In the past two weeks, two potential candidates for the
Republican presidential nomination each made one of the most
substantive, thoughtful, on-target major addresses that
presidential-level politics has seen in many a year. Each really
deserves its own separate column, but time does not allow; so this
single column will need to suffice.
The speakers were both conservative stalwarts, both of
them leaders but both seen as somewhat long-shots for the
nomination. U.S. Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, if he runs, is a
long-shot because conventional wisdom stupidly believes all past is
prologue, and the past says that nobody since James Garfield has
gone straight from the House to the presidency. Former U.S. Sen.
Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania is seen as a near-hopeless case
because, after all, who can lose re-election in his own state and
move, without intervening election, to the White House? Nobody,
supposedly.
Well, neither could a black man, or somebody born in
Hawaii who grew up in Indonesia. Neither could presidential ticket
nominees come from small states like Alaska or Delaware or Wyoming,
or be born in the Panama Canal Zone, or be a woman who hunts elk…
or a peanut farmer or a washed-up movie actor,
fergoshsakes.
So forget the useless, premature campaign handicapping.
Let’s see what these men actually say — because the speeches are
worth reading and re-reading and discussing and sharing, regardless
of whether each man even runs for president much less if he can
win.
The Santorum
speech came first, on Sept. 9, commemorating the 50th
anniversary weekend of John F. Kennedy’s famous speech declaring
that he, as a Catholic, would answer to the American Constitution
before answering to the Pope. JFK’s speech has long since been
fitted for a civic halo from the liberal elites, who do and will
evermore point to it as the decisive statement on proper
American church-state relations.
Against that elite, Sen. Santorum had the guts and mind to
call JFK’s hand. In short, Santorum said JFK was peddling
balderdash:
Let me quote from the beginning of Kennedy’s
speech:
I believe in an America where the separation
of church and state is absolute.
The idea of strict or absolute separation of church and
state is not and never was the American model.
After JFK’s bit of political jujitsu, the moronic
cognoscenti taught as established doctrine that faith
should be completely segregated from the public square. To which
Santorum answers: “Our founders’ vision, unlike the French, was to
give every belief and every believer and non-believer a place at
the table in the public square. Madison referred to this ‘equal and
complete liberty’ as the ‘true remedy.’” Repeat: The idea was not
to divorce all faiths from the public square, but to welcome all
faiths into it.
More pithily, Santorum rightly said that “Kennedy took
words written to protect religion from the government and used them
to protect the government from religion.”
Then came this long passage:
Another consequence is the debasement of our First Amendment
right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms
listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not
just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most
important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press,
before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the
government for redress of grievances, before all others. This
freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which
all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get
their life. Cut down the trunk and the tree of liberty will die and
in its place will be only the barren earth of tyranny.
This first freedom has now been placed on the lowest rung
of interests to be considered when weighing rights against one
another. The fruits of this misguided idea are increasing evident
— for example:
• The ACLU is currently pushing HHS to force Catholic
hospitals to perform abortions under the emergency care mandate of
Obamacare.
• A University of Illinois professor hired to teach
classes on Catholic doctrine was fired because he taught (well…)
Catholic doctrine….
Santorum gave several other examples. All were
appropriate. But at this point, readers might, even while nodding
in agreement, say to themselves that this is somewhat well-trod
ground. What was impressive was that this was not the end point of
Santorum’s speech, but its launch. What follows is of a quality, an
erudition, which few politicians would dare. Do read the
whole thing for yourself to see, for I can’t do it justice.
But, back on a more pithy level, this passage stands out: “Virtue
requires faith because faith is the primary teacher of morality.
That is not to say that one cannot be virtuous without faith, but
for society as a whole faith is the indispensable agent of virtue.
Faith requires freedom.”
Santorum’s speech rose not only above the moronic
cognoscenti, but above sloganeering as well. And, of
course, as do most conservative challenges to liberal orthodoxy —
even challenges from a former senator of some note on the
anniversary weekend of a famous speech, delivered in the same city
as the first speech and directly contradicting it — the
establishment media paid the speech little heed. This is, of
course, how the establishment media always gets blindsided by ideas
and developments in the majoritarian American heartland — because
the media turns its back to those ideas and developments, no matter
how forthrightly they are expressed. And Rick Santorum, who fought
for conservative judges when other senators shirked their duties,
who took the lead on welfare reform and on a host of other issues,
is nothing if not forthright. And on this matter, not just
forthright but also absolutely right, as in correct.
EQUALLY RIGHT AND MOVINGLY eloquent was Mike Pence, the
hero of many a conservative battle, in his speech at Hillsdale
College on Sept. 21. Also equally substantive. The American
Spectator already
posted the speech in full this week, and I commented on it in
two
different
places to two different effects. But what remains to be noted
is the great seriousness of purpose that marked Pence’s address, as
seriousness of purpose also had marked Santorum’s. This was no
populist stem-winder full of cheaply effective code words
signifying nothing more than a desire to earn applause. This was a
speech meant to elevate discussion, a speech that assumed
intelligence among its listeners, and challenged them to use that
intelligence, rather than one that played to some presumptive
lowest common denominator.
Consider this passage, among my favorites, which is
nothing like a sound bite of the sort usually heard on the
presidential stump:
A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of
presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely
upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the
fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life
itself. It communicates that the president feels the gravity of his
office and is willing to sacrifice himself; that his eye is not
upon his own prospects but on the storm of history through which it
is his responsibility to navigate with the specific powers accorded
to him and the limitations placed upon them not merely by man in
his design but by God in His.
Pence’s verbiage, his cadences, and his themes themselves
are in a way old-fashioned, as of a bygone era. Yet if the era is
bygone, it also was a good one, one where noble thoughts held
throngs spellbound for hours, as at the Lincoln-Douglas debates. If
they are in a way old-fashioned, it is a good way, and honed to a
fine art it can still be effective today — and ought to be
welcomed by a public that at least claims to be tired of politics
as oh-so-usual.
PRAISE ASIDE, I pray that it is not too presumptuous for
me to offer some advice. I’ve polled people, anecdotally only, for
some time about Pence’s speeches. I find an interesting dichotomy.
Men seem to like the speeches, and be inspired by Pence, far more
than women are. It’s not that women don’t agree with him, or that
they don’t like him; it’s just that the ones to whom I have talked
seemed less enthused than the men. The feedback, in a nutshell, is
this: Mike Pence needs to smile more, to lighten up his tone just a
little, to seem a little more joyful or optimistic — or something
like that.
Yet what’s problematic is that a Reaganesque ease of
bearing can’t be faked. It must naturally emanate from both the
language and the visage of the speaker. If I were Mike Pence, I
would set aside ten minutes each day just to relax and contemplate
whatever brings true joy to his life. Not just satisfaction, but
joy. As one smart lady said to me, the only thing lacking
from what she thought otherwise were several terrific Pence
speeches was a sense that the future will have sunny days. There’s
a sense of grim resoluteness to Pence, like that of Churchill
during the darkest days of World War II — and it’s a resoluteness
that does, make no mistake, promise that the good can triumph —
but there’s no sense that humor of a light and natural kind can
have room to play. If Mike Pence can somehow find that sense within
him, without losing the ability to inspire the male of the
species in the way of a Churchill or Vince Lombardi, then he will
become not just a “force to be reckoned with” — which he already
is — but a potential political juggernaut for whatever good and
worthy cause he chooses.
As for Rick Santorum, the advice is as easy and as
impossible as to exude the sense of a winner. He has bucked the
odds before — but he bucked them while in the role of an underdog
who had still not yet been beaten. Once an underdog is beaten,
indeed stomped, then the act of consciously and openly taking on an
establishment is seen by others through a different prism. Fighting
the ghost of JFK is brave, to be sure — but coming from someone
who’s been badly defeated, the fight can look entirely like a
loser’s game. Overcoming that image will be Santorum’s greatest
hurdle in any future run for office. A little bit of populist
razzle-dazzle might be needed to change the narrative.
NONE OF WHICH ADVICE should change a word of these two
men’s most recent major speeches. Sometimes substance is its own
reward and glory, and in substance both speeches were impregnable.
(Forgive me for sounding like a judicious Abe Lincoln avoiding a
spat by telling two haberdashers that their respective hats
“mutually excelled each other.”) In substance, these two speeches
have left almost all current politicians, whether possible
presidential contenders or not, floundering in their wake. What
Santorum called “this great inheritance that generations of
Americans created with their last full measure of devotion,” and
what Pence described, quoting Churchill, as “some great purpose and
design being worked out here below, of which we have been the
faithful servants,” is an inheritance, a purpose and design well
worth honoring through thoughtful expositions like these two major
addresses, and through the public services already performed by
Rick Santorum and Mike Pence.
