Thoughts On Santorum (Mostly Not My Own)

1.  Andrew Busch makes a modest but strong defense of Santorum’s virtues.  Santorum was a leader on welfare reform.  He has been good on entitlement reform (probably the most important fiscal issue of the next decade) for a long time.  Even the prescription drug benefit that he supported was pretty well structured and its cost came in below expectations.  If you think Santorum’s record on earmarks is of equal or greater importance, you might want to rethink your priorities.  That was exactly the nonsense that McCain was peddling in 2008.  It is shallow politics and (since earmarks are a low priority issue in every sense) lousy politics too.  Santorum is a solid social conservative, but as Busch notes this social conservatism is of the kind that values” the family as an institution precisely because family is an essential component of civil society that serves as a barrier between atomized individuals and the state. To put it another way, family is part of the essential structure of free society, and weak families leave a vacuum that will only be filled by a hyperactive state.”  We could do worse and we probably will.

2.  Andrew Ferguson has a devastating article about how Santorum became a professional anti-government politician during his sixteen years in Congress and how he ceased to really be from Pennsylvania during this time.  Then, after losing his last Senate race, Santorum became a professional ex-politician.  Santorum doesn’t seem to have sold out any of his principles (and let’s remember that he has principles - not everybody does), but his ex-politician career paid well for activities that many people would not regard as real jobs.  Ferguson (mostly rightly) describes this as Santorum benefiting from the overexpansion of government that he is against.

I can’t help but think that Ferguson is somewhat off the mark.  Santorum might be a limited government guy, but he is hardly a small government guy.  Santorum wants to cap federal government spending at 18% of GDP (a number that I think is too small given our demographic situation.)  That is still a lot of money going through Washington.  I wish there was a mass movement against me on similar terms. I think you can also look at Ferguson’s article as an argument against a certain kind of authenticity politics.  Would you rather policy be made by Santorum or a lefty Democratic freshman who is deeply embedded in their home community?

Still, there is something there.  One of the things about Santorum is that he is to human scale.  He seems to have taken his work and family life seriously.  He seems to have fallen to some of the temptations of being a professional politician, but none of the more serious ones.  I just wish he was a little smarter.  I wish I could phrase that in a way that seemed less insulting.  He is probably smarter than me (and he has to keep a lot more in his head.)  But I can also see him struggling and frustrated that he can’t quite find the right words that will make his point clear to his audience.  In those moments, I wish he could have a transfusion from Mitch Daniels or Bobby Jindal.

3.  The polls show Santorum fading, but we have another debate tonight (hurrah.)  Romney and Gingrich are going at each other hard.  There are only going to be five people at the debate so everyone should have more time than usual.  Santorum still has time to benefit from the general wreckage, but time is running out. 

4. Since it is Martin Luther King Day and Ron Paul is in the habit of describing Martin Luther King as one of his heroes, maybe the debate moderators should ask Ron Paul about this.  

5.  Anybody have the over/under on the comments?