By DEXTER DUGGAN
It was just a January snapshot in time as the 2012 Republican presidential primary season began in earnest, with a kaleidoscope of images yet to come. But it may have become a politically fatal photo frozen in many voters’ minds.
Arizonan John McCain rushed to Mitt Romney’s side for the cameras in New Hampshire, quickly endorsing the “moderate” former Massachusetts governor for the GOP nomination. Here, Mitt, let me be a saguaro cactus thorn in your side.
The GOP field was wide open, with Romney polling only in the 20s and 30s, while a basically conservative bevy of other White House GOP hopefuls fragmented polling results among themselves. It was going to be an interesting horserace.
Romney, the loudly proclaimed “frontrunner,” had just narrowly lost the January 3 Iowa Republican caucus vote to unheralded former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, although it was erroneously believed at the time that Romney had squeaked to a win in the Hawkeye State.
McCain was the disastrous, anti-conservative, open-borders, “moderate” Republican who lost the 2008 White House race to radical Democrat Barack Obama.
Now McCain was fired up to bestow or impose his blessing on the rather aloof Romney. Like McCain, Romney seemed to cut down conservative Republicans in debate while deferring to liberal Democrats.
Disgusted conservatives across the nation sighed, “Here we go again. We’re not buying Mitt.”
The sliver that is the Republican establishment assumed that dominant conservatives had to take their customary seat back in the campaign bus. There may be 80 passengers, says the sliver, but I deserve to be the driver. One day I might even earn a driver’s license.
For McCain as 2012 began, there was no sense in having a GOP primary season at all to test one candidate against another. Just give Mitt the crown.
McCain prophesied to the Granite State audience that in their early season January 10 primary, “New Hampshire is the state that will catapult [Romney] on to victory in a very short period of time.”
That’s made easier, of course, if multiple conservatives keep splitting the majority of GOP voters.
Only hours before McCain spoke, a clearly elated Santorum in Iowa professed his deep gratitude that he’d captured second place and managed to come oh so close to winning the Hawkeye caucuses victory.
If only Santorum had known at the time that in fact he was the winner there. How that would have knocked “frontrunner” Romney’s heralded dominance off the road, and sent subsequent primaries into disarray. How history can turn on misreported election results.
During the 2012 primaries, Santorum successfully staked out turf at appealing to the forgotten “blue-collar conservatives,” voters turned off by the Democratic Party’s radicalism but not persuaded that the Republican Party worries much about them either.
Wall Street isn’t their street, nor do the CEOs care. So the shop floor is swept away when it doesn’t bother to show up for the general election.
Even in 2012, incumbent Obama was widely seen as an awful, incompetent president, but wondrous “frontrunner” Romney managed to throw away the election to him.
Of course, these days — with Obama’s blatant manipulation of the truth, of the sacrosanct IRS, of Obamacare signup numbers, of unemployment figures, and just about everything else in government — one may even wonder about the validity of some election results.
But it’s still true that Romney was an inept learner in the general election even as Obama applied his Chicago brass knuckles to the fight.
Now a new book has come out under Santorum’s byline, with his handsome, boyish-looking cover photo, Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works (Regnery, 216 pages, $27.99). It is available at ricksantorum
book.com.
Santorum clearly would like to run for president again, and this easy-reading book is a trial balloon. Does he deserve another chance, or has someone like Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz shown a stronger claim to conservatives’ loyalty for 2016?
To his credit, Santorum doesn’t spend his time lamenting the past (we’ll leave that to reviewers like yours truly). Instead, he focuses on where and how he thinks the GOP should go. He puts forth an interesting assortment of economic ideas. He lauds self-reliance, but says a rising tide won’t simply lift people’s boats that have holes in them.
Santorum also notes that not everyone aspires to work 16-hour days, seven days a week, to grab the big corporate brass ring. (Or, one might add, to labor at three jobs to avoid family financial disaster.) Some people want to do their dutiful shift on the job, then go home to do volunteer work in the church and community, spend time with their families, and enjoy some leisure.
It used to be this way, before the elite said we must be “globally competitive,” struggling against every lower-wage worker in the world whom corporate titans align against us.
Meanwhile, Santorum points out, the United States has continued moving to the left politically and socially, even though “[e]very poll in the last 30 years shows that roughly twice as many people identify themselves as ‘conservative’ as identify themselves as ‘liberal’.” How so?
The leftists simply have been more determined, he writes, more insistent to impose their way against the rest of us. And it helps when dominant media are their cheerleader.
Obama’s “biggest campaign issue was free contraception to everyone, particularly unmarried young girls,” Santorum writes, adding later: “We live now in a country that believes we should be nonjudgmental to the point that we won’t even fight for the souls of our own children.” Parents concerned for their kids’ souls “are called right-wing radicals.”
Culturally, the former Pennsylvania senator makes plain that abortion is bad for families and society, and tells us about a representative pregnancy-help center in South Carolina:
“One of my favorite ministries helps families dealing with the trauma of an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. Pregnancy-care clinics around the country serve not just women in crisis, but their families, and increasingly the fathers of their unborn children.”
Santorum says he favors legal immigration. But who doesn’t? “America was built by immigrants, and we are for legal immigration. America is a beacon to the world for a reason.”
The beacon, though, has limits to its light. Even Raul Labrador, the Idaho conservative GOP congressman who recently tried to help with “immigration reform,” sees that the issue has jumped the tracks. The May/June issue of The American Conservative magazine reports:
“Labrador thinks it would be a ‘disaster’ to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year. He believes the GOP can take back the Senate in November, but if a liberal immigration bill is passed before then, ‘our base will be depressed in the general election, and we won’t be able to win’.”
However, in Santorum’s book you won’t find “immigration” or “abortion” in the index.
Don’t look for Blue Collar Conservatives to print paragraphs of statistics about the deep damage that permissive abortion does to women, or to document the serious crime that pours through the U.S.’s porous Southwestern border.
Some reporter would highlight any such remarks and begin attacking “single-issue” Santorum as waging that imaginary “war on women” devised by Democratic propagandists, or exposing his lurking alleged racism, as also devised by Democrats.
The fact that including such documentation seems too touchy to Santorum — or at least to those who guided his new book into print — suggests that the former Pennsylvania senator really would like to be in another presidential race and therefore shies from being “too controversial.”
Controversial as defined by whom? The media megaphones that wouldn’t have a kind word unless, like John McCain, Santorum starts praising pro-abortion radical Hillary Clinton? The reporters and pundits who cover up or ignore almost any utter outrage from the radical left, but who hit the ceiling if a conservative Republican says simply “Good morning” with the wrong tone to his voice?
This is a problem that about any conservative and traditionalist candidate faces when trying to advance a message past the scrimmage line of an adversary media, but Santorum doesn’t seem to have found the answer yet. If he does find it and patents it, he can forget the White House and retire on the royalties.
Santorum may have a lot of the answers, but even once you have the policy, you need the right people. Santorum rightly praises Vice President Dan Quayle for standing up for family values more than 20 years ago. But we here in Arizona saw Quayle’s own son grow up to be an opportunistic congressman who was justifiably dumped by the voters in 2012 after one term in D.C.
And Santorum himself recently made a questionable endorsement in our current Arizona GOP gubernatorial primary campaign. He favored a candidate who had quickly waved the surrender flag rather than take a courageous stand when the left-wing media and homosexual lobby howled against Arizona’s religious conscience bill, SB 1062, in February.
See what you think of Santorum’s book. No matter how wise his, or our, politics, we’re bumbling humans. Being angels comes with winning our contest for a different district, way above our heads.
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