Unless Santorum changes the focus of his campaign he is utterly unelectable.
Santorum has not focused his campaign on social issues. The only time he focuses primarily on social issues is when he is addressing a religious or charity-oriented group, and every candidate does the same. The mainstream media, partly under the direction of the Obama machine, attempts to see to it that any interview in which he is involved focuses almost entirely on social issues, simply because they know that doing so will indeed make him unelectable.
Rick delivered a major 50-minute speech yesterday on energy, manufacturing and bailouts in Michigan, outlining in detail his plans for attacking all three, and not a word of this has been mentioned by the mainstream media. This kind of thing happens on a regular, almost daily, basis. Santorum gives major speeches on those three topics, the threat of radical Islam, and his plans to reduce the national debt and curb entitlement spending, and all we hear are crickets from the media. And conservatives who fall into the 'he's only focused on social issues' mantra are allowing the mainstream media to have their way.
I've mentioned this before, so forgive the repetition: A friend of mine has been a close friend of the Santorums for more than twenty years. He worked with Rick on his initial campaign for the senate back in '94, and he spent about two weeks with him in South Carolina during that state's primary last month. He now tells me that Santorum's campaign strategy is, and has been, to expressly avoid bringing up such topics (contraception, abortion and the like) -- not because he doesn't have strong and unwavering opinions on them, but because those are not his only deeply held conservative beliefs. He very much wants to express his views on illegal immigration, the economy, the threat of radical Islam, etc. -- and he does so extremely effectively and passionately in his stump speeches, with the possible exception of feeling the need to address Obama'a recent edicts regarding the Catholic church.
Yet, whenever he is interviewed by any mainstream media outlet, it is they that consistently bring up his stances on social issues, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else. And of course snippets of those interviews are what the average American sees on his television screen every night, so the average American comes away with the idea that Santorum wants to speak about nothing else, and may not even have a deep understanding of anything else.
Likewise, should he win the nomination, the Obama machine will focus entirely on those social issues, and it will be Rick's uphill job (as it is now) to convince the voting public that he is not the one-trick pony that the media would have us all believe. I hope he is successful in doing that in Wednesday night's debate, or the media will continue to be successful in branding him a one-trick pony. |
