Santorum

I saw some of the debate tonight. These two comments at Hot Air capture the way I always feel about Santorum:

“I can never tell if Santorum is doing good or bad…. I just cannot tune in to the man.”

“Santorum has this irritating way of projecting rightous arrogance in answering even the most vanilla of questions. He’s got a chip on his shoulder that’s very unappealing. I really think he’d be a far happier man if he actually followed his religous convictions and became a televangelist.”

Here’s another interesting comment:

“Rick Santorum is an example of everything that is wrong with our government…. I couldn’t believe it; Santorum admits he voted for Planned Parenthood because it was part of one of those huge package bills that also included some things he supported. Ok, so he votes for Planned Parenthood. Then, in order to balance it all out, he writes and/or sponsors another bill that will pay for abstinence teaching in the schools. This is exactly why we are going bankrupt, he is having the taxpayer pay for both sides of an issue, then he has the nerve to claim he is conservative, you know, a conservative team player….”

Finally, there Allahpundit’s observation about Santorum’s “cringeworthy admission that he took one for the team in voting for No Child Left Behind.”

This is why it’s so hard for senators to be elected to the presidency; they’re too compromised by their years in the legislative sausage factory. Only two senators have been elected President in the last ninety years, Kennedy and Obama, and they both remained distant from the Senate and used it more as their launching pad than as their place of work.

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February 23

James P. writes:

Santorum is no fun to listen to, but I find it equally impossible to listen to Romney’s endlessly repeated saccharine platitudes and feeble inability to defend himself against obvious lines of attack.

It is also hard for governors of Massachusetts to be elected to the Presidency, as they are compromised by their years of governing a liberal state. Sadly, Romney is much more like Michael Dukakis than Calvin Coolidge.

LA writes:

One thing that bothered me, Romney said repeatedly that he would “repeal Obamacare.” He acted as though repeal were simply up to him, whereas it is up to Congress to repeal it, and up to the president to sign the repeal. And a repeal by Congress would require, as Michele Bachmann said over and over, a president who was not just committed to signing a repeal when it came to his desk, but who was actively pushing Congress to repeal it, as it will be a tough fight. Also, it may require a Republican majority of 60 in order to get cloture, and it’s not looking likely that that is attainable.

Also, Romney said he would repeal it because it is “too expensive,” and reasons like that. He did not indicate any understanding of how tyrannical it is, how it will destroy the private health care industry, and so on.

Paul Henri writes:

The moderator decided it was attack Santorum night. I watched the debate. And for the first hour or more, the questions mostly were directed at Santorum, and the incoherent Ron Paul was designated by the moderator as the hatchet man with his aw-shucks oblique demagoguery. Santorum did a superb job under the circumstances.

Santorum has the intellectual ability and knowledge to go toe-to-toe with any of the candidates, particularly the vacuous Obama. I thought he defended himself well. There might have been one or two times when he was not excellent, but that is super in a two-hour debate.

People can’t tell whether Santorum is doing well because the media have not deemed him (and never will because he is conservative) a nice guy, and people are not listening closely. He is beating Romney in the primaries. Moreover, he tears Romney—an energetic man pretending to be a conservative—apart. Santorum continually and accurately points out that Romney has no credibility when Romney says he is against Obamacare, the big thing among many conservatives. Yet somehow, Romney is still standing. Santorum carefully and succinctly explained the reasons for his votes.

(Also, I would like to know the ratio of clauses to phrases that Paul uttered tonight. I suspect it is pretty low.)

David B. writes:

Your post about Santorum in which you remarked that Kennedy and Obama are the only two serving senators to be elected president in the last ninety years reminded me of some research I did many years ago. I looked up magazine articles on John F. Kennedy when he was running for President.

In a Time magazine piece, JFK was quoted as saying (something like) being a senator was a handicap because you “have to vote on everything” which will upset some group of voters. Ironically, it was liberals who tended to be the most upset by Kennedy’s senatorial voting record. The Adlai Stevenson admirers and ADA types never forgave JFK for missing the censure vote for Joe McCarthy. You will recall John F. Kennedy was in the hospital when the vote took place.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 22, 2012 11:00 PM | Send