Henry Olsen is one of my favorite writers.  He explains the problem with Santorum’s strategy to win over white (and not only white) working-class voters.  Olsen just nails it and every right-of-center politician with national ambitions should read the article.  I had some similar thoughts last month, but Olsen is a lot smarter than me, so he includes stuff like facts and social science to make his point.

But just because Santorum has issues doesn’t mean that he isn’t the best of the bunch that is running.

I’ve spent a lot of the Republican nominating race complaining about the various demagogues and/or con artists like Trump, Cain, Bachmann, and Gingrich who, at one time or another either led the polls or were the main alternative to Romney. As Ross Douthat pointed out last month,  the non-Ron Paul alternative to Mitt Romney who has shown the most substance and honesty has been Rick Santorum.  Santorum embraced Paul Ryan’s premium support Medicare reform when the big ideas, transformational genius, Freddie Mac historian Newt Gingrich was calling the Ryan Budget “right-wing social engineering.”  When Gingrich promised private accounts for Social Security without benefit cuts for anybody, Santorum pointed out that this would have added hundreds of billions of dollars to our already unsustainable deficits.  Santorum was the only Republican to articulate a thoughtful critique of Romney and the only candidate to best Romney on health care in the debates.   

So where is everybody now?  Trump is a reality television show host and good for a “news” interview on Fox every once in a while.  I guess he must be good for ratings.  Cain dropped out early.  I would say he dropped out in disgrace if I thought Cain had a sense of shame.  Bachmann finished last of all the candidates who competed in Iowa and quit.  Gingrich imploded, came back to win one state, and then imploded again.  Santorum has won the popular vote in four of the eight states that have held contests.  Good for Rick Santorum.  Good for Republican voters.  Imagine what the Republican electorate might have done if the Republican politicians had given them better choices.

1.  I think Peter and Rich Lowry over at NRO said a lot. 

2.  One huge advantage that Santorum will have over Gingrich is that conservative journalists won’t turn on Santorum the way they did on Gingrich (unless Santorum really melts down or something).  Santorum isn’t mentally unstable, has real principles, and seems to be respected as personally a good guy. 

3.  I’m not sure how Romney brings Santorum back down really quickly.  Bringing down Gingrich was comparatively simple.  You use Freddie Mac, amnesty, and his past support for cap-and-trade and a federal insurance purchase mandate to shrink the authenticity gap between the two candidates while tearing down his electability with stories of Gingrich’s personal baggage and then stare him down in debates to eliminate Gingrich’s toughness advantage and then let superior money and organization do the rest.  And it really was simple since it was obvious to me at about the moment Gingrich rose to the top.  Santorum isn’t as good a Romney target as Gingrich.  Romney just can’t win (or even tie) an authenticity contest with Santorum.  Off the top of my head, I can’t come up with a Romney line of attack that is likely to knock Santorum out of the box.  “Earmarking Washinton insider” aren’t going to get it done as attacks when they are coming from the Romneycare guy.

4.  Romney needs to hope that Santorum lets the media bait him into bootless culture war arguments. 

5.  It is obvious to everybody that a majority of Republican primary voters will either not vote for Romney in the primary or will only vote for him on a lesser evil basis.  So he has to convince the key swing Republican voter that he is a lesser evil than Santorum.  This means convincing them that Santorum is an evil (well not an evil evil, just a bad choice.)

6.  Does Newt Gingrich have one more act left?  He doesn’t deserve one but he didn’t deserve his last two campaign surges either.

7.  It is nice to see a conservative authnticity candidate who is a principled and informed conservative rather than a demagogue back bencher (Bachmann) or a con artist (Cain, Gingrich.)  Santorum isn’t perfect, but he is a huge improvement.

8.  Run Mitch Run.

Over at Big Think, Peter Lawler writes that:

Another reason for the low turnout is the bizarrely huge number of debates that have absurdly lengthened the campaign. Robert says that those who Republicans who long for a candidate worthy of their deep devotion–such as Jindal or Christie or Daniels–forget that none of those able governors have been subjected to this long and endlessly demanding vetting process.

The problem with the new vetting process, of course, is that it might be that almost nobody could get through it unscathed. All those bleepin’ debates strung out over well over a year–and not, as Newt claimed, the mainstream elite media–might be the reason that hardly any decent and able person would actually enter the race.

I think there is a lot right to all of that, but I think that the lengthened campaign operates to discourage good candidates somewhat differently than Peter describes.  It is true that a Daniels, a Jindal or a Christie would have been shown to be mortal by entering into the presidential race.  We would have heard unflattering stories about their lives.  They are human after all.  There would have been issues on which any of them would have ended up on the opposite side of the median Republican primary voter.  They would have been bad days where they misspoke and said something they didn’t mean or misspoke by saying something they meant but wish they hadn’t said.  But I don’t think those things, in themselves, would have been fatally damaging.  Would Jindal look less articulate and less authentically conservative than Romney (to say nothing of some of the more deplorable anti-Romneys)?  Maybe, but I doubt it.

I think one of the biggest problems in the current system is that it makes running for President hard and pretending to run for President too easy.  Developing a real agenda on the full range of national issues and crafting a rhetoric that can appeal to both primary and general election audiences is hard.  This on top of building a national donor base, building campaign organizations state by state, doing retail politics in the early states, and preparing for the debates.  You try explaining premium support Medicare in two minutes sandwiched between Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry.  It is especially hard if you are a governor who has real executive responsibility and has to manage often difficult relations with your state legislature.  You are basically talking about two fulltime jobs that start about twenty months before the presidential election.  If you are reasonably happy doing worthwhile activities, the current system gives you plenty or reason not to run for President.  But what if you aren’t doing much worthwhile?

Which brings us to Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.  If you are glib, unprincipled, have good contacts in the right-of-center media, have no particular responsibilities, and your goal is to increase your name recognition, then running for President is much easier.  Not easy.  It still means a lot of travel, a lot of nights in hotels, a lot of interviews with reporters, etc.  You need a lot of energy and a modicum of political talent.  But it is still easier than being governor and really running for President.  You can focus on making your promises sound good rather than having them sound good and add up too.  You never have to really tell anyone no.  You can focus on fantasy solutions.  You can lie when people point out the downsides of your proposed policies.  You don’t have to build organizations in the states with later primaries.  You can go on a book tour several months before Iowa. It will all catch up to you, but with a little bit of luck, it won’t catch up with you until you’ve had a run that gave you huge amounts of media attention.  Even if you don’t win the nomination, you still win.  That is because the point isn’t really to win.  The point is to leave the race with a fraction of the public thinking well of you.  That will sell more books and mean higher speaking fees down the line.  That will mean more show invites and maybe a show of your own.  Maybe a company with business before Congress will decide they need a historian or a pizza leader on their payroll.  Short of a sex scandal, you almost can’t lose.   

Still, it is a shame.  The debates have been basically worthless other than for showcasing the weaknesses of the various candidates.  They could have been a valuable educational opportunity in which even one principled and able candidate could have focused on the institutional reforms in health care and entitlement policy that we need.  Santorum tried to do that once in a while, but he just doesn’t have the talent.  Instead the debates gave us 9-9-9, the HPV controversy, Romney pretending to be more anti-illegal immigration than the rest, Gingrich beating up the moderators and Romney beating up Gingrich.  Millions of people watched and even more they listened.  The debates really drove the nomination race.  We would be better off as a country if we had had better candidates that gave us a better debate.  I can see why the better GOP politicians passed on running for President.  They all had their reasons, but the country is very much worse off that a Daniels or a Jindal or a Christie didn’t run and that the field was left to the Bachmanns, Cains, and Gingriches.

Okay, so most of us have heard Romney’s comment about how he “not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.  I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”

I want to focus on one problem with that statement.  It doesn’t just make Romney look like an inept politician.  It makes Romney look like an inept unprincipled politician.  You can almost see the thought balloon over Romney’s head as he tries to manipulate his listeners.  I think the Romney thought balloon would look a little something like this:

Well, the vast majority of Americans describe themselves as middle-class and those who describe themselves as “very poor” (I need to remember to work the “very” in there) probably have low voting rates.  So I should position myself as the defender of the middle-class rather than the very poor.  I should also throw in something about not representing the very rich.

There is just something so oily about how Romney goes about some of his panders.  I think the single biggest part of his blunder isn’t that it creates a sense that he doesn’t “care” about the poor.  I’m not sure a lot of persuadables are ready to believe that Romney wants the poor to suffer.  This is a guy who tithes.  The biggest part of the blunder is that he comes across like he is trying to hustle people who consider themselves middle-class.  A more effective response by Romney would have been something like:

Those punished most by the wrong turns of the last three years are those unemployed or underemployed tonight and those so discouraged they’ve abandoned the search for work altogether. And no one’s been more tragically harmed than the young people of this country, the first generation in memory to face a future less promising than their parents did.

As Republicans, our first concern is for those waiting tonight to begin or resume the climb up life’s ladder. We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

That is from Mitch Daniels’ response to Obama’s State of the Union.  Daniels and Romney are both smart guys, but Daniels has a big advantage when it comes to talking.  Daniels really believes in a set of limited government, pro-effective government, pro-upward mobility, pro-growth policies, and Daniels is focused on explaining his beliefs to open-minded listeners.  Romney is stuck pretending to believe whatever he imagines the average voter wants to hear. 

Run Mitch Run

The speech wasn’t as aggressively awful as his Iowa Caucus night speech, but his reworked stump speech still isn’t much good.  He is trying to run as human placebo.  He needs to kill a couple of lines that he has fallen in love with.  I’m talkinng about lines like:

1.  The one about restoring rather than transforming America.  It was obnoxiously passive-aggressive when Glenn Beck was selling this line.

2.  The one about the Obama administration being a “detour not a destiny.”  It isn’t a clever way to make the point that we can do better.  It isn’t even an improvement over just saying we can do better.

The thing is Romney is much better when he has something to say.  He was pretty good at giving us actual reasons why Gingrich should not be nominee or president.  A focused, specific, Romney is a much better Romney.

1.  I think this statement, from just before the Monday debate, holds up pretty well “Gingrich’s campaign is built around this fantasy where pedantic, self-righteous bombast = ruff and tuff. Reality will intrude and bring his numbers down. Maybe it will happen in time for the Florida primary (I think probably.) Maybe later.”

2.  Romney really kicked Gingrich around for the first forty minutes of the debate.  I’m glad because Gingrich would be a calamity as either Republican nominee or American President and Romney did everyone a favor by reminding the country that Gingrich isn’t nearly as tough as he pretends to be.  But…Santorum was right that the Romney/Gingrich disputes revealed the smallness and hollowness of much of the Republican debate.  The Freddie Mac thing was a big story primarily because Gingrich lied about what he did for them .  Amnesty is a more serious issue, but does anyone doubt that Romney would be for a much bigger amnesty than Gingrich if Romney thought that was the ticket to the White House?

3.  Santorum has been the only candidate to put Romney consistently on the defensive on Romneycare.  Santorum had Romney sounding like Obama in defense of the health insurance purchase mandate and that is not a place Romney wants to be.  Obama will be reminding Romney of those comments come the general election (if Romney makes it that far.)  Santorum’s success in getting to Romney is a testament to Santorum.  He isn’t the brightest, but he is principled and takes public policy seriously.  Perry and Bachmann couldn’t make the case against Romneycare because they didn’t take running for President seriously enough to come up with a coherent and detailed critique of Romneycare.  Gingrich has the brains, but he knew he was compromised by his long-term support for a federal health insurance purchase mandate.  So he went with picking on the moderators.  So that left Santorum to make the case for conservative health care reform in the Republican primary.

4.  If you’re in Florida, you might want to strongly consider voting Santorum.

5.  There was a very bad sign towards the end of the debate.  Romney was obviously feeling like he had thrashed Gingrich.  Romney went back to his lazy and lame “I’m for the America of I love America to stop Obama from turning America into a social democracy of Europe” spiel.  There is the outline of a real argument in there somewhere.  I know because Mitch Daniels made the case a lot better in his response to Obama.  Daniels was better than Romney on economic growth, social mobility, limited government, a responsible and adult citizenry, and a sustainable and secure welfare state. 

6.  The regret…

that with every debate the questions just seem to get worse and worse.  Zero questions on Medicare.  Who-knows-how-long on moon colonies.  Why should your wife be the best  First Lady?  What job would you give Marco Rubio (it wasn’t phrased that way but…)?  The candidates are complicit.  They could move the debate to more important issues if they wanted to.

Santorum has hooked Romney good on Romneycare and the similarities between Obamacare and Romneycare.  It is devastating.  This is what the whole debate should be like.