Rick Santorum's abrupt withdrawal (you just can resist the jokes when a candidate for president is also a neologism) underscores why the GOP will consider him its 2016 front runner:
To me, one measure of electability is a candidate’s reach outside his party base. The Rick Santorum of 2006 had no reach. He ended up with 41.3 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans in Pennsylvania constituted 40.3 percent of the electorate.
CNN exit polls confirmed the shellacking Santorum took from his Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr., losing virtually every voter group by wide margins: Democrats, of course, (Casey won 93 percent of the Democratic vote); independents (Casey 73 percent); moderates (65 percent); women (61 percent) and so on and so forth.
Santorum wasn’t defeated by the voters in 2006; he was repudiated. They did not like his politics. They did not like his personality. To put it in terms he might use, they cast him out of the Senate and into the darkness.
If that had happened to me, it would have been a cause of great pain and some soul searching.
An analogous situation is how the United States military reacted after Vietnam. It engaged in a long self-analysis that resulted in transformative changes in strategy, tactics and leadership with the goal of never, ever repeating the mistakes made in that war.
Santorum’s statement implies that in 2006 voters gave him the opportunity to engage in a similar self-analysis: What did he do that he should never repeat? What aspects of his personality could he alter to positive effect? How should his strategy and tactics be changed to improve the outcome?
Handed this “tremendous gift” from the voters, Santorum emerged from the crucible of his 2006 defeat unchanged. He was older, a little thicker around the middle, but in every other aspect he was the same Rick as in 2006. Only instead of playing on the smaller field of Pennsylvania, he decided to go nationwide and run for president.
It was as if the generals in the Pentagon, after reviewing their loss in Vietnam, decided that the best corrective action would be to attack China. That the mistake they made — waging a land war in a small country — could be rectified by waging a land war in a huge country.
Analogies can only take you so far. For Santorum, what made 2012 different was that while he did not change, his audience did. In Pennsylvania, he always appealed to the most conservative of the conservatives, and he did the same in the Republican primaries.
Where we Pennsylvanians saw arrogance, conservative and Tea Party Republicans saw passion. Where we saw rigidity on moral and social issues, they saw rectitude. Where we saw a hard-right politician, they saw a righteous warrior for their cause.
The very attributes and positions that made Santorum anathema to so many Pennsylvania voters in 2006 lifted him into contention in 2012 among a core of activist, angry Republicans.
Among the general electorate, one’s ability to like Santorum tends to be in inverse ratio to one’s exposure to him. The more regular voters saw him, the less they liked him.
When Santorum first announced for president, I thought he would be underestimated as a candidate (which he was) and that he had great potential if he portrayed himself as an economic populist: a man with working-class roots and disdain for the Richie Riches of this world. You know, guys with Harvard M.B.A.’s who worked for private equity investment firms. Not to mention any names.
But that didn’t get his juices flowing. The rights of homosexuals, the morality of abortion and contraception, the evil of Islamofacism, lectures on how moral turpitude had weakened America. Those were the subjects that got Santorum going.
In this way, he fit Winston Churchill’s definition of a fanatic — someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the topic.
To me, one measure of electability is a candidate’s reach outside his party base. The Rick Santorum of 2006 had no reach. He ended up with 41.3 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans in Pennsylvania constituted 40.3 percent of the electorate.
CNN exit polls confirmed the shellacking Santorum took from his Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr., losing virtually every voter group by wide margins: Democrats, of course, (Casey won 93 percent of the Democratic vote); independents (Casey 73 percent); moderates (65 percent); women (61 percent) and so on and so forth.
Santorum wasn’t defeated by the voters in 2006; he was repudiated. They did not like his politics. They did not like his personality. To put it in terms he might use, they cast him out of the Senate and into the darkness.
If that had happened to me, it would have been a cause of great pain and some soul searching.
An analogous situation is how the United States military reacted after Vietnam. It engaged in a long self-analysis that resulted in transformative changes in strategy, tactics and leadership with the goal of never, ever repeating the mistakes made in that war.
Santorum’s statement implies that in 2006 voters gave him the opportunity to engage in a similar self-analysis: What did he do that he should never repeat? What aspects of his personality could he alter to positive effect? How should his strategy and tactics be changed to improve the outcome?
Handed this “tremendous gift” from the voters, Santorum emerged from the crucible of his 2006 defeat unchanged. He was older, a little thicker around the middle, but in every other aspect he was the same Rick as in 2006. Only instead of playing on the smaller field of Pennsylvania, he decided to go nationwide and run for president.
It was as if the generals in the Pentagon, after reviewing their loss in Vietnam, decided that the best corrective action would be to attack China. That the mistake they made — waging a land war in a small country — could be rectified by waging a land war in a huge country.
Analogies can only take you so far. For Santorum, what made 2012 different was that while he did not change, his audience did. In Pennsylvania, he always appealed to the most conservative of the conservatives, and he did the same in the Republican primaries.
Where we Pennsylvanians saw arrogance, conservative and Tea Party Republicans saw passion. Where we saw rigidity on moral and social issues, they saw rectitude. Where we saw a hard-right politician, they saw a righteous warrior for their cause.
The very attributes and positions that made Santorum anathema to so many Pennsylvania voters in 2006 lifted him into contention in 2012 among a core of activist, angry Republicans.
Among the general electorate, one’s ability to like Santorum tends to be in inverse ratio to one’s exposure to him. The more regular voters saw him, the less they liked him.
When Santorum first announced for president, I thought he would be underestimated as a candidate (which he was) and that he had great potential if he portrayed himself as an economic populist: a man with working-class roots and disdain for the Richie Riches of this world. You know, guys with Harvard M.B.A.’s who worked for private equity investment firms. Not to mention any names.
But that didn’t get his juices flowing. The rights of homosexuals, the morality of abortion and contraception, the evil of Islamofacism, lectures on how moral turpitude had weakened America. Those were the subjects that got Santorum going.
In this way, he fit Winston Churchill’s definition of a fanatic — someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment