by Nicholas Wilbur
With the new John Boehner tan and a Sylvester Stallone lop-sided grin, Rick Santorum would have looked less out of place on “Jersey Shore” than at a national debate scrapping for sound bites in the fight for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
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| Photo: Charlie Neibergall/ Associated Press August 11, 2011 |
But Santorum’s presidential run is more of a résumé builder than a legitimate campaign. After being slaughtered by a historical 18 percent in his 2006 Senate re-election bid, Santorum became a Fox News contributor making just under $100,000 a year (a $74,000 pay cut). If a hopeless presidential run has the power to turn a faceless pizza maker into a household name (See Herman Cain), adding “2012 Republican presidential candidate” to his current title of “former Pennsylvania senator” ought to be worth at least another couple thousand dollars. (The strategy worked for “former Arkansas governor and 2008 presidential candidate” Mike Huckabee, who’s raking in around $500,000 a year from Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” “news” network.
Santorum’s candidacy won’t have the slightest effect on the outcome of the primary or the general election race, but pushing the envelope and challenging the media darling candidates is a prerequisite for any prospective political pundit who’s worth the weight of his partisan rhetoric.
Santorum may not have stood out as a presidential contender Thursday night during the second official Republican primary election debate, but he proved his legitimacy as a future commentator.
If only to guarantee that six-figure contract, Santorum nonetheless demonstrated that he has as much (if not more) credibility as a political thinker as the rest of the field, and he established himself as perhaps the only consistent candidate of the lot when he drew a line in the sand that made the two front runners, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, look neither credible nor consistent in their oft-repeated talking points.
Answering a question about states’ rights, Romney defended the health care law he created as governor of Massachusetts and simultaneously attacked President Obama’s nearly identical national health care law when he emphatically advocated for the 10th Amendment.
“We put together a plan that was right for Massachusetts,” he said.
The president took the power of the people and the states away from them and put in place a one-size-fits-all plan. It’s bad law. It’s bad constitutional law. It’s bad medicine... The right answer for every state is to determine what’s right for those states and not to impose Obamacare on the nation. That’s why I’ll repeal it.
Bachmann, as any second-place candidate ought to do, disagreed with both Romney’s and Obama’s laws.
“If the federal government can force American citizens – or if a state can force their citizens – to purchase health insurance, there is nothing that the state cannot do,” she said. “This is clearly an unconstitutional action, whether it’s done at the federal level or whether it’s the state level.”
Libertarian Ron Paul of Texas added his two cents as well, arguing on principle the idea that the federal government can’t regulate states on an issue that hasn’t been decided by the judiciary as unconstitutional.
“The way I would understand the Constitution, the federal government can’t go in and prohibit the states from doing bad things,” he said.
Santorum had had enough.
Flailing his arms and demanding that the debate moderators acknowledge his otherwise inconsequential presence, he said with passionate disgust, “This is the 10th Amendment run amok!”
Michele Bachmann says that she would go in and fight health care being imposed by states…but she wouldn’t go in and fight marriage being imposed by the states. That would be okay. We have Ron Paul saying “Whatever the states want to do on the 10th Amendment is fine.” So if the states want to pass polygamy, that’s fine. If the states want to impose sterilization, that’s fine.
No, our country is based on moral laws, ladies and gentleman. There are things the states can’t do. Abraham Lincoln said the states don’t have the right to do wrong. I respect the 10th Amendment, but we are nation that has values. We are a nation that was built on a moral enterprise, and states don’t have the right to tramp over those because of the 10th Amendment.
The theocon was talking about gay marriage, but also about the shallow and illogical rhetoric we’ve come to accept from candidates seeking high office.
Romney believes states can impose mandates requiring residents to buy health insurance, but the federal government can’t. Bachmann believes neither can impose mandates, but the federal government can limit who is and isn’t allowed to marry. Paul believes the federal government can’t regulate state governments, when in fact the 10th Amendment gives authority to the states only in the absence of a constitutional prohibition or a federal law already on the books.
This is, indeed, “the 10th Amendment run amok.”
Santorum, of course, believes sodomy should be a federal offense, but his stance on states’ rights is at least a consistent one.
If states were the ultimate authority in the absence of a federal law, Oregon could require that every Caucasian grow dreadlocks, Arizona could fully regulate its border with Mexico (thereby becoming the sole defender of national sovereignty in that region), Wisconsin could mandate cheese hats in church, and Utah could prohibit monogamy.
“We can’t have 50 marriage laws,” he said.
He’s correct – Romney and Bachmann are both inconsistent, and Paul is misinformed – but in the end it doesn’t matter. No mainstream media outlet has looked upon Santorum as anything more than a limelight seeking fire and brimstone moralist with an axe to grind against homosexuals. Which he is.
His presidential ambitions are a means to an end that isn’t the White House, a fact to which he openly confessed when he told a group of Catholics in Florida, “I hate to be calculating, but I see that 2012 is not just throwing somebody out to be eaten, but it’s a real opportunity for success.” In January, 2010, he admitted, “I have no great burning desire to be president…”
He has no great odds, either.
Santorum has a better chance at being elected mayor of Sodom than he does of winning a state primary. The media already ignore him in favor of more outrageous (and entertaining) candidates, and half the population doesn’t know who he is, meaning that few people, besides his tight-assed wife, will even notice when he drops out.
But just because the media ignored him doesn’t negate the fact that he bested the party’s top two contenders in an intellectual argument about consistency, morality and the applications of states’ rights legislation. And that says something.
Mainly, it says the “former Pennsylvania senator and 2012 presidential candidate” may have just completed his rite of passage into the Fox News punditry class – and just in time to fill the void left by Glenn Beck’s departure.
