Most pundits don’t understand politics. For that matter, many
leading conservative activists don’t really understand politics. If
they had, they would never have written off Rick Santorum as a
presidential candidate — and they wouldn’t be rushing, right now,
to say that he has no staying power.
In fact, it’s really pathetic to think back on how many
times conventional wisdom, even conservative conventional wisdom,
got things wrong.
Ronald Reagan was too old to be elected president. Then he
was certainly too old even to run for, much less win, a second
term. Bill Clinton destroyed himself as a national figure with his
horrible 1988 Democratic National Convention speech. Republicans
couldn’t possibly win Congress in 1994 (or ever). Republicans
couldn’t possibly lose seats in 1998 because the non-presidential
party always picks up seats in the sixth year of a
president’s term. George W. Bush couldn’t win in 2000 unless he
picked a running mate who was a moderate from a big swing state.
Republicans couldn’t win the Senate in 2002 because president’s
parties don’t win new congressional majorities in mid-term
elections. Nobody really cares about restraining federal spending
so Bush was politically right not to worry about it. Barack Obama
couldn’t possibly beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 (nobody
could beat Hillary in 2008). John McCain couldn’t possibly win the
Republican nomination that year after his campaign team blew up
early in 2007. The Tea Parties weren’t a real movement but merely
Astroturf that would disappear. Rick Perry was a juggernaut who
couldn’t be stopped this year. Then Newt Gingrich peaked at just
the right time and had made this year’s campaign into a two-man
race with Mitt Romney, with Gingrich the likely victor. Oh, yes:
And Rick Santorum never had a chance.
Yeah, right. Tell me another one,
Kojak.
As one who has nearly worn out my vocal chords trying to
convince conservative leaders for a full year that Santorum had a
real shot (and who accepted none of that “wisdom” in the paragraph
above except, before the battle was really joined, the bit about
Hillary being sure to beat Obama), it always astonishes me how
seldom so many smart people actually pay attention to political
fundamentals.
For instance: A) In Iowa and New Hampshire especially,
personal voter contact matters. Actually, it matters everywhere, if
given a chance to matter. Rick Santorum clearly was outworking
everybody, and was building the finest grassroots organization in
terms of both breadth and depth of actual political skills that has
been seen in Iowa since Jimmy Carter put the state on the
presidential map in 1976 — but pundits wrote him off anyway. B)
Past performance matters. Rick Santorum has a history of winning
races as an underdog, of attracting blue-collar workers, of peaking
his election campaigns at just the right time (i.e., right around
the day of the election), and of being an effective retail
campaigner. C) Context matters in assessing past political
performances. If somebody lost, did he lose by bigger or smaller
margins than others of his party running in the same state or
district at the same time? If somebody won, did he outperform
others of his party, or just ride somebody’s coat-tails? If
somebody lost in a nearly impossible year, does that make him more
of a “loser” than somebody who chickened out of running for
re-election in that same year? (Can you say “Mitt for Re-Election
in Massachusetts? Oh, you mean there never was such a campaign?
Gee, what a winner Romney must be!” Not exactly….) The
fact is, Rick Santorum has one of the most impressive résumés that
we’ve seen in a long, long time, in terms of being a vote-getter
outperforming others similarly situated.
D) How well does somebody actually demonstrate a level of
knowledge that will impress voters in the long run? Does he
actually know the issues for the race he’s running (or is he all
Texas hat but no federal cattle, which isn’t a character flaw but
is a sign of insufficient experience)? Is he likely to be
embarrassed by new revelations or reminders of past transgressions?
If a candidate has low and/or correctable down-side risks — as the
thoroughly knowledgeable Santorum does — but a big potential
upside (again, Santorum appealing to Iowa’s large social-issues
contingent and appealing to middle-class voters with his
focus on blue-collar economic concerns), then, by golly, the
candidate bears watching.
E) Is a candidate who has risen spectacularly in the polls
somebody with obvious staying power? This was the question, in
retrospect, that so many pundits obviously failed to ask when
proclaiming first Perry, and then Gingrich, as the certain
“conservative” finalist against Romney. How could they ignore
Perry’s lack of national-issue experience or his lack of
disciplined advance preparation on those subjects? How could they
ignore the overwhelmingly obvious fact that nobody had thrown a
single political punch at Gingrich in months and that he had a long
history of being supremely vulnerable to political
punches?
These are just some of the considerations that should
always go into political analysis/prognostication. Now, obviously,
with so many people writing off Santorum so consistently, his road
was a tough one and it was not clear to anybody that he
actually would pull off a surge. But it should have been clear that
he had as good a chance, if not better, than anybody to do so and
to do it at just the right time. It also should have been clear
that if he didn’t do so, it was just as likely for a new entrant, a
Candidate X such as Bobby Jindal or Paul Ryan, to catch fire as it
was for either Perry or Gingrich to hold their earlier high
positions despite their manifest weaknesses. The Perry and Gingrich
stumbles, in short, were eminently foreseeable. The Santorum rise
was not inevitable, but either it or a Candidate X should have been
obviously at least as feasible, if not more so, than a Perry or
Gingrich victory.
Likewise, pundits still write off Santorum in the long
run. Are they still not paying attention? Have they not
seen that he has diligently built solid organizational bones in New
Hampshire and South Carolina even as he worked Iowa like an
indefatigable trooper? Have they not seen how fast money flows to a
candidate who seems on the rise? Did they not see how Obama and
Carter and Dole and Kerry and G.W. Bush all used Iowa success as a
springboard to their eventual nominations? Did they not see how
Huckabee came within a Fred Thompson last-stand of doing the same
thing in 2008? Why should all of these candidates have had staying
power after Iowa success, but Rick Santorum not have it? Does he
not have a long record of showing major political skills? Or was it
just happenstance that he won four elections in a blue-tinged
purple district and a blue-tinged purple state and then became the
third-ranking Republican in the Senate?
As a purely analytical matter, what I wrote
way back in July of 2010 – yes, a year and a half
ago — remains true: “[C]onservatives do themselves and their
cause a huge disservice if they don’t take a Rick Santorum
candidacy seriously. It would be crazy not to acknowledge that the
odds seem long. But he has beaten the odds, repeatedly, before, and
he knows how to leverage public opinion for conservative
ends. ‘I’m someone who moves the ball,’ he told me. ‘I
get a lot of stuff done.’”
None of this means Santorum’s road to victory will be the
slightest bit easy. It is, however, far more likely that he will
traverse it successfully than most pundits, even now, will
recognize.
