Poor Rick Santorum
Rick Santorum — how many remember that he was Ted Cruz’s predecessor as the GOP’s second-place finisher and last surviving grassroots candidate, destroyed by a united GOP establishment in the final stages of the previous Republican presidential primary process (2012)? — occasionally makes the news these days as a guest commentator on television. On most of these occasions, he is saying something reasonable enough, whether about the global warming hypocrites or about Donald Trump’s character weaknesses. And on all such occasions, the typical reaction to his words among self-described conservatives on the internet is an almost unanimous cry of “Who cares what fake conservative establishment shill Rick Santorum thinks?”
Leaving aside the obvious inanity of anyone who supports and defends Donald Trump calling into question anyone else’s conservatism or anti-establishmentarianism, I cannot help feeling some pity for poor Rick Santorum. He is virtually the only elected Republican, past or present, who continues to speak with so much as a modicum of dignity and principle — let alone a concern for character issues — in this GOP era of the McConnell twins, Turtle and Trump.
No, his principles are not always clear and uncompromised these days, as he has shown more willingness to put up with Trump’s gutter-scraping soul and obvious demagoguery than any sincere Catholic and thoughtful constitutionalist ought to succumb to. In fact, that apparent willingness to slide occasionally for the sake of preserving his access to the microphones has been perhaps his most serious shortcoming for many years, and one reason he was not every Tea Partier’s first choice as presidential candidate back in 2012.
Having said that, at this moment when the conservative media establishment, on talk radio and on the “alternative” political commentary websites, is circling the wagons to excuse and run interference for the cowardly dimwit who just defended his beloved friend Kim Jong-un’s innocence in the deadly torture his regime doled out to American student Otto Warmbier, Santorum has once again put his neck on the block for the cultists and establishment hacks to chop at, correctly calling Trump out on his shameful behavior, as any decent and moderately dignified man ought to have the courage to do — but as none of Trump’s other public supporters has the courage to do, naturally. This would be a moment for mass resignations within Trump’s national security apparatus, if there were a man among them; but alas there is not, and so there will be nothing but the usual sound of puckering from that quarter.
In honor of Santorum’s surviving honor — more than anyone can ascribe to the last man the GOP humiliated as they did Santorum, namely Senator Cruz, who has turned himself into one of the loudest and most eager puckerers lining up behind Trump — I thought this might be a nice time to remind my longtime readers, or inform newer ones, of my reasons for publicly supporting Santorum against the milquetoast progressive Mitt Romney and the globalist progressive Newt Gingrich during the final stages of the 2012 presidential primaries.
In those days, I did most of my political writing for Canada Free Press, which is where, in defense of Michele Bachmann, I created my “Newt-Romney, All-American” trope (an admittedly forced play on “Knute Rockne”), which was used effectively in a debate by Bachmann herself, before the GOP old boys club had finished making mincemeat of her campaign and reputation.
When the field had been culled to nothing but Newt-Romney and the dogged but underfunded Santorum, I felt (and still feel) that there was no choice left, if commenting on the race was to include declaring a preference, but to express support for Santorum. Not to sugarcoat or exaggerate his virtues, but simply to say, in all honesty, that given the choices left, no one who cared a tick about the survival of the United States as a constitutional republic that year — the year of what history will record as the last meaningful presidential race in U.S. history — had any real choice at all, as of late January, but to support Rick Santorum, the last man standing who even seemed aware of the concept of limited government, let alone personal character.
Indeed, it is interesting, looking back on that race, to think that Santorum’s doomed campaign was truly the last stand for the very idea that moral substance mattered in a presidential candidate — a fact which I recognized and frequently focused on in my writings at the time, although perhaps even I, at the peak of my cynicism in those days, did not foresee just how quickly the American conservative movement’s concern for civility and principle would collapse in the aftermath of the 2012 election.
The following, at any rate, is a representative sample of what I wrote in Santorum’s defense back then. I think it might make an interesting time capsule piece, as so much of what was at issue then seems relevant to today’s American predicament — though perhaps mostly as a cause for nostalgic lamentation.
Rick Santorum’s Lonely Path to Victory
by Daren Jonescu at Canada Free Press
January 26th, 2012
Near the end of his January 23rd [2012] radio program, Rush Limbaugh was asked by a caller what Rick Santorum could do to turn things in his favor. Limbaugh, granting that he likes Santorum, advised only that he should stop talking about himself, and start “acting like a conservative.” His point seemed to be that Santorum ought to spend less of his precious microphone time explaining himself and his record, and instead focus on articulating conservative ideas aimed at changing America’s direction. Though reasonable enough in itself, Limbaugh’s advice seems to overlook the special problem facing Santorum’s campaign, the problem which has created his feeling of needing to speak up on his own behalf: No one wants him around anymore.
As I have previously detailed the cynical use made of Santorum during the lead-up to Iowa—propped up at the last minute as a temporary substitute for the falling Newt Gingrich, in order to squeeze out the serious constitutionalist campaign of Michele Bachmann—we need not go through all those ugly details again. We might, however, ask a few questions in the aftermath of that debacle:
(1) Did anyone else notice how quickly Santorum’s post-Iowa “momentum” mysteriously disappeared? Less than one news cycle after his photo finish “loss” to Romney (which has subsequently turned out to be a win), articles and blog posts were everywhere outlining Santorum’s alleged non-conservatism. Old votes were suddenly being dragged up from the depths to prove he was a fraud, a compassionate conservative, a welfare statist—often by the same people who scream bloody murder every time the rest of us mention any of the contradictions and hypocrisies in the distant and recent pasts of Gingrich and Romney.
(2) As Santorum himself has asked of anyone who will listen—an example of how he has been forced into “talking about himself”—how did it come to pass that after trouncing Gingrich in Iowa, and then finishing a little ahead of him in New Hampshire, Newt was once again being advertised throughout the mainstream and “conservative” media as Romney’s only rival?
(3) Returning to the subject of mysterious disappearances, whatever happened to Rupert Murdoch? The final coup in the Establishment-boosted “Santorum Surge” before Iowa was Murdoch’s famous January 2nd “tweet” encouraging Iowa caucus-goers to “look at” Santorum as the “only candidate with genuine big vision for the country.” Do a Google search of Murdoch’s Santorum advocacy today; you will find that all search results are dated January 2nd or 3rd. Having helped to achieve the Establishment’s purposes, Murdoch has subsequently been mute about the candidate he supposedly “couldn’t resist” backing on the eve of Iowa. And Murdoch’s American news channel has firmly and quickly retrenched to its pre-Iowa position within the Romney-Gingrich paradigm.
Leaving all of this aside, however, let us follow Limbaugh’s sound advice ourselves, and ask a different set of questions, these directed specifically at the self-described conservatives who either have not yet decided whom to support among the remaining primary candidates, or who have been tempted to tie themselves to Gingrich’s leaky boat on the “last conservative option” principle.
(1) For all of Gingrich’s rabble-rousing during the debates, do conservatives really want to behave like Democrats, blinding themselves to their candidate’s litany of character issues? Every day, some writer somewhere is defending Gingrich by noting that Bill Clinton was not held to the moral standard being proposed for Newt. A bizarre argument, in light of the fact that Clinton was indeed held to that standard by conservatives; it was the liberals in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media who preferred to overlook Clinton’s sociopathic lack of character. Should conservatives now join in this amoral advocacy, just because the character questions this time pertain to a man they perceive as one of their own?
Santorum has flaws—as a human, like everyone, and also as a conservative. Does he have the kind of flaws that could easily be exploited by an opponent to undermine his support within his own base, let alone with undecided voters?
(2) Have conservative voters been so cowed by decades of being told how stupid they are that they are now willing to clamor around a man who stands before them and says, with world-historical condescension, “Don’t worry, I’m smart, I’m educated, I’ve written books, I’m full of big ideas; I’ll show them who has the brains around here”?
A little personal history may be instructive. For many voters without context, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate, was a bumbling old man, unable to form coherent answers to questions during a vice-presidential debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle. When I was a graduate student, I was one of those who assumed this disastrous debate performance was the measure of the man. One day, a dismissive reference to Stockdale was made during a class discussion. The professor, my M.A. supervisor Samuel Ajzenstat—a most original interpreter of Kant and the Old Testament, a popular teacher, a leader in his synagogue, and a champion ironist—mused self-deprecatingly, “Mm… I had thought he seemed pretty serious when I read his writings.”
Needless to say, through this surprising contradiction, I went on to discover that Stockdale was, intellectually and otherwise, ten times the measure of Gore and Quayle put together. Pithy public displays, churlish demagoguery, and clever identification with one’s audience are not intelligence—or at least not the kind needed to save a nation from an impending collapse that is at least as much moral as economic.
What is needed now is character, of the sort that bespeaks consistency of principle in the face of fire or changing cultural tides, along with steadfastness in the face of audience disapproval—precisely what one cannot expect from a man who desires to be fêted as superior more than he desires actually to be right.
The second question, then: Which of the remaining candidates seems least inclined to say what merely plays well with his desired audience (whether it be “Tea Partiers,” anti-war youth, or Establishment pundits), and most inclined to stick to core principles that he has long espoused, and which he holds to be true?
(3) Aside from Ron Paul—who disqualifies himself with his complete denial of the inconvenient reality of radical Islam, and who cites the propaganda of his country’s avowed enemies as evidence for his interpretation of recent history—which of the remaining candidates has been most clearly abused by the Republican Establishment (political and media wings) during this process?
This question is very important, as the Anything But Obama mantra being espoused prematurely by so many conservatives quite obviously plays into the hands of the Establishment manipulators. They want you to stop thinking now, and to accept Romney and Gingrich—their race—as the only choice. That means they want you to stop thinking about Santorum. Given what the Establishment stands for, this alone ought to be a strong argument in Santorum’s favor. Why do they want to bury Santorum? Because they see him as outside the Establishment, and therefore as a potential threat to the status quo. Good for him.
(4) Which candidate refused to jump on the anti-free market bandwagon to score easy points against Romney? The two who jumped on are now on the same team. The one who did not is Santorum.
(5) Which candidate opposed government bailouts (i.e. crony-capitalism) in 2008? Romney and Gingrich favored them, thereby showing a basic disdain for the free market, properly understood—i.e. understood as freedom, rather than as a government tool for achieving social goals. Santorum strongly opposed them as a further step towards the destruction of the free market, and the Europeanization of American government.
(6) Which candidate has never advocated an individual mandate for healthcare? This is no small issue, as all the rest of the Republican platform, whoever wins the task of representing it, will be irrelevant in the long run if government-run healthcare is allowed to move forward. The person who is most trustworthy on this most important issue is the person whose own record is most unequivocal and clear on the question of government encroachments upon citizens’ ownership of their own bodies.
(7) Which of the four remaining candidates has never fudged on global warming, let alone spoken forcefully in favor of the pseudo-science as Gingrich and Romney have?
Most of the above questions have an answer so obvious as to render them rhetorical in nature. And all of them address matters of great importance to any constitutionalist who has not simply given up on the prospect of electing a genuine conservative in 2012. Nevertheless, Santorum’s path to the nomination is far more difficult than the normal challenge of convincing enough voters that one has the strongest position on matters of the greatest importance to them. He cannot simply “act like a conservative,” as Limbaugh implores. Why not?
The main problem he faces, once again, is the Establishment’s power to create the dynamics of the campaign. As long as the entire campaign is being consistently portrayed as a two-man race, and the never-ending debates staged as such, Santorum is in the impossible position of trying to discuss the issues on even terms with his competitors—acting like a conservative—while at the same time trying to remind audiences primed for Romney-Gingrich fireworks that his moments on camera are not merely opportunities for viewers to run to the bathroom. This means he must do some special pleading for himself, reminding everyone that he is there, that his views are not merely superfluous shades of Newt-Romney, and that he is, after all, the winner of Iowa.
On this last point, the Iowa vote-counting disaster was shameful, and perfect grist for the mill of conspiracy theorists. There are only two explanations for the late revelation (two weeks after the event) that Santorum had actually won that close caucus vote: either it was deliberate chicanery designed to squelch any big Santorum bounce, funding drives, and so on; or, as Mark Steyn has noted, the Iowa caucus was run by boobs unworthy of participating in the electoral process of a developed nation. The second is presumably true, but it’s small consolation for those of us who would like to think that a multi-billion dollar Establishment machine bent on preserving its own anti-constitutional power by artificially distorting public perceptions through clever manipulation of the media and the bastardization of the Tea Party movement is all that a decent conservative has to overcome—I mean, a sub-Afghan electoral bureaucracy to boot is just plain unfair!
Perhaps the biggest problem Santorum faces at this point, however, is the prejudices of primary voters themselves. As he does not have the funds to advertise widely like the other candidates, and does not have the Establishment support required to get the free advertising of constant media attention and extra questions during debates, Santorum is forced to rely on face to face contact with voters—as many as possible, as quickly as possible. And, as we know, “all politics is local.”
This expression about the localism of politics is so widely cited, in so many contexts, that one rarely stops to consider its meaning. Recall that the source of the expression is Tip O’Neill, a liberal Democrat. Its meaning, put bluntly, is that people are not smart enough to think of political issues in terms of big, over-arching questions of principle; rather, most people judge politicians in terms of their own personal interests. The expression is essentially a bit of typical liberal condescension to the little people.
Unfortunately, too many people have implicitly taken this notion to heart, not as a warning about the disdain with which they are viewed by Washington, but rather as a rule to live by. I recall reading an article about Michele Bachmann’s whirlwind tour of Iowa before the caucuses. The article concluded with a mention of a particular voter, a woman who claimed that she liked Bachmann, but was disappointed that the candidate had not come back for a second visit to her neighborhood. Bachmann was engaged in a 99-county tour of the state before the biggest election of her career, and this woman was miffed because she hadn’t been given the extra fifteen minutes of personal contact that she felt she deserved.
And now we have Santorum, fishing for votes in Florida, where, upon concluding a speech, an elderly man critiques him with this: “We want to hear you talk about Cuba when you’re in this area. Please do.”
Yes, Cuba policy matters. But the United States is possibly a few years away from a full-fledged economic collapse, which in turn will lead to a collapse of civility—a fate assured by the moral collapse that has already taken place under the radar over decades, thanks in part to the educational collapse manufactured by Dewey- and Marx-inspired social engineering. And this man is disappointed because Santorum didn’t address “local” concerns.
When the U.S. economy—not to mention its medical system—begins to look a lot more like Cuba’s, even the Cuba question will appear in a very different light. Priorities are largely a matter of seeing one’s problems squarely. As Michele Bachmann learned the hard way, a whole lot of Americans—including some self-described Tea Partiers—are not yet able to keep their gaze focused on the fast-approaching monster. And yet drawing attention to that monster, and being the only warrior left out there who is prepared to slay it, are Santorum’s only long-shot means to victory—as well as being the best argument for his nomination.
As the Gingrich people are so fond of saying about their man (as though it needed emphasis), he is not perfect. Neither is Rick Santorum. Primarily, to my mind, he needs a sound lesson in the ethics of individualism, and its relation to the American Founding. He is correct that the family is the primary social institution; but the individual is the primary “institution” of Nature, and Santorum needs to focus on that, too. He also needs to revise his absolutist position on military spending—if America is broke, as it most superlatively is, then there can be no sacred cows. Facing reality does not mean sacrificing strength; on the contrary, it is the only way to ensure the projection of that strength into the long term.
If, however, the goal is to find someone among the surviving candidates who just might, with the right backing, become the constitutional conservative leader America so desperately needs, then Santorum is clearly the man of the moment.
The fact that Rupert Murdoch has abandoned him when he needs support most doesn’t mean everyone has to.
