Check out this article about Santorum:
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-why-santorum-runs
The questions here are all answers Paul would answer in the affirmative. We're on the cusp of something wonderful here.
FAIRFIELD, IOWA -- If sheer effort determined the winner of the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum would win in a walk. His stop in Fairfield marks the 97th Iowa county Santorum has visited in his run for the Republican presidential nomination. The state has 99 counties in all, and before this day is over, Santorum will reach his goal of visiting them all. None of Santorum's rivals has even come close.
The problem is Santorum isn't close to the lead here in Iowa. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, he is the choice of 3.5 percent of Iowa Republicans -- seventh in a field of eight candidates. No matter who has led the field -- Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain -- Santorum has stayed near the bottom.
Yet Santorum is the most powerful voice on behalf of the conservative social positions that many Iowa Republicans hold dear. It's his bad luck to be running in a year dominated by economic concerns and to face opponents who more or less share his views on social issues but are perceived as stronger candidates on economic matters. Santorum is stuck in a moment that's just not made for him.
It's a problem Santorum has struggled with, and he's come up with two ways to address it. The first is by talking about the economy in a way that is unique among Republican candidates. And the second is by arguing that economic recovery and economic strength simply aren't possible without the emphasis on strong families that has been a key part of his campaign.
Here in Fairfield, Santorum has come to the Arts & Convention Center for a meet-and-greet with possible supporters. It's not a rally -- not anywhere big enough for that. Santorum meets with about 15 people seated around a large conference table, with perhaps five or ten others in the room. They're not necessarily Santorum supporters; several of them say they are still shopping for a candidate and are just taking this opportunity to check out Santorum face-to-face.
Santorum's talk starts with the economy, but with a different emphasis than rivals like Cain, Romney, and Rick Perry. Santorum tells the group he created his economic plan in part to extend a helping hand to those "who are the most in trouble as far as improving their economic lot in life" -- a subject Santorum says "Republicans don't talk about, to our peril."
What Santorum is trying to do is find a Republican way to discuss income inequality. "We always talk about let's cut taxes, let's grow the economy, and everybody will do better," Santorum tells the group. "Well, yes, but some will do a lot better than others if we don't really think about how we're going to grow this economy and how this economy is going to be structured."
The unemployment rate for Americans over 25 with a bachelor's degree or better is between four and five percent, Santorum tells the group, while the unemployment rate for people without that degree is in the double digits. "We have lost a sector of our economy that used to employ, in large numbers and in good-paying jobs, people who are not college educated," Santorum says. "And that is the manufacturing and processing sector of our economy."
Santorum's proposed solutions are mainstream Republican -- he wants to cut to zero the corporate tax for the manufacturing and processing sector, as well as cut regulations and make it easier for companies to bring overseas profits back to the United States. But his discussion of income inequality is clearly shaped by his experience in Pennsylvania, watching manufacturing jobs disappear by the thousands.
"There are studies that have been done that show there is actually greater income mobility in Europe now than in the United States," Santorum says in an interview a few hours after the Fairfield meet-and-greet. "That's a problem. People don't have to read studies to know that. They can feel it. That's why we need to focus on how we can create opportunities for that mobility."
"I've been working on issues of poverty and issues of income mobility for a long, long time," Santorum continues. "I was called a big-government Republican because of it. I'm not a big-government Republican. I'm someone who believes that this is an important issue for our country. And we need to have policies that are not government top-down but do recognize that there are people being left behind in our economy, and we need to make sure that they have opportunities, too."
The other way Santorum is trying to address economic ills is an attempt to meld concerns about the economy with his basic platform of social conservatism. On Friday he released what he calls the "Faith, Family and Freedom" agenda, in which he tries to fuse social and economic concerns into a single platform. You can't have economic recovery and economic strength, Santorum argues, without strengthening traditional families.
"The people of Iowa realize that America is not just about taxes and spending," Santorum tells Republicans gathered in Des Moines for the GOP annual Reagan Dinner fundraiser on Friday. "It's not just about the size of government. It's not just about the economy. They realize and they understand that we cannot have limited government without strong families. We cannot have a strong economy without strong families."
The Faith, Family and Freedom agenda is a mix of proposals a President Santorum promises to accomplish by executive authority and those he would ask Congress to enact. Santorum would defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court (something the Obama administration has declined to do); would bring back the Mexico City Policy; and would reinstate the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. He would push a Personhood Amendment to the Constitution; urge Congress to eliminate the liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; restore federal funding for abstinence education; call on Congress to reinstate Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell in the military; and push for a Federal Marriage Amendment.
None of that will reduce the pigeonholing of Santorum as the social conservative candidate. It's something he finds frustrating -- he has a lot to say about foreign policy, particularly the war on terrorism, as well as economic issues -- but it's also a label that fits. Watch Santorum long enough and it becomes clear that the social issues are the ones he seems to feel most deeply within himself. It's just who he is. Now, he's trying to connect those issues to today's economic problems.
Maybe it will work, and maybe it won't. Whatever happens, Santorum will stick to his guns; he seems constitutionally unable to shape his positions simply to please potential voters. At one point in the Fairfield discussion, a voter asked if Santorum "would be game for shutting down the Department of Energy." It would have been easy enough for Santorum to go along and talk about how much government should be cut. Instead, Santorum explained how the Energy Department plays a critical role in the nation's nuclear capability, and those functions would have to continue, whether by an entity called the Department of Energy or not. "It's much more complicated than just getting rid of the Energy Department," Santorum tells the man.
"I don't want to go out and say, 'Eliminate the Department of Energy, eliminate the department of this," Santorum continues. "That's just populist chatter. What we need to do is focus in on the functions of the federal government that need to be eliminated and why."
That didn't stop another voter from asking whether Santorum would eliminate the Department of Education. "That's an anti-policy," says Santorum. "I'm for a pro-policy."
When yet another voter begins by saying, "I'm strongly against the Federal Reserve system," Santorum doesn't display much patience. "Let's stop there," he says, challenging the man on his desire to return to the gold standard. What follows is several minutes of argument in which Santorum carefully explains the Fed and the monetary system but fails completely to satisfy his questioner.
Three voters, three questions Santorum could have danced around, perhaps leaving the voters with the impression that he agreed with them without explicitly saying so. Santorum didn't do it, and probably lost support in the process. But he said what he believed.
"I don't pander for votes," Santorum says after the meeting. "One of the things I've said from the very beginning is I am who I am. I'm not going to say something to one person and then say something different to somebody else. It's not just because technology doesn't let you do that anymore, but because people deserve to hear what you really think. And they may not like it, and people may say that's the reason you're not going anywhere in the polls. Maybe, but that's OK. I think there are a lot more people in this country who want a politician who tells it the way it is and lays out answers and will tell somebody, no, I don't agree with you, instead of making it sound like they do when they really don't."
Santorum likes to call himself "the William F. Buckley candidate," referring to Buckley's dictum that conservatives should support the most conservative candidate who is also electable. "We think we're the most electable conservative," Santorum tells the Fairfield group.
There's little doubt about the conservative part, but electability is another question. Talks with GOP voters in Iowa suggest they respect Santorum, and they especially appreciate his dogged efforts to actually meet and talk with actual Iowans -- an effort not seen in some other campaigns. But they just don't see him as the candidate most likely to defeat Barack Obama in November 2012.
Still, Santorum keeps going. There's no doubt the work is making him a better candidate; Iowa Republican blogger Craig Robinson wrote recently that Santorum "has grown the most of any candidate in the Republican field." And Santorum looks at the other candidates who have risen and fallen and concludes there might be more changes to come. If that happens, he's hoping that voters in Iowa -- in all of those 99 counties -- will give Rick Santorum another look.
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-why-santorum-runs
The questions here are all answers Paul would answer in the affirmative. We're on the cusp of something wonderful here.
