Rick Santorum Scares Republican Establishment


After coming out top in the polls, the favorite of the Christian Right, who might have to play Obama’s game, increases his extremist remarks.

In a Republican campaign which was meant to focus on the economy, the “chief theologian,” Rick Santorum, who has set the agenda for several weeks, is prancing to the top of the polls to the great concern of a Republican establishment which judges him to be too extreme to beat Obama.

Every day, while he travels around the small towns of Ohio and Michigan, the industrial heart of a country devastated by unemployment, this Christian candidate, who is good at making contact with impoverished workers, does not miss an occasion to mention “values,” between pleas for a revival of American manufacturing. Criticizing the reimbursement of contraception and prenatal testing; pleading for a disengagement of the Federal State in education; defending the teaching of “creationism” (the biblical version of the origins of the world) alongside theories of evolution in science classes — in each meeting, Santorum returns inexorably to the subjects of famous “culture wars” which have divided Americans for decades, at the risk of weakening his potential for gathering votes in the scope of the general election. Obama’s team has already sharpened its knives for tearing him to pieces.

“In the 1930s, we would also have said: ‘He’s a good guy, no problem,’ and now we have seen what would have happened,”* launched Santorum two days ago, in a tirade which seemed to compare the democratic President to Hitler. Last Saturday, he was indignant against the “phony theology” of Obama on the matter of the environment, which is “not a theology based on the Bible.” Favorable to a continuation of oil and gas drillings in all directions, this intimate friend of “big oil” and “big gas,” who denies climate change, even said that Obama was willing to sacrifice “the well-being of Americans for the supposed future of the planet,”* here reading the ideological will of the President to “take control of people’s lives.”

Double or Nothing for Romney

For the moment, Santorum finds a favorable echo in the popular conservative electorate. He is at the head of national surveys, with 33.8 percent in the polls against 28 percent for Mitt Romney. In Michigan, where he held his primary on Feb. 28 (and which will be, in general opinion, double or nothing for Romney because he cannot allow himself to lose the state where he was born and where his father was governor) Santorum is similarly ahead, with 34.7 percent against Romney’s 31.5 percent, although the gap is narrowing.

Can this last? The very worried “big chiefs” of the Republican Party are wondering. In private, they judge Santorum too right-wing to win the Presidential election. What they fear, is a Barry Goldwater-like scenario — an avid ultra-conservative who won the Republican primary in 1964 who finally collapsed facing the Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. “Ideological purity is the enemy of unity,” warned Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi. “Can Santorum play in the big leagues?” asks Jonathan Bernstein in the Washington Post, “Comparing Barack Obama to Hitler isn’t a good sign.”

The bosses of the Republican Party are also focused on primaries where brawls would devastate the right field until the election. In this case, the Tampa Convention would become the place of great wrangling. One even starts to talk about the surprise emergence of a heaven-sent candidate like Jeb Bush (brother of George W. Bush), the ex-governor of Florida, a Reaganite candidate who is more inclusive than the current contenders.

Suspense until Tuesday

If Romney eventually wins Michigan and Arizona and muscles in during the Super Tuesday primaries on Mar. 6, the party inauguration should no longer escape him. This is always the assumption that favors his team, which insists on the clampdown of gaps in the polls and counts on the impact of a massive publicity campaign led by his super PAC from now until Feb. 28. It’s also the bet of journalist John Gizzi, who underlines the absence of support from the establishment for Santorum. Neither a senator nor a governor has for the moment been knighted. Supporters of the former senator of Pennsylvania argue that this lack of support in high places did not stop him from winning Missouri, for example. The suspense will therefore be prolonged until at least next Tuesday. On Wednesday, a televised Republican debate, organized by CNN in Mesa, Arizona, is expected to take the pulse of an opinion which is volatile and difficult to decipher.

*Editor’s note: While accurately translated, these quotes could not be verified in English.

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