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
An “Entangled Legacy”: The Sordid K Street Past Of Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum has received, and courted, plenty of comparisons with Mike Huckabee since his near-victory in the Iowa Caucuses, but not all of them have been earned. Yes, like Huckabee in 2008, Santorum has been heavily dependent on grassroots campaigning, with direct appeals to evangelical voters, and a veneer of folksy, blue-collar economic populism. But the comparison ought to stop there. What Santorum cannot match is Huckabee’s status as a genuine Washington outsider, someone untainted by the corrupt dealings inside the beltway. Indeed, Santorum’s record shows him to be deeply connected to the ethically unsavory and legally dubious world of DC influence-peddling.
Since losing his Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2006, Santorum has used his connections to land a series of highly-paid jobs. Consol Energy, a natural gas company specializing in “hydrofracking” and the fifth-largest donor to his 2006 campaign, paid him $142,000 for consulting work. He also earned $395,000 sitting on the board of United Health Services (UHS), a for-profit hospital chain whose CEO made contributions to his Senate campaigns and which stood to benefit from a big hike in Medicare payments Santorum proposed in 2003. (Incidentally, the Department of Justice sued UHS for Medicare and Medicaid fraud during Santorum’s four-year tenure on its board.) Santorum also earned paychecks from a religious advocacy group, a lobbying firm, and a think tank. For pushing legislation benefitting UHS and several other companies, one ethics group named Santorum to its “most corrupt Senators” list.
Santorum has made his post-Senate career doing the sort of quasi-lobbying that helped sink Newt Gingrich’s campaign in Iowa. But in fact, while still in office, he was a central actor in an even more sordid venture: The K Street Project. Started in 1989 by GOP strategist Grover Norquist and brought to prominence by former House majority leader Tom DeLay in 1995, the K Street Project was a highly organized effort to funnel Republican Congressional staffers into jobs at lobbying firms, trade organizations, and corporations, while attempting to block Democrats from those same posts. From 2001 until 2006, Santorum was the Project’s point man for the Senate, while House Majority Whip Roy Blunt manned the House side.
In 2006, the K Street Project was effectively forced to shut down amid public outcry; the following year, an ethics reform law made such outfits illegal. But in its heyday, it helped create an unprecedented revolving door between the White House, Congress and K Street, blurring distinctions between Republican policy and corporate welfare. As Elizabeth Drew put it in a 2005 New York Review of Books piece, “Democratic lobbyists have been pushed out of their jobs as a result; business associations who hire Democrats for prominent positions have been subject to retribution. They are told that they won’t be able to see the people on Capitol Hill they want to see.” Nicholas Confessore, in a groundbreaking 2003 Washington Monthly expose of the Project, detailed the goal bluntly: “First, move the party to K Street. Then move the government there, too.”
At the center of all this was Santorum. According to Confessore, Santorum conducted weekly breakfasts with lobbyists, and occasionally Congressmen and White House staff, during which he attempted to match Republican Hill staffers with K Street job openings. As Confessore put it, “Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican—a Senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated.” The group refused to meet with Democrats, and threatened sanctions against lobbies that did.
Revolving door tactics, until then de facto lobbying policy, were formalized and transformed into a “pay to play” system by the K Street Project. In 2003, after the top post at The Motion Picture Association of America went to a Democrat instead of a Republican, House Republicans reneged on an impending tax break, hitting the movie industry with a $1.5 billion bill. After the Democrat was chosen, Roll Call reported that “Santorum has begun discussing what the consequences are for the movie industry.” (Santorum, though he often denies his involvement in the K Street Project, more or less confirmed his involvement in the MPAA flap.) Later that year, the Washington Post revealed that the House Financial Services Committee pressured a consortium of mutual funds to oust a top lobbyist who was a Democrat in exchange for relaxing a pending investigation. After the smoke cleared, she was replaced by a Republican.
Whether the K Street Project was truly successful is up for debate. Confessore and Drew’s reports portray intimidated and marginalized Democratic lobbyists. According to a 2003 Washington Post story, a Republican National Committee official boasted that 33 of 36 top lobbying jobs had recently gone to Republicans. Former lobbyist Patrick Griffin, now an adjunct professorial lecturer at American University, told me that the project embodied the brazen crudeness of “DeLayism,” but also suggested that most lobbying firms and corporations were not “stupid” enough to purge Democratic staff and risk alienating much of the Hill.
What is clear is how much Santorum’s legacy is entangled with the two most corrupt political figures of the last decade: DeLay, and Jack Abramoff, who was said to have been involved in the Project. (Abramoff reportedly attended Santorum’s very first meeting, though Abramoff denied involvement and Santorum said in 2001 he couldn’t remember if he had.) Abramoff’s recent assertion that he “owned” politicians by dangling the promise of highly-paid lobbying gigs in front of powerful Hill staffers, though hyperbolic, is a fairly apt description of the K Street Project’s goals.
Yet, despite all this, Santorum’s communications director recently told the Washington Post that “Rick Santorum fought to destroy the good old boy network in Washington.” As an electoral strategy, of course, it makes sense for the former Senator to present himself as a Washington outsider and a paragon of personal ethics. But such claims of moral rectitude strain credulity. Santorum made a career polishing DC’s corrupt revolving door—only to walk through it himself at the first opportunity.
By: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, The New Republic, January 6, 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
The Grating Santorum: A Student’s Worst Nightmare
Rick Santorum was locking down the youth vote.
The man who fondly recalls nuns rapping his knuckles with rulers did some verbal knuckle-rapping of his own on Thursday with students at a forum in Concord hosted by New England College.
Not satisfied with mentioning homosexuality in the same breath as bestiality and pedophilia, as he did in 2003, Santorum tried to win over the kids by equating homosexuality with polygamy.
Even for Santorum, it was a masterpiece of antediluvian abrasiveness — slapping gays and Mormons at the same time.
When 17-year-old Rhiannon Pyle, visiting with her civics class from Newburyport, Mass., pressed Santorum on how he could believe that all men are created equal and still object to two men in love marrying, he began nonsensically frothing.
“So if everybody has the right to be happy, so if you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that O.K.?” he said, adding, “Well, what about three men?”
The grating Santorum was their worst nightmare of a bad teacher. He merely got booed; he’s lucky the kids didn’t TP his car or soap the windows.
In a campaign where W. is an unmentionable, Santorum is an unexpected revival of Bushian uncompassionate conservatism.
He got more scattered boos on Friday at a library in Keene and a private high school in Dublin. In Keene, he was asked if he would protect gay rights, since gays are “children of God” too.
“Serving in the military is not an unalienable right, it’s a privilege, you’re selected,” replied the candidate, who wants to restore “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He also called marriage “a privilege, not a right,” for the purpose is procreation.
Rick Perry baits gays because it’s good politics; Santorum sincerely means it. His political philosophy is infused with his über-Catholicism but lacks humanity.
At the Dublin event, 16-year-old Jessica Scharf asked Santorum how her handicapped brother could be cared for without help from the federal government. He replied, as The Times’s Katharine Q. Seelye reported, that he and his wife “bear the cost” of a handicapped daughter; he said family, friends, neighbors and the church could help, and that caring for someone would knit them closer. Scharf told Seelye later that such a group was not equipped to handle her brother, who has multiple handicaps.
New Hampshire’s feisty voters don’t seem as enraptured with Santorum’s rigid conservatism and sweater vests as evangelical voters in Iowa were. Many are pushing back on the wacky worldview of Senator Slash, as Santorum was once known for his vicious attacks on Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
He bashes President Obama as a European-style socialist and preaches fiscal conservatism. Yet in the Senate, he made sure dollars from the socialistic Medicare program went to Puerto Rico on behalf of a hometown firm — United Health Services — that later gave him nearly $400,000 in director’s fees and stock options.
He was among the pay-for-play Republicans who tried to strong-arm lobbyists and say that if you wanted to have influence you had to cough up campaign money.
While Karen Santorum was home-schooling their seven children in Virginia, Santorum soaked the Pennsylvania taxpayers to the tune of $100,000 by enrolling the children in a Pennsylvania cyber charter school.
The preface to Mrs. Santorum’s 2003 book of moral parables teaching children good manners was written by Joe Paterno, who warns against “a decline of civility and a coarsening of society.” And he knows how that goes.
In his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” Santorum goes off on “radical feminists” poisoning society: “What happened in America so that mothers and fathers who leave their children in the care of someone else — or worse yet, home alone after school between three and six in the afternoon — find themselves more affirmed by society?”
In Iowa, he tossed out a line about food stamps that NPR reported this way: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” He later told CNN that he was “pretty confident” that he didn’t say “black.” The only alternative, watching the video clip, is that he said “blah.” He doesn’t want to make blah people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money?
Santorum’s hot politics of aggrievement have competed with Mitt Romney’s cold politics of convenience. But soon Santorum will be gone and Mittens will reign as the calculating consultant type, unpersuasive in premium denim mom jeans, his hair slicked and gray, a lead in a ’50s B movie.
Santorum thinks he’s a bold color and Romney’s a pastel. But the whole Republican field seems ensconced in a black-and-white ’50s diorama. It’s like they’re running for president of Leave It to Beaverland.
As Tony Soprano told Meadow, “Out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house, it’s 1954.”
By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 7, 2012
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