Former Sen. Rick Santorum is running for the Republican presidential nominee as the principled, unbending conservative stalwart — which means he’s also running from his past. Santorum’s beliefs are conservative, and he’s been a hero for pro-lifers nationwide. But last decade he exhibited the standard Bush-era misguided pragmatism of shunting aside principle in calculated gambits aimed at political gain. Unsurprisingly, these ploys often backfired.
Bush’s principle-free game playing culminated in his bailout bonanza of 2008. Remember: “I have abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”
But the height of Santorum’s political scheming came in 2004 with his relentless and spirited support of pro-choice liberal Arlen Specter that proved decisive in the 2004 GOP primary against pro-life conservative Pat Toomey. Making it worse, Specter was in line to chair the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over abortion law.
Many pro-lifers in Washington and Pennsylvania never forgave Santorum for Specter. But the incident wasn’t isolated. It reflected the GOP mind-set at the time in which party leaders saw themselves as clever chess masters setting up long-term victory with the occasional retreat or flanking move. Santorum was a main player in this hubristic game.
Santorum championed No Child Left Behind, a marquee George W. Bush campaign proposal that trampled the conservative view that education was strictly a local matter. Santorum also supported Bush in creating a new entitlement, the Medicare prescription drug bill — a defensive ploy to defuse Democratic attacks. Santorum was also a porker, despite his general fiscal conservatism.
The knock on this Santorum-Bush posture is not that they compromised. Governing requires compromise. Santorum and Bush’s mistake was trusting too much in their own plans and believing they could foresee the long-term effects of their actions.
Santorum and Bush didn’t back big-government programs and politicians out of corruption or liberalism. They did what they did, most likely, in the belief that it would ultimately aid the cause.
But the best laid plans of senators and presidents often go awry, and bad policy rarely ends up being good politics. After expanding Medicare in 2004, Republicans today find themselves under fire for trying to pare back the program to sustainable levels. Ted Kennedy, a few months after standing on stage with Bush for the signing of No Child Left Behind, used the bill as a cudgel to attack Republicans for not spending enough on education.
But helping save Specter was the worst. Santorum and Bush didn’t just endorse Specter, which they probably had to do. They went to the mat, cutting TV ads, hosting fundraisers, taping robo-calls, and jetting around the state to save him from Toomey. Specter beat Toomey by only 17,000 votes. I was in the state on primary day, and every Specter voter I spoke with cited Bush’s or Santorum’s endorsement.
Santorum carried Specter across the finish line. His reason at the time: simple majority building. Specter would be a near shoo-in in November, while Toomey would have made the general election a costly 50-50 contest. Also, helping Specter was supposed to help Bush win Pennsylvania that same year and help Santorum win re-election in 2006.
Sure, Specter won easily in November, but he didn’t help Bush — Specter backers put up “Kerry/Specter” lawn signs, and Specter skipped a Dick Cheney campaign stop the week before the election. Bush still lost Pennsylvania. And Santorum, in 2006, lost by 19 points.
Then in April 2009, five years after his win over Toomey, Specter switched parties and became a Democrat, giving President Obama the 60 votes he needed to pass the health care bill. So much for Santorum’s long-term majority building.
Today Toomey, whom Santorum deemed an inferior candidate, is a U.S. senator. And Santorum isn’t.
Things didn’t turn out as Santorum had planned. Nobody can blame Santorum for failing to predict the future — but we can blame him for believing he could.
Conservatism is supposed to be more than a political strategy. It’s supposed to be an intellectual disposition grounded largely in humility about our ability to conform the world to our will or to change human nature. Fealty to principle is not always stubbornness. It’s often a recognition of the limits of pragmatism. Santorum, like George W. Bush, too often trusted his own plans over his own principles.
Santorum has expressed contrition about his porking past and his Specter save. Maybe he’s learned lessons about his own limitations. If nothing else, his long odds in this presidential race might free him from the temptation of playing the pragmatist game, liberating him to simply speak the truth.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
