During the week that ended Sunday, Newt Gingrich held eight
campaign events and Mitt Romney held nine. Rick Santorum held
15 events last week, and that may ultimately explain why
Santorum continues his otherwise inexplicable surge in the
Republican presidential race: He is simply out-working his
opponents.
Ever since Iowa, where he famously visited all 99 counties
before surging to an upset win over Romney in the final week before
the Jan. 3 caucuses, Santorum has consistently appeared at more
public events than either of his chief GOP rivals. Excepting only
the last weekend of January — when he returned home to get his tax
returns and stayed to visit with his ailing 3-year-old daughter —
Santorum has almost always held more events each day than either
Gingrich or Romney. Some days, Santorum appears at more campaign
events than the other two combined. Monday, Santorum did two events
in Ohio and two in Michigan. Tuesday, he traveled to Arizona for
two more events, and today he will speak at a Tea Party rally in
Tucson before tonight’s
debate in Mesa (8 p.m. Eastern, CNN).
The national media, while spending the past week hopping
from one Santorum-related “controversy” to another, have paid
little attention to the former Pennsylvania senator’s unsurpassed
diligence as a candidate. If all you knew about the Santorum
campaign was what you learned from the media, you might be excused
for believing that he has
surged to the top of the Republican presidential field because
(a) he’s a scary religious kook, and (b) so are GOP primary
voters.
Day after day, ever since it became clear that Santorum is
the last man standing between Romney and the Republican nomination,
a drumbeat of hostile media coverage has followed Santorum
everywhere. When he described President Obama’s allegiance to
radical environmentalism as a secular “theology,”
this was seized on as evidence that Santorum was questioning
Obama’s professed Christianity. After draining the last ounce of
outrage from that controversy — which they had, of course, created
— the media then evidently decided that the public should be
alarmed because of something Santorum said at a Catholic university
four years ago. His August 2008 remarks during a speech at Ave
Maria University in Florida, to the effect that Satan was
especially targeting the United States for destruction, were a
banner headline all day Tuesday on the Drudge Report, and
even so staunch a conservative as
Rush Limbaugh said, “Santorum will have to deal
with it. He’ll have to answer it.”
It should not be necessary to explain the recording and
transcript of Santorum’s Ave Maria speech did not make its way into
the media by mere happenstance, but was in all likelihood unearthed
by opposition researchers for some other campaign. The shadow of
suspicion would naturally fall on Romney’s well-funded operation,
but one cannot rule out the possibility that Obama’s own
re-election campaign was responsible, because there is good reason
to believe that Santorum’s rise in the GOP field has alarmed Team
Obama.
A recent Washington Post article reported that the
Obama campaign, which has spent most of the past year operating on
the assumption that Romney would be the Republican nominee, had
re-assigned researchers to begin “digging into Santorum’s
background.” In recent days, the president’s Chicago-based campaign
staff has “begun to consider the implications of a Santorum
victory,” the Post’s Sandhya Somashekhar reported. “They
view him as a weaker general election opponent, but one who has
shown an ability to connect with the population that is most
disillusioned with Obama: white, blue-collar voters.”
One look at the Electoral College map should make clear
why, despite their description of Santorum as the “weaker”
Republican candidate, Team Obama may be especially worried about
his potential strengths as an opponent in the fall campaign. The
so-called Rust Belt states — from Santorum’s home state of
Pennsylvania, across West Virginia and Ohio all the way west to
Wisconsin, Minnesota — are home to many millions of those “white,
blue-collar voters” and Santorum has indeed shown an ability to
connect with that “disillusioned” population. These are Americans
who were notoriously described by Obama in April 2008:
“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant
sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations.”
Despite their alleged “antipathy,” many of those bitter
gun-and-Bible clingers in the small towns and cities of America’s
heartland voted for Obama four years ago, but they haven’t gotten
much of the “Hope and Change” he promised them. Those voters have
much in common with Santorum, who speaks frequently of his
coal-miner grandfather, an Italian immigrant who came to America to
escape Mussolini’s fascist regime. Many of those blue-collar Rust
Belt voters are Catholics like Santorum and, in recent decades,
Catholics have been the crucial “swing” vote that decides
elections. In 2008, polls showed Catholics favoring Obama over
Republican John McCain by a 10-point margin. On the eve of the 2010
mid-term election, however, polls showed Catholics had shifted
sharply, favoring Republicans by as much as 24 points — and the
GOP
won its largest congressional landslide in more than half a
century.
Should Santorum emerge from this long campaign as the
Republican nominee and manage to rally blue-collar voters and
Catholics in the Midwestern heartland to the GOP standard, Obama’s
re-election prospects would be quite dim indeed. And so while the
hostile media continues trying to gin up new controversies around
him, Santorum just keeps on doing what he has been doing every day
for nearly a year: Campaigning everywhere he can, in the hope that
hard-working voters will ultimately choose the Republican who is
working harder than any other candidate to win their
votes.
