CAMPAIGN 2012
The Appeal of Santorum
Why the social conservative has proven
a stronger candidate than many thought.
BY JAMES TARANTO
The Daily, Saturday, February 11,
2012
When a man at a dinner last spring told me he thought Rick Santorum was the obvious choice for president, I scoffed. I'm not scoffing anymore. By sweeping the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses, which Mitt Romney won in 2008, the former Pennsylvania senator erased any doubt that he is a serious candidate. Add in Missouri's primary and the narrow Iowa victory last month, and Santorum has carried as many states as Romney and Newt Gingrich combined.
Santorum's ideological appeal to a conservative electorate is obvious. To be sure, he is not always consistent in his support of free-market principles. Among other things, he has backed steel tariffs and voted against right-to-work laws, and he is now proposing special tax advantages for manufacturers. But on foreign policy and social issues he is firmly on the right, and his economic aberrations are minor in comparison with those of Romney, who governed Massachusetts as a moderate and signed a health-insurance mandate into law years before President Obama did. As for Gingrich, he has a solid identity as a man of the right, thanks to his years as Bill Clinton's adversary. But can conservatives really trust a man who shared both a loveseat and a passion for global warming with Nancy Pelosi?
Gingrich transformed himself from has-been to contender with a series of strong performances in the seemingly endless primary debates. In a less flashy way, so did Santorum. He outlasted onetime conservative favorites like Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry by demonstrating a superior command of facts and ideas and a willingness to scrap with opponents, whether it was with Ron Paul over foreign policy or with Romney over health care.
Perhaps Santorum's biggest advantages over Romney and Gingrich are his character
and personality. A conservative journalist friend once told me he sympathized
with Santorum because "he's such a nice guy." I don't think that's quite right.
In fact, Santorum can be off-puttingly peevish. But no one can deny that he
is sincere and genuine, in marked contrast to Romney. And unlike the grandiose
Gingrich, Santorum's flaws are human in scale.
The case against Santorum mostly amounts to a corollary of the argument that Romney is the only "electable" candidate. Santorum is said to be unelectable chiefly because of his very conservative positions on social issues. Urban liberals and libertarians frequently overestimate the degree to which these issues are electorally damaging to Republicans. The GOP has, after all, run on a strict anti-abortion platform since 1980, during which time it has won five of eight presidential elections.
On the other hand, there is reason to worry that independent voters for whom social issues are not a high priority might be put off by Santorum's heavy emphasis on them, especially at a time when economic anxiety is an overriding concern. And he has been known to make embarrassingly intemperate statements about them. Last year he brought up Obama's race in criticizing the president's position on abortion: "I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'We're going to decide who are people and who are not people.' "
Most notoriously, in 2003 he observed, "In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." Santorum insists that he meant to distinguish homosexuality, not marriage, from "man on dog." Perhaps he was misconstrued, but surely that is a foreseeable risk of using such a phrase.
I tend to agree with these concerns about Santorum and to think Romney, for all his shortcomings, is the safest GOP choice for November. But there is a counterargument, which begins with the recognition that "electability" is relative. Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George McGovern in 1972 were the most unelectable nominees of modern times, yet if they had been the candidates four years later and four years earlier, respectively, one of them would have won.
I didn't think America would ever elect a president as left-wing as Barack Obama. But it happened, because in 2008, after a series of policy failures and amid an economic crisis to which John McCain reacted erratically, voters were fed up with the Republican Party.
This year an incumbent president is seeking re-election during a period of sluggish economic growth and high unemployment. He has low approval ratings among independents, and his signature legislative accomplishments are widely hated. As in 2008, the president's party is coming off brutal losses in the congressional midterm elections.
The best case for nominating a staunch conservative like Rick Santorum rather than a trimmer like Mitt Romney may be that Santorum is electable because Barack Obama is not.
Next article: Social Issues and the Santorum Surge (2/18/12)
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