sailingaway
02-26-2012, 11:37 AM
I really dislike this woman, she is a true neoconservative, and is bashing Santorum for Romney's benefit, certainly not for ours. However, she is good at it:
Because Santorum cast himself as a more pristine conservative than his opponents, he made it that much more inviting to use his voting record against him. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard observes: “Much of what Congress does can be chalked up to members trying to get reelected, and that means sending the bacon back home to the district. But it would be politically impractical for members to put specific items up for a vote one-by-one, so they group them all together, so that everybody votes for your pork and you vote for everybody else’s pork simultaneously. Thus, Santorum never got to choose between ‘good’ earmarks and ‘bad’ earmarks — he had to vote for all or none.”
In essence, Santorum took a problematic Senate voting record and turned it into a hypocrisy problem. Had he not posed as someone who would not stoop to compromise his ideological convictions, the votes for Big Labor, earmarks, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D and the Bridge to Nowhere wouldn’t look quite as bad.
It is for this reason that his alliance with former senator Arlen Specter also is so problematic. It is not just his endorsement of Specter’s reelection in 2004, but his presidential support in 1996 that is a killer. In the C-SPAN video from the Specter kickoff, we can see Santorum sitting right up front applauding the candidate who proclaims (beginning at about the 4:45-minute mark) that he is running “to champion tolerance and freedom, especially a woman’s right to choose.” Santorum cheers for a candidate characterizing himself as a “social libertarian.”
You can chalk up that display to political back-scratching. Specter had lent considerable help and even some staff to Santorum for his Senate run in 1994. So Santorum was willing to return the favor by pushing the candidacy of a man who opposed Santorum’s core principles. It happens. But for Santorum it’s jarringly inconsistent with his message.
Santorum unfortunately underestimated the degree to which his record and past political behavior could be used to undermine his self-image a a doctrinaire conservative. It appears that he didn’t order opposition research on himself and was unprepared for the kind of scrutiny you get in the New Media age when every reporter and campaign staffer can find reams of data with no more than a Google search.
Any lawmaker has a problem with votes that don’t later match up with his campaign theme. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran as a maverick in 2008, not as a holier-than-thou conservative. In that case his votes were irksome to the right, but they did not reveal him to be a “fake,” in Rep. Ron Paul’s vernacular.
more at link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-problem-with-santorums-past/2012/02/25/gIQALROBaR_blog.html
there is also a poll on the lower right about whether the US should intervene in Syria...
Because Santorum cast himself as a more pristine conservative than his opponents, he made it that much more inviting to use his voting record against him. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard observes: “Much of what Congress does can be chalked up to members trying to get reelected, and that means sending the bacon back home to the district. But it would be politically impractical for members to put specific items up for a vote one-by-one, so they group them all together, so that everybody votes for your pork and you vote for everybody else’s pork simultaneously. Thus, Santorum never got to choose between ‘good’ earmarks and ‘bad’ earmarks — he had to vote for all or none.”
In essence, Santorum took a problematic Senate voting record and turned it into a hypocrisy problem. Had he not posed as someone who would not stoop to compromise his ideological convictions, the votes for Big Labor, earmarks, No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D and the Bridge to Nowhere wouldn’t look quite as bad.
It is for this reason that his alliance with former senator Arlen Specter also is so problematic. It is not just his endorsement of Specter’s reelection in 2004, but his presidential support in 1996 that is a killer. In the C-SPAN video from the Specter kickoff, we can see Santorum sitting right up front applauding the candidate who proclaims (beginning at about the 4:45-minute mark) that he is running “to champion tolerance and freedom, especially a woman’s right to choose.” Santorum cheers for a candidate characterizing himself as a “social libertarian.”
You can chalk up that display to political back-scratching. Specter had lent considerable help and even some staff to Santorum for his Senate run in 1994. So Santorum was willing to return the favor by pushing the candidacy of a man who opposed Santorum’s core principles. It happens. But for Santorum it’s jarringly inconsistent with his message.
Santorum unfortunately underestimated the degree to which his record and past political behavior could be used to undermine his self-image a a doctrinaire conservative. It appears that he didn’t order opposition research on himself and was unprepared for the kind of scrutiny you get in the New Media age when every reporter and campaign staffer can find reams of data with no more than a Google search.
Any lawmaker has a problem with votes that don’t later match up with his campaign theme. But Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) ran as a maverick in 2008, not as a holier-than-thou conservative. In that case his votes were irksome to the right, but they did not reveal him to be a “fake,” in Rep. Ron Paul’s vernacular.
more at link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/the-problem-with-santorums-past/2012/02/25/gIQALROBaR_blog.html
there is also a poll on the lower right about whether the US should intervene in Syria...