Sometimes conservatives tick me off. Why? I’ve written on this
before: Conservatives spend far too little time actually crediting
fellow conservatives in the arena who do the hard work of
legislating, of getting real things done. Conservatives these days
seem to rush to lionize people who talk a good game, who have a
flair for catchy phrases, who rabble-rouse (in a good way), who
specialize in media manipulation. Those are important
political skills, to be sure. But conservatives of all people
should value actual performance, should value the practical skills
that make government work while keeping it limited.
Today, one of those conservative workers — who also is
excellent on his feet in debates — entered the campaign for
president. Rick Santorum for some reason gets treated as if
he were a fringe player on Capitol Hill for 16 years, playing to
the right wing (mostly) in a sort of gadfly role. Nothing
could be further from the truth. This is a guy who rose to
the fourth ranking position in the Republican Senate as Conference
Chairman, and who all conservatives in Washington knew was THE “go
to guy” within leadership whenever leadership wasn’t paying enough
heed to conservative views. Santorum wouldn’t just talk a
good game; he would actually go into leadership meetings and fight
the good fight. There are conservative judges right now who
would not be on the bench if it weren’t for Santorum. There
are abortion restrictions in law that wouldn’t be there without
Santorum. And, lest we forget the single most successful
major federal governmental programmatic reform of the past
half-century, it was Santorum who was the lead Senate sponsor of
welfare reform in 1996. Yes, the House took the lead in many
ways in the welfare reform effort (with Florida’s Clay Shaw and
Texas’ Bill Archer never getting the credit they deserved for their
work on it), but it takes two chambers to tango. It was
Santorum who led the way in the Senate. This was not a
gadfly; this was an effective legislator at work. Santorum
also was a conservative leader on foreign policy, and a key
supporter of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Santorum is an able and effective campaigner against incumbents,
having upset incumbents to win in a tough House district in 1990
and in a tough state for the Senate in 1994. He also won
re-election in 2000 against the odds, taking Pennsylvania by about
seven percentage points even as GW Bush lost the state at the head
of the ticket.
By any SERIOUS standard of who should be treated as a top-tier
candidate, on the merits, Santorum qualifies.
Finally, if one’s standard is authenticity — of being the same
person in private as in public, of not being a calculating
political BSer — only Herman Cain, of the apparent field, can
fully join Santorum on the podium.
So conservatives should heartily welcome Santorum to the race.
And they should expect him to punch well above the political weight
for which the cognoscenti credit him.
