Rand Paul and Rick Santorum were perhaps the two Republican candidates most dedicated to ideas. Now that they’ve dropped out of the race, their erstwhile competitors — mostly running on personality, charisma, demagoguery, or having the right friends or enemies — would do well to take up some of Paul’s and Santorum’s arguments and ideas.
Santorum entered the race this year as the working man’s candidate. He argued that his strong second-place finish in 2012, and his two Senate wins in Pennsylvania came “not just because I stood for something. It’s because I stood for someone — the American worker.”
There was too much wrong with Santorum the candidate, though. Throughout the Bush era, he was a consummate party man, backing W’s big-government programs and even saving the steadfastly pro-choice, pro-Roe v. Wade Sen. Arlen Specter from a conservative primary in 2004 (Specter would become a Democrat later that term). Santorum also never learned to articulate conservative defenses of traditional marriage so as to not alienate the overwhelmingly socially liberal mainstream media that covers politics.
Most of the Republican field ignored the working class. Romney, you’ll recall, actively pushed them away. That left the door open for Donald Trump. While Santorum’s solutions for the working class weren’t always the best (such as manufacturing subsidies), Trump’s are impractical, counterproductive, and involve a heavy dose of race-baiting. Trump might have less running room if other Republicans offered the working class more than a few sentences in town halls and a child tax credit.
Rand Paul also began with serious political weaknesses. His style is weirdly aloof, and he has a very strange habit of denying it when he changes his mind. Conservatives and libertarians should be relieved by his decision to concentrate on his Senate re-election — and wish him a long career in that chamber.
Paul battled Obama on his drone strikes, his surveillance, and his unwise illegal wars.
Paul, as libertarian David Boaz of the Cato Institute pointed out, reached out to younger voters and minority voters, taking the libertarian message to them — big government will benefit the insiders and trample on those out of power.
Are the viable Republicans picking up where Paul and Santorum left off? Yes and no.
Rubio is an expert at showing compassion, and he’s labored to find conservative policies that appeal to average Americans. Will he go deeper than the surface on this?
Cruz is making a hard play for the libertarian vote, with his New Hampshire campaign chairmen hustling to pick up former Paul supporters. Cruz has, for months, tried to balance a jingoistic hawkishness with conservative aversion to meddling in other countries’ affairs.
Rubio, meanwhile, is pushing the libertarians away. To those who want to cut defense spending — which makes up about half of all appropriations — Rubio says “you probably shouldn’t vote for me.” He’s pooh-poohing concerns about police abuse or government surveillance.
This hard line is odd coming from a man whose virtue is supposedly his electability.
Paul’s foreign policy critique is crucial to battling Clinton. Hillary Clinton is stubbornly standing by the illegal ill-considered war in Libya that has empowered the Islamic State and sent the region into terrorist-infested chaos. It was Hillary’s war and it was a disaster.
Paul consistently and clearly made that argument in the primary. It’s a case Republicans need to make in the general election: Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy experience is one of disastrous hubris that learned no lessons from Iraq.
As long as the Republicans are unflinchingly hawkish (as Rubio appears to be) or defensive of the Iraq War (as Jeb Bush seems to be), Hillary is safe from that.
Santorum’s populism is necessary, too. First, the actual conservatives in the race need to find a way to eat into Trump’s base now, and to appeal to it in general elections without employing his odious insults against Mexicans and Muslims.
Republicans will need to turn out the working class vote to win in November. Romney would have been within striking distance of Obama had not millions of downscale white voters stayed home in 2012, as Sean Trende has shown. The “Missing White Voters” live in Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New Hampshire — all swing votes.
Finally, successful upper-middle-class voters want to see a party that shows compassion. You need to appeal to the downscale to win more of the upscale.
But there is a more important reason for Republicans to take up Santorum’s concern for the working class and Paul’s dedication to limited government.
“I almost feel uncomfortable talking about, ‘Well, we need to do that to win,'” Santorum told me at last year’s Southern Republican Leadership Conference. “We need to do that because it’s the right thing.”
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
