Des Moines, Iowa – One hot August night in Ames, Rick Santorum stood on the mat-covered basketball court at Iowa State University’s Hilton Coliseum. As pop-country songs played softly over the arena’s loudspeakers, he huddled with his wife, Karen. Few people noticed him, and his handlers, if he had any, were elsewhere. Reporters breezed past the couple, hustling to chat with big-name strategists working for Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty.
A couple steps away, under a cavern of Klieg lights, Sean Hannity of Fox News bantered with Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman, who was widely expected to sweep the upcoming straw poll. Santorum, surveying the scene, scowled. As he waited for Bachmann to finish the interview, he tapped his foot, like a backup player itching to get into the game. Once again he had participated in a Republican primary debate, and once again he was a bench-warmer.
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Minutes after the televised spar, here he was, in a post-debate “spin room” stuffed with political junkies, and he was ignored — an also-ran, a B-list pol waiting to appear on cable. The proud, boyish-looking former Pennsylvania senator was miffed. “This is unbelievable,” he told Karen, shaking his head. “Two questions in the beginning, and I had to wave my hand to get them.”
Five months later, on a bitterly cold January morning in central Iowa, Santorum’s summer doldrums have largely evaporated. All week, as he has greeted burly voters, many of them decked in Carhartt jackets, he has been swarmed by hundreds of media types — print reporters, network producers, camera-toting Swiss bloggers — out in force to cover every move of the man who, quite suddenly, has shaken up the GOP presidential scramble.
But Santorum’s sustained buzz in Iowa’s small diners and Pizza Ranch restaurants is not due in any way to his celebrity or his charm. His usual outfit — single-color, slightly pilled sweater-vests over a pressed white shirt — is the look of the ill-at-ease soccer dad, not the confident frontrunner. His remarks are always delivered rapid-fire, are frequently testy, and are too often focused on long-forgotten legislative yawners. Regardless, Iowans have flocked to him at the eleventh hour, partly because they’ve soured on Bachmann and Gov. Rick Perry, and partly because he is the last alternative to Mitt Romney left, the nice-enough guy who has visited all 99 counties.
That’s just fine with Santorum, who tells me that he is confident that Republicans will nominate him, a “reliable conservative,” rather than “settle” on Romney. But as Iowans prepare to caucus, Romney’s well-organized and lavishly funded campaign looms over the Pennsylvanian’s upstart effort — the Death Star to Santorum’s X-wing fighter. Whatever the outcome tonight, the former Massachusetts governor will be a formidable competitor in the months ahead, as will Texas congressman Ron Paul, who has the money and ground game to stay in the hunt. And the rest of the field, should they choose to carry on, will give Santorum headaches, knocking him as they fade.
Of course, such a scenario depends on Santorum finishing in Iowa’s top tier, near or above Paul and Romney. The latest polls hint at this happening, but in this tumultuous primary season, most every reporter is wary of trusting any last-minute temperature-taking of the conservatives among the cornfields. Still, Santorum looks poised for a good night, and should he pull it off the real question becomes: What’s next?
To get some answers, I recently spoke with John Brabender, Santorum’s own Karl Rove — the senior strategist who has been with him since his first House race in 1990, when he toppled Democrat Doug Walgren, a seven-term incumbent from the Pittsburgh suburbs. Brabender tells me to keep an eye on seven factors as the Iowa HQ closes and the plane for Manchester is fueled.
If this race were an 800m run, Santorum is definitely proving to be the Dave Wottle of the group. If you watch Wottle in the 1972 Olympic finals (youtube), observers believe he poured on a huge kick to get from the back of the pack to the front. What actually happened was that both laps were run at nearly equal splits. In other words, he kept his same pace from beginning to end; everyone else petered out.
Any notion that Santorum can compete beyond Iowa is pixie dust. He has spent two years virtually living in Iowa in order to achieve the level of poll support he appears to enjoy. But without major sources of funding and with no real organizational muscle there is no way in the world he can compete in regular primary states, which will be coming at a rapid fire pace in the weeks ahead. That is just a fact of political life. There is a reason that money has always been called the mother's milk of politics, and Santorum cannot raise enough of it fast enough to mount any serious effort in South Carolina or Florida; much less the states that will be voting on Super Tuesday.
Gingrich lacks the organization and is low on funds, but he can at least tap into the funding networks he has established over the years and can count on some major donors to get him rapidly up to speed. Perry continues to be the only candidate other than Romney with the deep pockets, ready-made organization and campaign structure necessary to compete in a long nomination marathon.
If Iowa conservatives cast a Quixotic vote for Santorum, all they will be doing is advancing Romney, who will have skated through the nominating process without ever having to face a consolidated, conservative challenge. If that's the case, welcome to McCain II.
It is no accident that some of the writers on this site who have firmly established themselves as Romney supporters became suddenly enamored with Santorum in the past couple of weeks, just as Perry began to move up again in the polls. The buzz they and other establishment Republicans provided in various national interviews have helped fuel a Santorum rise in Iowa that is insupportable anywhere else, while allowing Romney to continue the luxury of facing a fractured, conservative opposition. Fortunately, there is still an opportunity for either Perry or Gingrich to finish, if not third, fourth, and move on to South Carolina in position to finally take on Romney one-on-one. The only question would be whether Santorum would still siphon away enough votes to hand Romney a win. In other words, conservative GOP primary voters have exactly 18 days to get serious, grow up and quit making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Santorum appears to be the only conservative in the bunch. Gingrich is the perfect liberal, moderate, or conservative, depending on which part of his record anyone cares to examine. The optics of Obama debating the sweating marshmellow man (Gingrich) or the known debate-tanker and caricature of GWB (Perry) are awful.
If a conservative is going to win, Santorum is the guy. He has an uphill climb, as you infer, but nothing fills the campaign coffers like winning. He can get huge buzz if he gets pole position in Iowa, and he has the Christian right in his back pocket - a key for any nominee in states like South Carolina.
I don't see why Santorum would be better than Romney and he has no chance anyway. He can claim he is going to soldier on but it is meaningless. The guy couldn't even win his last statewide election in PA, forget him.
@KRoyall: Yeah, and Lincoln went down in flames in 1858 against Stephen Douglas -- which one do you remember better now?
ENOUGH already of you bloggers bringing up Santorum's defeat. So the voters in PA were too stupid to re-elect him last go-round. How's that got anything to do with anything?
The question of the day is "should conervatives unite behind a single candidate?"
I suspect that the answer to that question is about to be answered. Rick Santorum is the real deal, just like Paul Ryan,
Ron Paul may siphon off a little bit of the hippie wing of the libertarian vote down the line, but Santorum gives him no real traction among pro-life libertarians on his bona fides (Wow!, did anyone ever imagine that there were so many of us out here?).
It will boil down to RIck Santorum continuing his string of strong debate perfomances (in MHO a very consistent gentleman's B or better), solid understanding of the issues respectable policy stances, political savvy, and some good luck.
He has continued to come across as a man of intelligence an integrity - and if he can dispel any suspicions of whinines, as decisively as possible, the political pedigree is impressive.
I believe the case can be made that he has a legislative background that outranked JFK's prior to his winning move from the Senate to the White House.
Santorum's youthful personality, good looks, and boundless energy will need more gravitas in the coming months, but he's so far been pretty sure footed. After so much destruction of front runners by their own hand, at least in Rick Santorum, we have a man that never made big mistakes, and learned a lot from the one's he's made.
Your question "should conservatives unite around one candidate" is the key question in this nomination.
Unfortunately for conservatives, the time to unite for this purpose is quickly coming. My thinking is that the last chance for this to happen is South Carolina.
Why?
Romney, who I think will come into either first or second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire, will be coming into South Carolina with a lot of momentum. If he wins SC also, the race is over.
But the main reason is that the Romney has what the other campaigns do not have - the money and the organization to go the distance as well as being electable. If Conservatives do not rally around a candidate in SC, then no candidate will have the money or organization to compete with Romney.
Santorum has three problems that he has to overcome: money, organization, and electability.
He needs all three to have any chance to compete with Romney.
Unfortunately for Santorum, he has to compete with three other candidates for the conservative vote, money, and organization. Without these resources Santorum will not be able to stay in the race too much longer.
Well at least the evangelicals came home to the guy who is all about their causes: banning abortion and making gays second class citizens. Not much there for the middle of the road though. He'll make Romney look better to most people, which is some accomplishment.
@Rook: Gays are not second class citizens -- they do not deserve to marry any more than I deserve to "marry" a rock or a dog or a tree, or -- heaven forbid -- my daughter or my son. There is no such thing as gay "marriage." The militant homosexual movement is all about bullying and power, and shoving and pushing to get their way. They are, at heart, violent and obnoxious. They want to deprive me of my God-given privilege to be married and to have society respect marriage.
I'm grateful that you do not have a vote in my state, which on New Year's Day conducted its first gay marriage, sanctioned by law. By the "rule of law," which has become a popular catchphrase, it is in fact a true marriage, with all of the attendant rights and responsibilities. You are, of course, entitled to your own views, as are the citizens of my state. They have spoken, and so have you.
indykat, indykat, indykat: It is in fact NOT a true marriage. What it really is is a legal fiction contrived to satisfy what might be termed the Democratic Party's hypernookey brigade, that portion of the political spectrum so hopelessly lost in the silly idealism of the Sixties its members have unquestionably accepted that decade's notion that freedom, progress, and equality mean anything and everything "goes" sexually. Their (and your) day is done, as we the people prepare to escort you intellectual relics from a bygone era into the dustbin of history come November.
Santorum is the last desperate choice of those who don't like Romney. Note that carefully ... the last choice. After Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Paul and Gingrich all glimmered for a moment and burned out ... the evangelical-one-issue-voters and refusenik conservatives coalesced once again around whomever was left and -- surprise! -- it was Santorum. Good for him...he has enough money to go another week, now.
But he has one issue -- abortion. On everything else, he sounds like a freshman running for senior class President. His resume does not match his rhetoric, and his last time out on the horse didn't go very well, when he lost by 17 points to a complete nothing in a Senate race.
This one-trick pony will be gassed within a week. He's a fraud, just like the rest.
I have a generally good impression of Santorum, but I didn't know much about his career until this week. This Reuters article is interesting. External Link
I didn't realize Santorum has been in Washington most of his life and that he has been a lobbyist and had very close ties with lobbyists. He may be just another Washington Insider whose paycheck has come directly or indirectly from the taxpayer.
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