I know this opinion will be excoriated by most of you (and that’s what free speech is all about), but Santorum’s words about Romney have been reported by all of the major media outlets as ‘Obama is preferable to Romney’ – which would lead most listeners to believe that he thinks Obama has been a better president than Romney would be.
Santorum’s exact words were, ‘If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch-A-Sketch candidate of the future.’
While I will be the first to admit that Rick stepped over the line in that statement, let’s look at two things:
(1) Every one of the four candidates has said something he would like to take back. And the media has seen to that. They’re republicans (the media’s favorite whipping boys) and they’re human. They’ve been on the campaign trail practically 24/7 for months, or years, in Romney’s case. Fatigue and frustration sometimes rule the day.
When you have a media standing there feverishly awaiting a mis-step (and all of them with the possible exception of Ron Paul deal with that on a daily basis) any unfortunate comment runs the threat of becoming a major policy issue, or worse. Rick does not ever speak with the aid of a teleprompter, which doubles that threat.
Reagan was depicted as the always-sleeping, foot-in-the-mouth president because the media were always on the prowl for evidence of both, and, when they found that evidence, made it appear as though they were everyday occurrences.
Ford was depicted as the clumsiest president in our history, and the media adopted that mantra until the majority of Americans believed their assertion – when, in actuality, he was very co-ordinated and agile. One doesn’t become a highly-respected college football player by tripping over one’s own feet.
(2) Despite the fact that the mainstream media would have us believe otherwise, one of the main points that Santorum has attempted to drive home is the parallels between Romneycare and Obamacare. Romney urged the president to use his healthcare plan as a model for Obamacare, and his own plan has resulted in disaster for the state of Massachusetts. Santorum believes that that will serve as a major, possibly deadly Achilles heel in the general election, and I think that belief played a role in the unfortunate comment everyone is repeating. The fear that Obama will be able to use the fact that his opponent was one of the sources for the blueprint of Obamacare will dramatically diminish one of the most vital issues of this campaign: the over-riding need to repeal that monstrosity. If the truth be told, many of us are concerned that Romney has moved to the more conservative side of the spectrum for this primary campaign, and we are very concerned that he will move back toward the more liberal side once he has the nomination, and (God willing) once he becomes president.
I know these opinions are not popular on this board, but I have followed Rick Santorum’s career for more than twenty years, and I strongly believe that the perception of him during this campaign, as a result of the media’s magnification of his faults and minimizing of his strengths, requires rebuttal, even if that rebuttal falls on deaf or disbelieving ears. :(
My husband and I attempted to attended the event at the Gettysburg Hotel on Tuesday night at which Rick spoke after the Illinois primary. There were an estimated 1,500 people outside of the Hotel who were unable to gain access to the speech because of the overwhelming crowd (we were among them). His speech was imbued with fire-in-the-belly, visionary, love-of-country passion, spoken without the aid of a teleprompter. I highly suspect that there isn't a word of it with which most people on this board would disagree. But neither did a word of it appear in the mainstream media.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/post/rick-santorum-big-things-are-adrift-video-speech-transcript/2012/03/20/gIQAtnlbQS_blog.html |
