Following Rick Santorum’s graceful exit from the
Republican presidential primary on Tuesday, pundits were speaking
as much about what the former Pennsylvania senator did not say as
what he did say.
In particular, Santorum described wanting to help Republicans
beat Barack Obama, keep the House and take back the Senate, but he
made no mention of the all-but-certain Republican presidential
nominee, Mitt Romney.
Nerves are raw, with Santorum, under the additional pressure of
having a very sick daughter, feeling unjustly swamped by the Romney
campaign’s money and aggressiveness — much as Newt Gingrich
apparently still does. It’s not just business; it’s personal, at
least for now.
And it is not just Rick Santorum who feels injured; plenty of
his supporters do as well. Some are saying (such as in comments on
these pages) that following Santorum’s exit, they will not vote in
November, or only vote in House or Senate races, or even give up
their Republican Party registration.
But if I may offer an overused expression: Really? Really?
Santorum’s supporters are, if they are anything, passionate
about ending the Obama administration’s intentional shredding of
the American fabric, whether in the social, economic, or political
arenas. We all should be so passionate.
Barack Obama is, with his every law and his every regulation,
trying to do just what he promised us he would: fundamentally
transform the nation, namely the nation that his wife had never
been proud of until he was nominated and about which his minister of
20-years said “G_d damn America.”
As promised, with Obamacare, he is orchestrating a de
facto nationalization of the health insurance industry, which
is to say transforming the way Americans deal with the most
personal and most critical decisions we face.
He promised us that he wanted to bankrupt coal companies. With
recent EPA regulations, he is well on his way toward that
transformation, a first big step toward another energy-related
promise: to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”
He promised us that “No world order that elevates one nation or
group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power
among nations will hold.” With his sweet nothings whispered to
Russian President Dmitry “Vlad’s sock puppet” Medvedev about future
“flexibility,” Obama made clear his intention to further weaken the
United States’ position as the world’s only military
superpower.
Those are the promises he keeps.
A promise he has not kept — not that anyone who understood the
man believed it was anything but a sop to gullible independent
voters — was that he would “cut the deficit we inherited by half
by the end of my first term in office.” Under Obama’s budget
proposals, we have trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable
future, with the national debt increasing by more than 80 percent
in the next ten years, from $10 trillion to just under $19
trillion, a level of debt that would make Greek politicians giggle
at their own relative fiscal conscientiousness.
Are many Santorum supporters — some of the nation’s most ardent
believers in the promise of America — really going to take their
marbles and go home rather than support Mitt Romney’s efforts to
unseat a president who is arguably the most destructive (of the
American exceptionalism that he disdains) in our nation’s
history?
If that is really what they think, then perhaps the nation is
better off without them. More likely, only a single digit
percentage of Santorum’s supporters (or Newt Gingrich’s, though
perhaps not Ron Paul’s) will be willing to sacrifice their country
in November. More will, like Quin Hillyer,
disavow responsibility for Romney’s eventual results while pledging
to do what they can to help him beat the current occupant of the
White House.
Conservatives and libertarians alike have valid concerns about
Mitt Romney. It remains depressingly difficult to tell just what
the man actually believes. It remains a black mark on his résumé
that he is the father of Romneycare. It remains troubling that one
can imagine the John Kerry windsurfing ad with Romney
filling in, given his changed positions on everything from minimum
wage to mandates to climate change. I could go on.
Nevertheless, I take Romney at his word that lessons from
politics, business, and daily life have caused him to become more
conservative over time. And religious voters should take comfort —
regardless of their opinions of Mormonism — in Mitt Romney’s
obviously sincere and long-held commitment to his faith. Most
importantly, there are precisely zero important policy areas in
which Mitt Romney is in agreement with Barack Obama.
So, for the sake of this nation — dare I say “for the children”
— can’t we all just get along?
Mitt Romney needs to raise his game in order to beat Barack
Obama. He needs to show more commitment to conservative principles,
particularly in terms of economics, and he needs to show at least a
little ability to connect with the ordinary American whose wife
does not have two Cadillacs. His
speech following winning the Wisconsin Republican primary shows
that he is doing those things, better late than never. Romney’s new
tagline of Obama’s “government-centered society” is a good one, and
his delivery has improved along with his rhetoric.
Not just because he hails from Massachusetts, but Romney reminds
me of the New England Patriots: He is almost annoyingly successful,
and opponents know that when they go up against that team they are
likely not just to be outplayed but also to be outcoached (the NY
Giants being a notable exception in recent years). You might love
to hate the Patriots but some part of you admires their consistent
success.
Imagine that you must bet ten percent of your net worth (perhaps
the minimum that another Obama term would cost you) on a football
game, but you can choose the team that will play for you. Wouldn’t
the Patriots be in the top few teams you’d consider, no matter what
your visceral reaction is to them, no matter how much you want your
team to beat them during the regular season? Romney is that guy.
His campaign tactics have been aggressive, some might say ruthless,
and have, with 98 percent betting odds, gotten him the Republican
nomination.
Don’t you want an aggressive, successful guy being the one going
up against the most aggressive, ruthless political machine the
nation has seen in at least a generation?
Romney is not perfect, but of the Republicans who actually
decided to run for president in 2012, he was and remains our best
chance at defeating a far more imperfect politician. The Rasmussen
polling organization
reported on Tuesday that “In a hypothetical Election 2012
matchup, President Obama and Mitt Romney are tied at 45%.” Not bad
considering where the GOP has been for the past few months. We can
do this — together — if we keep our eyes on the prize, even if
you view that prize not as a Romney victory but as an Obama
defeat.
Leaving football, one of my favorite moments in sports — and
one of the classiest — comes at the end of a National Hockey
League playoff series when the two teams line up after a week or
more of gladiator-like battle to shake hands, to say thanks and
congratulations and good luck, before the victors move on to the
next series in pursuit of Lord Stanley’s Cup.
It’s time for Republicans of good will, still sore and perhaps
even bleeding from the recent bruising contest, to line up and
shake hands and support the victor’s upcoming fight to win the big
prize. While our friends to the north may disagree, what is at
stake here is more important than the Stanley Cup.
