Yesterday, a former United States senator who was roundly rejected by his Pennsylvanian constituents and who seeks government based on religion, including procreation as the purpose of sex, swept three caucuses and primaries in the 2012 Republican presidential campaign. Conservative Rick Santorum won in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado, throwing the Republican race into a tailspin. In topping 50 percent and winning by wide margins in states with low turnout and high concentrations of Christians seeking more religion in government, he trounced the GOP’s frontrunner and flip-flopper Mitt Romney, originator of ObamaCare, nasty Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. The Catholic conservative is the most explicitly religious major presidential candidate.
Though he sounds reasonable on Iran, and Islamism, former Sen. Santorum – elected in a backlash in the 1990s against the dead on arrival Clinton health care plan and master of nothing but an abysmal record on capitalism and individual rights including total submission to faith-based President Bush – opposes the moral foundation of the United States: man’s rights. Taking advantage of the accurate perception that Romney is unprincipled, Gingrich is unseemly and Ron Paul is a kook, the folksy former senator is waging an open and, thus far, straightforward campaign of telling Republican voters exactly what he will do as president: impose faith, family and tradition in government, which precludes him as a serious opponent of Islamism or the welfare state and fundamentally disqualifies him from the presidency. He seeks to annihilate any trace of a secular republic, from contraceptives and abortion to sodomy and homosexuality and he aims to impose bigger, religious government. Rick Santorum – congenial, conservative and loaded with “gee whiz” appeal – ought to offend every decent American.
But with Romney failing to make the case for the morality of capitalism – and Romney’s been partly right on private equity and the decimated middle class – Santorum’s triple victory tells us three things: 1) this historic presidential election may go all the way to the convention in Tampa, Florida, with Santorum as the most consistently principled unless you count Ron Paul as consistently incoherent; 2) bundled up, Romney must assert an at least partially moral case for capitalism and freedom to differentiate himself, which he’s unable to do, it is not too late for a new candidate to emerge and reelection of the atrocious President Obama just became more plausible and 3) because Obama is atrocious and Americans are coming apart and looking to believe instead of to think, the prospect of theocracy in America is rising.
