy Kennedy. “I was happy he had to take a mortgage out on his house to ultimately defeat me,” he said.
The exchange with Newt Gingrich brought out Romney at his most tone-deaf, and echoed his offer of a $10,000 bet to Rick Perry in an earlier debate. Romney’s rivals are already looking for ways to turn his wealth — and his tone-deaf treatment of it — into a liability. The Obama campaign regularly blasts him as out-of-touch with the lives of American workers.
So: the person running on the vision of a “merit” and “opportunity” society opposed to Barack Obama’s “entitlement” society believes that politicians should be independently wealthy, not peons who have to rely on the paltry earnings of a U.S. senator or governor. It’s worth noting that this is hardly the first time that Romney has depicted his move into politics in 1994 in this light. In his 2007 piece about Romney’s relationship with his father, who after running American Motors became governor of Michigan and ran for president in 1968, Jonathan Cohn wrote: “George Romney had always said the ideal time to run for public office was after you had achieved financial independence and your children were old enough to put up with the loss of privacy.” So Mitt today was just echoing the advice of the father he revered. But of all the aspects of George Romney that are to be admired — including many lacking in his son — this brand of noblesse oblige wasn’t one of them. Once again, I’m simply amazed that the Republican Party, at a time of heightened consciousness about the privileges of the very wealthy, is on the verge of nominating a quarter-billionaire who, when presented with the notion of running for president, says: thanks, much obliged.
By: Alec MacGillis, The New Republic, January 8, 2012
Why Romney’s Relationship With GOP Voters Is Like An Arranged Marriage
Other than the losing candidates themselves, the people unhappiest with the Iowa results must be journalists and Democrats.
Journalists for the simple and obvious reason that a fierce battle is a lot more interesting to watch, and to write about, than a triumphal march. And Democrats because, even though Mitt Romney didn’t emerge from the caucuses entirely unscathed, what he suffered was, as they used to say in old cowboy movies, “just a flesh wound.” And since Democrats know Romney is the most dangerous — arguably the only dangerous — Republican presidential candidate in the field, they would like to have seen him injured far more grievously than actually occurred. An eight-vote win isn’t much of a win (his margin of victory was even narrower than Al Gore’s in the 2000 presidential election), but no one can call it a defeat.
Perhaps the best way to think about Republican primary voters this year is to imagine them as the bride in an arranged marriage. Her parents have chosen well for her, better than she had any right to expect; she has no grounds for complaint and knows it. The groom they have found for her is responsible, decent, reliable, a good provider, and even very handsome. But he just doesn’t excite her. There’s nothing about him that makes her heart beat faster. When she contemplates a future being wedded to him, something inside her shrivels up and dies.
So in the months before the marriage she goes a little crazy. Spends her nights at the bars in a bad section of town. Lets inappropriate strangers buy her drinks, and goes home with more than a few of them. Deep in her heart, she knows her behavior isn’t merely ill advised, it’s foolhardy. These guys (and even one woman!) won’t make her happy even for a night, let alone a lifetime. They’re all wrong, and some of them are even a little nuts. But they’re dashing and dangerous and transgressive, and she’s in that heedless mood where she just doesn’t give a damn. By morning, she always realizes she’s made a dreadful mistake. But that’s desperation for you: She doesn’t want to be reasonable, she wants to rebel. And this is looking like her last chance. Of course, on some level, she’s aware she’s going to be marching down the aisle with Mr. Sensible soon enough.
For those of us watching this matrimonial crisis closely, the only question remaining prior to Iowa was whether there was time for one more folly before she came to her senses. We knew the identity of the one guy on a bar stool she hadn’t hooked up with, we just didn’t know if she’d have an opportunity to plant herself on the back of his Harley before reality set in. Well, as became evident in the last week before the Republicans caucused, the answer was yes.
As with each of her previous flings, she didn’t begin to know enough about this fellow before deciding he might be worth a tumble. Rick Santorum appears personable, boyish, and pleasant. He gives every indication of being an upright sort of person. But his politics are genuinely abhorrent, so far outside the American mainstream as to be almost Falangist. Once his views become more widely known, he would drive voters away in droves; with sufficient exposure, it’s unlikely he could carry a single state outside the deep South. The only reasons he did so well in Iowa are a) he was the last alternative still standing, and b) while he’s known to be conservative, a buzzword that makes Republicans salivate without requesting a definition, the full extent of his views aren’t well known at all, and would not survive scrutiny.
The battle isn’t quite over. Santorum hasn’t yet undergone the sort of examination that undid, in turn, Trump, Bachmann, Cain, Perry, and Gingrich. He might have time to make a little mischief in New Hampshire before that happens, and South Carolina might be congenial territory for him regardless. And he has a spirited, spiteful ally in Newt Gingrich. Gingrich feels aggrieved, and when Gingrich feels aggrieved, he gets mean. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he gets meaner. He must know he’s going down, but he’s going to do everything he can to pull Mitt Romney down with him. Pure personal vengeance. Many of Romney’s vulnerabilities are well enough known by now to occasion no surprise, but I think we’re going to see him suffer some serious new knife wounds, front and back, during the next few debates.
Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. But he will be a damaged nominee. Which isn’t to say he will lose — it’s much too early for those kinds of predictions — but it does mean his path to victory is steeper and more tortuous than it had to be.
Two other thoughts: President Obama’s recess appointment of Richard Cordray was, yes, an appropriate and justified exercise of executive power. But it was also, in a modest and opening-gambit sort of way, an announcement of how he is going to run for re-election this year: Like Harry Truman in 1948. His opponent will be not only Mitt Romney, but the Congressional Republican Party.
And most interestingly, I suspect Iowa may mark the turning point in the way the country views the Supreme Court’s recent, indefensible decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It was a decision most conservatives embraced when first issued, but the mischievous and entirely foreseeable consequences of this idiotic piece of jurisprudence are now visible for all to see. The fact that the State Supreme Court of a conservative state like Montana seems to agree has to be taken as a great big fat straw in the wind.
By: Erik Tarloff, The Atlantic, January 6, 2012
The GOP’s Peculiar Vocabulary Of Race
If Rick Santorum is upset that pretty much nobody believed him when he said he wasn’t talking about “black people” living off “somebody else’s money,” he has Newt Gingrich to blame. A day after the GOP’s flavor of the week changed stories and claimed, “I didn’t say black,” when he said, “I don’t want to make [something sounding like black] people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money,” Gingrich again called President Obama “the food stamp president.” He told reporters in New Hampshire, “I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”
On Thursday I performed the mental exercise of giving Santorum the benefit of the doubt, and laid out the way the GOP’s ’60s era rhetoric about “welfare queens” and “welfare cheats” has been updated to include much of the multiracial working class, including whites – including anyone who has a public sector job, a union-protected job, or collects unemployment, Social Security or Medicare. It seemed theoretically possible – while still hard to believe – that Santorum was merely sharing the new GOP line that we’re all welfare queens now, any of us who’ve ever benefited from a government program.
Then Gingrich made my thought exercise seem unduly kind, by demonstrating exactly why people should be inclined to distrust Santorum’s new story and believe he was talking about black people: The modern GOP seems unashamed of its prejudice.
It’s impossible not to believe that having our first black president unleashed a new round of GOP race-baiting, even leaving birtherism aside. In August, one of Obama’s few Republican friends, Sen. Tom Coburn, lapsed into shameful racial stereotyping trying to “defend” the president, telling an Oklahoma constituent that Obama’s “intent is not to destroy … It’s to create dependency because it worked so well for him … As an African-American male, coming through the progress of everything he experienced, he got tremendous benefit through a lot of these programs.” A black guy raised by a (white) single mother gets into Harvard Law School: In the everyday vocabulary of today’s Republican Party, he’s looking for a handout.
Ronald Reagan wrapped up the ugly racism of earlier Republicans in pretty paper when he claimed, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” and made the case that welfare — which he associated with Democrats — created “dependency” that harmed its recipients. You didn’t have to be angry or racist anymore to oppose welfare programs; you could say you were trying to help their recipients. Reagan also muted the rhetoric that associated welfare with race, at least a little. More than 30 years later, having a black president makes it seem safe, and necessary, to unwrap Reagan’s pretty paper and once again make plain the GOP’s political association between welfare and African-Americans. Make that, having a black Democratic president. This wouldn’t happen to President Herman Cain, would it?
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 6, 2012
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