Santorum thinks he can transform opponents into supporters by talking to them. He believes he can talk them into it. Because he’s done it. He was elected to the House in 1990 at age 32, with no great amount of money or media, in a Democratic district with many blue collar workers along the Monongahela River in the Pittsburgh area, by going door to door and talking to voters. “I represented more steelworkers than any district in America,” he boasts in Manchester.
I asked his campaign manager Rick Biundo (a New Hampshire native) and top press aide Hogan Gidley (who used to work for the South Carolina Republican party) how much debate prep Santorum did. The response: they laughed. None. “He gets much harder questions in town halls than in debates.” “He’s not a talking points guy.” Actually, he does do talking points: like anyone who has thought hard about issues and then has to speak about them, he has practiced riffs which he can launch into at what he thinks an appopriate time.
And he seems to seek hostile venues, as presumably he did when he was running for Congress in the Mon Valley. On Friday he spoke to a college convention, of mostly outstaters, and predictably got a question on same-sex marriage to which he delivered a combative reply. Suffolk University pollstder David Paleologos writes that this accounts for a drop in their two-day tracking poll of Santorum support from 18-34 year old voters from 9% to 2%. I’m not at all sure you can pinpoint these things too closely, or that that drop is statistically significant; but what did Santorum hope to gain from this event?
His Manchester event at the tiny Belmont Hall restaurant was not well advanced: the fire marshal said the place was too crowded, and the event was moved to the restaurant’s parking lot, where the sound on Santorum’s microphone did not always penetrate above the constant cries of hecklers and where the dimming light of late afternoon probably made visuals look weird. Santorum prides himself on taking questions, and here he got almost nothing but hostile questions; even a child asks him what his biggest mistake was (voting for No Child Left Behind, he says). Others: Why not raise capital gains tax rates? Don’t you support the Consumer Finance Protection Agency? Why did you seek earmarks and get payments as a lobbyist? Santorum answered at considerable length and made sure to address all four prongs of a hostile questioner’s question.
Similarly, at the Southern New Hampshire 912 Committee event on Thursday night at Windham High School, Santorum delivered answers that are probably not what the 912 Committee wanted to hear. He declined to oppose the National Defense Authorization Act’s detention provisions (a main talking point for the Ron Paul campaign), refused to oppose the SOPA intellectual property legislation, came out against baseline budgeting for appropriations but not for entitlements (he takes ten rather tedious minutes to answer this question) and forthrightly opposed state nullification of federal laws as advocated by Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Newt Gingrich’s response to that question at a December 912 event at the same location was emollient. He started off by saying that Madison retreatted later from his 1798 position. Santorum’s was confrontational. “We had a war about that. Nullification—I don’t want to go there.”
Santorum seems to take pride in rejecting the advice of “pundits” whom he scorns and the advice that I think any competent political consultant would give him. To have been elected to the House in a Democratic district at age 32 and to the U.S. Senate from an at best marginal state at age 36 seem to have been experiences that provided him with enormous positive reinforcement, enough to keep him confident even after he lost the 2006 Senate race by a 59%-41% margin that he can talk people into agreeing with him. We’ll see how effective that is in the next few days and weeks.
