At CPAC 2009, Tony Fabrizio observed conservatism had gone back to its roots when announcing the Straw Poll results, which showed a conference overwhelmingly concerned with spending over social issues. Moreover, Bush-era compassionate conservatism was widely seen as having failed the party on fiscal issues. As Newt Gingrich put it, there was a “Bush-Obama axis” on spending and debt. With the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, compassionate conservatism looked dead.
It is odd that three years later, Rick Santorum, the poster-boy for Bush-era compassionate conservatism, took second in the CPAC straw poll.
For some, this assertion probably sounds like an attempt to invoke ancient history. Still, a look at the history is both instructive and necessary, for nothing would please Barack Obama so much as to be able to tar Rick Santorum with the same brush he used against John McCain – that a vote for him is a vote for George W. Bush’s third term.
And despite Rick Santorum’s history-defying ability to reinvent himself, that is precisely what it is.
Santorum claims to have been a “Tea Partier before there was a Tea Party.” It’s generally agreed the Tea Party follows what can broadly be classified as “libertarian” principles, despite Ron Paul’s extensive-and-unintentional efforts to make that label a dirty word. In any case, it is beyond dispute that the Tea Party is part of what Grover Norquist calls the “Leave us Alone” coalition.
And no doubt they should be, with Barack Obama complaining about how conservatives “have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low,” a predisposition that the President finds objectionable because “There is no such society that I’m aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”
Oh wait, that’s not a quote from Barack Obama. It’s from Rick Santorum in August 2005.
But still, maybe that sentiment was a phase for Santorum. It’s not like he published an entire book arguing against the concept of “no-fault freedom,” defined as “freedom to choose, irrespective of the choice,” while flippantly dismissing all accusations that he is a Big Government conservative.
Not, that is, unless you count Rick Santorum’s It Takes a Family, published in the same year as the above quote, which says all of the above.
Still, we’re only talking about the realm of theory – surely, there isn’t anything Santorum’s advocated that would cause Glenns Beck and/or Greenwald to go into fits of rage. Nothing except for advocating the euphemistically named concept of “national service” – in essence, the exact same idea behind the infamous “Obama Youth” bill sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) which would have drafted millions of young people into national organizations like Americorps as a condition for receiving student loans.
And what about Santorum’s ideas on entitlement reform? Here, Santorum has tried to carve out a niche for himself by claiming he is the only candidate serious about the issue. Yet, as recently as March of last year, Santorum was arguing the problem with Social Security and Medicare was that abortion was depriving the State of potential workers’ wages to expropriate. Yes, that’s right – the problem with one of the most structurally flawed programs in the United States Government is there just aren’t enough people to sponge off of, according to Rick Santorum. This is the kind of Baby Boomer-centric thinking that gave us the Prescription Drug benefit, not the Paul Ryan plan.
While the conservative movement has struggled to distance itself from the follies of the Bush era, the opposite is in danger of happening. It says something when the supposedly “moderate” candidate in the race is the one espousing “severe conservatism” and fiscal austerity, while the “conservative” alternative is the one with a history of pushing the old “compassionate conservatism” of the 2000s.
At the end of the day, Santorum’s record is nothing so much as the frothy mix of well-lubricated talking points and policy ideas which have decayed to the point that they have the texture and consistency of fecal matter.
