TROY, Michigan — Rick Santorum had been speaking for nearly an
hour Sunday night in Davison. He had laid out his policies on
economics, on energy, on social issues and national security. He
had defended his record against attacks from his Republican rival,
Mitt Romney, and expressed strong criticism of President Obama’s
policies. He took questions from the audience of about 400 people
who packed Crystal Hall and gave lengthy, detailed answers. When it
came time for the final question, a man mentioned the “kid gloves”
treatment that many conservatives felt Obama received from 2008 GOP
nominee John McCain. Would Santorum go after Obama?
“Well, what do you think?” Santorum answered, getting a
huge cheer from the crowd. Santorum said that he has tried to avoid
personal attacks in the long Republican primary campaign and
preferred to “keep it on the issues.” The former Pennsylvania
senator then said, “I’m not going to go out and personally attack
Barack Obama.… I’m going to talk about what he’s done to this
country. I’m going to talk about his policies.… I’m going to hold
him accountable for every decision he’s made.… Let me assure you,
we will draw a contrast. We will talk about what’s at stake in this
country. We will not let you down. We will fight for your
principles and we’ll fight for this country. Just help us, here in
Michigan, on Tuesday.”
There was nothing controversial in those comments, and so
they didn’t become an instant banner headline on the Drudge Report.
For the past two weeks, ever since a series of polls showed
Santorum surging after his Feb. 7 triple victory in Colorado,
Minnesota, and Missouri, a non-stop drumbeat of “controversy”
headlines have portrayed Santorum as a radical right-wing
extremist. Meanwhile, and with irony approaching the level of utter
absurdity, attack ads from the Romney campaign and its allied
Restore Our Future super PAC have sought to portray Santorum as a
big-spending liberal. One Romney campaign radio ad says Santorum
voted “just like liberal Carl Levin” – one of Michigan’s two
Democratic senators – in favor of the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere”
in Alaska.
The attacks are a ridiculous distortion of Santorum’s
record. During his years in Congress, Santorum amassed an admirable
record as a fiscal conservative and, as recently detailed by
Jeffrey Anderson and Andy Wickersham in the Weekly
Standard, had one of the highest
ratings from the National Taxpayers Union. Addressing the
accusations of liberalism from Romney on the stump, Santorum
sometimes seems astonished that anyone would believe such charges –
especially considering the source.
“In 1994, [Romney] ran to the left of Ted Kennedy, and if
you have any doubt, go look at the last debate between the two them
– it’s hard to tell them apart,” Santorum told the audience Sunday
in Davison, contrasting Romney’s failed Senate bid with his own
successful upset victory that year over Pennsylvania Democratic
Sen. Harris Wofford. “Now for someone to run, in a critical
election year – 1994, the year of the revolution, the Contract With
America – who says, ‘no I won’t be a Reagan Republican, no I don’t
support the Contract With America, I’m not a conservative,’ to now
go and run ads here in the state of Michigan, and say, ‘Oh, Rick
Santorum, because he voted for this bill or that bill’ — out of
the 4,000 votes that I cast in the United States Senate — ‘is not
a conservative,’ just doesn’t hold water.”
As with Romney’s previous attacks on Newt Gingrich,
Santorum finds himself presented with a damned-if-you-do,
damned-if-you-don’t dilemma: The attacks cannot simply be ignored
and yet, when the target responds, he is accused of being
“defensive,” of seeming “angry” or even “whining.” Nevertheless,
the very fact that Romney has found himself having to spend
millions of dollars in an effort to avoid an embarrassing defeat in
his native Michigan is testimony to the power of Santorum’s
challenge. He has made a direct and quite personal appeal to
blue-collar voters in the state he calls “America’s industrial
heartland.” During his Sunday night speech, while discussing his
energy policy, Santorum elicited cheers when he said, “I’m not a
Texas oilman… [but] yes, I have an energy background: My
grandfather was a coal miner.”
The Santorum campaign is also clearly aiming to maximize
his support among conservative Catholics, who are expected to
account for as many as a third of voters in Tuesday’s Republican
primary. On Friday, Santorum got a rock-star reception when he
attended a Lenten fish fry at a parish in Walled Lake. “I love the
smell of fish on a Friday night,” Santorum said, provoking loud
applause with his praise of a Catholic tradition.
Santorum’s challenge has been more effective because
Romney hasn’t enjoyed an utterly lopsided advantage in advertising
here. Although Romney has outspent the Santorum campaign by an
estimated 3-to-2 ratio, Santorum has hit back with
his own TV
ads. The Santorum campaign also has sent
out a mailing that contrasts his record with Romney’s and tells GOP
voters, “You can’t turn on the TV without seeing a vicious negative
attack ad by Mitt Romney. Not only are the ads insulting and
offensive, they’re downright false.”
Recent polls indicate that Romney has
regained his lead over Santorum in Michigan, albeit by a margin so
narrow that an upset by Santorum is still possible Tuesday. Romney
has always been the favorite to win here, but Santorum has made
sure he won’t win it without a fight.
