The Cato Institute (which mostly favors gay marriage) sharpens their attacks on Santorum. Fair enough. It's a horse race. But we were struck by this sentence in Michael Tanner's essay:
"After all, the Tea Party and 2010 elections were largely about economic issues and the desire to limit the size, cost, and intrusiveness of government. And those issues are not Santorum’s strong suit."
...Rick Santorum has become central because Iowa Republicans ignored an axiom that is as familiar as it is false: Democrats fall in love, and Republicans fall in line. Republicans, supposedly hierarchical, actually are — let us say the worst — human. They crave fun. Supporting Mitt Romney still seems to many like a duty, the responsible thing to do. Suddenly, supporting Santorum seems like a lark, partly because a week or so ago he could quit complaining about media neglect and start having fun, which is infectious.
... White voters without college education — economically anxious and culturally conservative — were called “Reagan Democrats” when they were considered only seasonal Republicans because of Ronald Reagan. Today they are called the Republican base.
Who is more apt to energize them: Santorum, who is from them, or Romney, who is desperately seeking enthusiasm?
By NOM Staff|Posted in Same Sex Marriage|Comments Off on George Will on Santorum: Suddenly, a Fun Candidate
Rick Santorum has lagged near the bottom of the pack in South Carolina, mired below 3 percent in most polls.
That's despite the fact that he's spent more time in the state than any of his Republican presidential rivals.
But since he virtually tied former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, Santorum's South Carolina backers expect those numbers to climb.
"There are two viable candidates coming out of Iowa, that's Romney and Santorum," said former U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett of Westminster, Santorum's state chairman. "Santorum is poised to win South Carolina."
The thing that should be clear to observers of the Iowa caucuses is that social conservatives remain a critical component of the conservative movement. It’s been said that there are three legs of the conservative stool: economic conservatives, social conservatives, and national-security conservatives. But many in the elite, including some in the GOP elite in Washington, have been working hard to dismiss the importance of social conservatism. Iowa reminds us that this is a losing strategy for the Republican party.
I attended the Waterloo caucus and listened to people talk in the crowd and the candidates’ representatives make their final pitches. Virtually every one of the representatives spoke of their candidate’s solid commitment to social conservatism — support for life from conception to natural death and a fervent commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Certainly Rick Santorum’s meteoric rise in Iowa is due in large part to his consistent championing of social-conservative issues, especially life and marriage.
Ron Paul’s representative didn’t mention his views on marriage, and no wonder. His position on marriage is far out of the mainstream of Republican beliefs — not only has he said “sure” to gay marriage, he actually has advocated abolishing civil marriage altogether. Ron Paul was expecting to win Iowa, but he finished third. His failure to recognize and support the fundamental, foundational importance of marriage is a big reason for that. NOM ran television and online ads, launched tens of thousands of robo-calls, and mounted grassroots activities with our thousands of supporters in the state.
Social conservatives were heard from in Iowa. They propelled Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney — who along with Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann signed NOM’s marriage pledge — to the front of the pack, and sent an important message to Ron Paul.
Iowa reminded the GOP elite that supporting marriage is a winning issue. Marriage won in Iowa, just as it has won in 31 of 31 state elections.
A reporter caught up with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in Iowa and asked her to respond to the fact that Rick Santorum supports a Federal Marriage Amendment.
She responded: "That would be unamerican, undemocratic and entirely unappropriate and unacceptable."
Our President Brian Brown interviewed by Reuters in response to the news that Gov. Gregoire is supporting redefining marriage through the legislature:
...Brian Brown, president of the 800,000-member Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for Marriage, told Reuters his nonprofit group would lobby against gay marriage in Washington state.
"The people of this country believe that marriage is a union of a man and a woman," Brown said in a telephone interview. "I expect the legislature in Washington state will stand up for this commitment and vote to protect marriage."
Republican state lawmakers also criticized Gregoire's gay marriage proposal as a potential diversion from Washington's $1.5 billion budget shortfall. Republican state Senator Dan Swecker called the move "bad timing and a bad idea."
Gregoire, a Catholic, has not always been a public supporter of gay marriage, but moved the issue to the fore in May 2009 when she signed a bill granting domestic partners the same rights as married couples so long as they did not conflict with federal law. Voters narrowly approved the measure in a referendum later in the year.
Jonathan Last at the new web-only publication The Daily writes about the Santorum surge for a tech-friendly audience:
On Dec. 20, Rick Santorum polled at 5 percent in Iowa, placing him ahead of only the MIA Jon Huntsman in the state. Although Mitt Romney officially won the contest, Santorum captured 25 percent of caucus voters last night, essentially tying the “inevitable” Romney. Santorum came from further behind, faster, than anyone in caucus history. It was Rudy, Hoosiers, and the Miracle on Ice, rolled into one — the biggest electoral upset in modern primary politics.
And despite what some of the spinners are selling, the entire race is changed. Let’s work our way around the horn.
Rick Santorum: No money, no organization, no compelling personal story or shtick, Santorum surged by doing two things: He sold a vision of the country that embraced the culture war and conservative values and he formulated a populist economic plan that offered a different twist on the small-government line being taken by the rest of the field. And the real killer app was that Santorum found a way to marry his economics to family-formation and middle class mores.
The received wisdom is that Santorum can’t be a factor going forward, but it’s not clear why that’s true. He has a message. He connects with voters. Look at the exit polls and it’s clear that conservatives, evangelicals and tea party voters like him.
A lament against the domestication of "gayness" with an acute awareness that gay marriage is not just an individual right, but a social change:
"...Certainly, there were always members of the gay community who would rather not have borne the burden of existential difference, who would rather have stayed who they were while seeing society change in such a way that who they are might be allowed to count as normal. The domestication of same-sex desire is surely a good thing for these people. But their individual advantage does not mean that the world as a whole is not losing something, and it has been one of the great fallacies of the liberal defenders of gay marriage to assume that what is good for any given individual is for that very reason good for society. The loss we have in fact suffered is one akin to the loss of some mighty species of wild boar as it is bred downward into a fat, ugly, lazy, edible pig; or to the move of indigenous Amazonians from the rainforest into squalid urban slums."
Some interesting observations on how as marriage came to be seen as about love and the source of all happiness, it also came to be seen as work. Just as work is now suppose to reflect an urgent and creative passion:
"What is more difficult to understand, and what seems to invite only controversial theses, is the question of why the conception of marriage as love, on the one hand, and as work on the other, emerged together in the modern era. Some have argued that it was precisely the expectation that marriage should be sustained by love that brought the institution to a crisis, and brought us to a situation more absurd than Shaw could have imagined, where couples are expected to work in order to preserve themselves in the exhausting and abnormal condition in which they started out."
The author, a professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, attributes this to the capacity of capitalism to domesticate all other ways of being.
Rick Santorum’s socially conservative brand has helped him break through with a last-minute surge in Iowa. But his agenda isn’t restricted to reimposing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,”outlawing gay marriage nationwide, or promoting prayer in public schools. Santorum also wants to use the federal tax incentives to promote traditional marriage and families.
“Tax policy as social policy” is the most distinguishing characteristic of Santorum’s tax reform platform. The Pennsylvania Republican wants to reduce taxes by tripling the child tax credit, which currently stands at $1,000 per child. Santorum also wants to reduce federal taxes that penalize married couples. Under the current tax code, some spouses who earn about the same salary on the middle-to-upper end of the spectrum pay more in taxes by filing jointly as a married couple than they would as individuals. Justin Wolfers explains further: “The U.S. has a household-based taxation system which subsidizes married families when one person stays home and taxes most people extra if they choose to marry and both work full-time. The average tax cost of marriage for a dual-income couple is $1,500 annually.”
Rick Santorum's speech after improving from single digits in the polls to within eight votes of victory in Iowa.
Part 1 -- Game on!
"Thank you so much, Iowa... you've taken the first step of taking back our country." He speaks eloquently of his grandfather, who taught him the lesson: "Work hard." He said: "What wins in America is bold ideas, sharp contrasts, and a plan that includes everyone." And more: "When the family breaks down, the economy struggles."
Part 2 -- A rousing finish:
Human life and human dignity--for Rick that's what it's all about. He shares the story of his youngest daughter, Isabella Maria. "You ask me what motivates me? The dignity of every human life."
Gov. Chris Gregoire on Wednesday said she'll put forward legislation to legalize marriage for gay and lesbian couples.
The proposal will be introduced during the legislative session that starts Monday. If it's approved, Washington would become the seventh state to legalize gay marriage.
"It's time, it's the right thing to do, and I will introduce a bill to do it," Gregoire said in a statement.
... The announcement represents a change for Gregoire. While running for governor in 2004, she supported legal rights for same-sex couples but said, "I do not believe that Washington state is ready to support gay marriage."
In a 2008 interview, when she ran for a second term, Gregoire explained her beliefs in more detail.
"There are two issues here," she said. "One is the state's responsibility. To me, the state's responsibility is to absolutely ensure equality. The other is a religious issue, and I leave it to the churches to make that call about marriage." -- The Seattle Times
There are plenty of factors that any voter needs to sort out in deciding whom to support for president. For me, one very important factor is which candidate is most likely to nominate excellent Supreme Court justices and lower-court judges and to work tenaciously to get them confirmed. On this score, the candidate in whom I have by far the greatest confidence is Rick Santorum.
I know Rick not only from his work as a senator but from his four-plus years as a colleague of mine at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. (Rick disaffiliated from EPPC just before he launched his presidential campaign.) Rick is deeply committed to the battle against liberal judicial activism, and I’d be delighted to have him making judicial nominations.
Charles Hurt at the Washington Times writes about why so many reporters wrongly wrote-off Rick Santorum. It's the sweater vest. He's not your slickster rosy scenarioist. He comes from the coal mines of Pennsylvania, he knows that life can be tough, that you have to fight, and that if you fight for what's right, you can win--against long odds. Hurt calls it "time for the porcupine":
... [a] big reason he has been written off from the start is that most political reporters have covered the former Pennsylvania senator in the Senate for the better part of a decade and have reached the conclusion that he is about as lovable as a porcupine with the charm of a possum. He is not your average back-slapping, jovial politician.
... Most politicians thrive on giving soft speeches with gauzy visions of happiness. They are related to the snake oil salesman or the used car salesman. President Obama was one of the best ever. Literally, there are still millions of people out there taking the snake oil he sold them and wondering why they aren’t getting better. Or they are still sitting on the side of the road in the broken down car he sold them jiggling the steering wheel as if it were still going.
That is not Rick Santorum. He does not offer rosy promises. Instead, he talks about fighting. And he talks about “truth.” Or he recites scripture from the Bible, usually the Old Testament. The motto emblazoned on his bus here in Iowa is: “Join the fight.”
... In these deeply troubled times, voters appear especially attracted to Mr. Santorum’s mixture of raw honesty, serious demeanor and battle-ready politics. It might just be that the time of the porcupine has finally come.
By Maggie Gallagher|Posted in Election Watch 2012, Iowa|Comments Off on Why Santorum Could Win: It’s Time for the Porcupine
I attended the Waterloo caucus and listened to people talk in the crowd and the candidates’ representatives make their final pitches. Virtually every one of the representatives spoke of their candidate’s solid commitment to social conservatism — support for life from conception to natural death and a fervent commitment to marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Certainly Rick Santorum’s meteoric rise in Iowa is due in large part to his consistent championing of social-conservative issues, especially life and marriage.
