santorum

Does Rick Santorum Know He’s an Embarrassment?

With 20/20 hindsight, it is easy to see that Mitt Romney was, if not unelectable, fighting an uphill battle. In a year when the incumbent was supposedly politically weak and vulnerable, the best option the GOP had was not much of an option at all. Romney looked vaguely presidential, if you squinted hard enough, but his chief asset seemed to be that he was not Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, or Rick Santorum. The primary selling point of the others had been that they weren’t Mitt Romney. That fact alone throws the Republicans’ current problems into sharp relief.

Santorum was the last and most serious challenger to Romney, and this contest highlights the divide at the heart of the GOP. The former Massachusetts governor was the last residual scraping from the bottom of the barrel that was once the GOP of George H.W. Bush, the party of New England bankers and rock-ribbed East Coast Establishmentarianism. Business-friendly but not ideologically rigid, they could usually be counted on to govern in partnership with Democrats, regardless of who was in power.

Santorum was just the latest darling of “more ideologically pure than thou” Tea Party wing of the party. Had he garnered the nomination, no amount of Electoral College gamesmanship could have saving the Republicans from a drubbing that would have made the election we actually saw look like a nail biter.

Some people like to portray the internal struggles of the Republican party as a struggle between the Tea Party and the old guard “establishment” conservatives, but I don’t think that’s the real problem. You have a party with an intractable fringe element combined with a vacuum at the top. The Congressional GOP leadership in the persons of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner appear to lack the testicular fortitude to bring their unruly packs to heel when it comes time to actually govern the country.

While the Senate, with its Democratic majority, better reflects the shifting demographics of this country, the Republican majority in the House is symptomatic of the problems facing that party. By virtue of their unchallenged majorities in some states, the Republicans redrew congressional districts after 2010 so that it was impossible for the Democrats to win back a majority in 2012 (even through Democratic House candidates received more votes than Republican ones). Behind the castle walls of these districts, the Republicans have no threat from the left during the general election. The only threat to a Republican in those districts is from a more conservative Republican during the primary.

To stay in office, a Republican congressman must be a true Tea Party doctrinaire or risk losing to someone who is. The net effect for the party is an inexorable drift to the right, away from the political mainstream, away from relevancy.

Since losing the nomination, Rick Santorum has become a regular contributor to WorldNetDaily, a web-based for all sorts of birther nonsense. One of his first posts was against a UN Treaty on the treatment of people with disabilities. He railed that it would give the UN dictatorial powers to tell Americans how to run their business.1 In reality, the Treaty had no enforcement power and was based entirely on the Americans with Disabilities Act, so American business people already have to comply with the terms of the treaty under existing U.S. law. Sadly, Santorum’s lies carried the day and the Senate failed to ratify the treaty2 which codified American values into international law.

For being a walking, living, breathing example of everything that is wrong with the Republican Party, Rick Santorum earns a place at the table in the Marketing Dept.

  1. This Treaty Crushes U.S. Sovereignty,” WorldNetDaily, 12/2/2012 []
  2. Dole Appears, but G.O.P. Rejects a Disabilities Treaty,” Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times, 12/4/2012 []

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