The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
That’s a Lot Easier Than Winning Ball Games
“Red Sox Plan to Put 2011 in the Past”–headline, MLB.com, Feb. 22
No, It’s Mine!
“Two-Headed Fish Found Near Mine”–headline, TheDailyBeast.com, Feb. 23
Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?
“Time for Ireland to Start Thinking Like the Chinese”–headline, IrishCentral.com, Feb. 22
Tony Could’ve Done With a Trim
“Firefighters Battling Anthony’s Nose Brush Fire”–headline, Journal News (White Plains, N.Y.), Feb. 23
There’s No ‘I’ in ‘Congress’
Mitt Romney is inevitable again, although his detractors can take heart that he’s been inevitable before and it’s never lasted. That’s another way of saying we agree with the conventional wisdom that Rick Santorum put in a poor performance in [Wednesday] night’s Mesa, Ariz., CNN debate. (Complicating the inevitability question, Newt Gingrich had a good night, as he always seems to do when he’s been counted out, so we can count him back in, at least for the moment.)
Santorum’s troubles last night did not result from his supposedly outré social conservatism, as we shall see, but rather from his history as a U.S. senator. His worst moment came in response to a question about his vote in favor of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, a Republican-led (though bipartisan) initiative that is now unpopular among Republicans:
Well, you know what? I supported No Child Left Behind. I supported it. It was the principal priority of President Bush to try to take on a failing education system and try to impose some sort of testing regime that would be able to quantify how well we’re doing with respect to education.
I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.
(BOOING) You know, politics is a team sport, folks. And sometimes you’ve got to rally together and do something. And in this case, you know, I thought testing was–and finding out how bad the problem was wasn’t a bad idea.
What was a bad idea was all the money that was put out there, and that, in fact, was a huge problem. I admit the mistake and I will not make that mistake again. You have someone who is committed.
What Santorum said is completely true. A lawmaker’s duty quite often demands that he compromise his principles, that he “take one for the team.” But while there’s no “I” in “Congress,” there is one in “president.” By striking such an apologetic tone, Santorum made himself look weak and made it harder for voters to think of him as a leader.
Barack Obama, the only sitting senator to make it to the White House in more than half a century, avoided this problem by not being much of a senator. He used his Senate seat as a vehicle for his own self-promotion, and pretty much checked out of the legislative process altogether after 2006.
Santorum checked out at about the same time, albeit involuntarily. But unlike Obama, he is hindered in his presidential ambitions by having internalized the mentality of a senator. He could use a bit of the president’s cockiness.
When the inevitable contraception question came, however, Santorum’s response was excellent:
What I was talking about is we have a society–Charles Murray just wrote a book about this, and it’s on the front page of the New York Times two days ago [actually four days], which is the increasing number of children being born out of wedlock in America, teens who are sexually active.
What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and all–a host of other things when children have children.
And so, yes, I was talking about these very serious issues. And, in fact, as I mentioned before, two days ago on the front page of the New York Times, they’re talking about the same thing. The bottom line is we have a problem in this country, and the family is fracturing.
Over 40% of children born in America are born out of wedlock. How can a country survive if children are being raised in homes where it’s so much harder to succeed economically? It’s five times the rate of poverty in single-parent households than it is in two-parent homes. We can have limited government, lower tax–we hear this all the time, cut spending, limit the government, everything will be fine. No, everything’s not going to be fine.
There are bigger problems at stake in America. And someone has got to go out there–I will–and talk about the things.
And you know what? Here’s the difference.
The left gets all upset. “Oh, look at him talking about these things.” You know, here’s the difference between me and the left, and they don’t get this. Just because I’m talking about it doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.
That’s what they do. That’s not what we do.
His analysis of the problem might well have been informed by our Tuesday column, which also cites Murray’s “Coming Apart” and the New York Times’s surprisingly truthful report on the illegitimacy crisis. And in the close, it sounds as though he’s following Jeffrey Bell’s advice to stress that his social conservative agenda is not a coercive one.
Romney scored one hit on Santorum on social issues–but he was firing from the right, not the left. Santorum said that he had “always opposed Title X funding”–federal family planning subsidies–but he had voted for it as part of “a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things.” Here’s Romney’s rejoinder:
I just saw a YouTube clip of you being interviewed where you said that you personally opposed contraceptives but that you–you said that you voted for Title X. You . . . used that as an argument, saying this is something I did proactively. You didn’t say this is something I was opposed to; it wasn’t something I would have done. You said this–you said this in a positive light, “I voted for Title X.”
The interview to which Romney refers is the one from 2006 that we discussed in last Thursday’s column. There is no contradiction between Santorum’s statements in that interview and last night’s debate–in both, Santorum accurately says that he has voted in favor of Title X funding–but in the former, in what looks like an effort to appear “reasonable” for the general electorate, he omits that the vote ran contrary to his views. Romney was right. Clearly he’s been reading someone other than Jennifer Rubin.
In that Thursday column, we asked for a “reasoned argument” against Santorum. George Will offers one. “The problem is not that the phenomena that trouble Santorum are unserious,” he writes. Rather, it is that Santorum is too grim:
He is an engagingly happy warrior, except when he is not. Then he is an angry prophet of a dystopian future in which, he has warned, people will be “holed up in their homes afraid to go outside at night.” He has the right forebodings but might have the wrong profession. Presidential candidates do not thrive as apostles of social regeneration; they are expected to be as sunny as Ronald Reagan was as he assured voters that they were as virtuous as their government was tedious.
Will thinks, for different reasons, that Romney is also a weak candidate for November. Maybe, but a new Gallup poll of registered voters nationwide finds the former Massachusetts governor leading the president, 50% to 46%, and the former Pennsylvania senator trailing by the narrowest of margins, 49% to 48%.
That would seem to bolster the Romney-is-more-electable argument, but wait. Consider this report from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Obama has significantly strengthened his hand in California, where his margin over his strongest GOP challenger, Mitt Romney, has doubled in the past three months, a new Field Poll shows.
Obama leads the former Massachusetts governor by 20 percentage points, 55-35, in the nation’s most-populous state. Independent voters, who will be critical in the November election, prefer the president 59 to 27 percent, the poll found.
The president has an even more commanding lead–of 28 points–over former Sen. Rick Santorum.
This was also a poll of registered voters. If Republicans care about keeping Obama’s California margin below 20%, they’d be fools to nominate Santorum. But they’d be even bigger fools to care about the margin in California, a state Obama will carry unless the GOP wins in a landslide whose proportions are, at least now, outside the realm of plausibility.
In a general-election match-up, Romney’s advantage over Santorum is eight points in California but only five nationwide. Let’s assume that other large and medium-sized socially liberal states–Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Washington–follow the California pattern. All of these states are both highly unlikely to go Republican and unnecessary for a GOP victory. On that assumption, the Gallup and Field polls suggest that Romney and Santorum are about equally electable.
It’s even possible that Santorum has a slight edge, though there’s no way to tell without comparative numbers from socially conservative swing states. As for socially liberal swing states, Romney is probably at an advantage in New Hampshire, and in–oh wait, that’s it. New Hampshire is the only socially liberal swing state.
Of course in November there will be only one match-up, Obama versus some Republican, and there will be no way to tell if some other Republican would have done better. Last night’s debate made it less likely that Santorum will be the one put to the actual test. But the reason it did so is not that voters find his social views unacceptable.
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