I have made no secret of the fact that I have supported Rick Santorum in these primary races, so today was a very sad day for me. Yet, beginning today, I will be supporting Mitt Romney in his race against Barack Obama, and intend to write and speak locally to that effect, and wear out some shoe leather going door-to-door as November approaches.
With that said, I have one major complaint regarding one of the Romney campaign focuses: Rick Santorum’s defeat in his bid for re-election to the senate in 2006.
I live in Pennsylvania, and I have received probably a dozen robo-calls from the Romney campaign over the past week alone, almost all of which have focused on Santorum’s national ‘electability’ since his defeat here in Pennsylvania back in 2006.
To me, using that tactic against him on the part of Republicans serves no purpose other than to allow a second sleezy victory for the DNC.
2006 was an historically bad year for Republicans – the worst since the Great Depression – as they lost control of both houses of Congress. And 2006 was the worst election year for republicans in the history of the state of Pennsylvania. In 2006 Rick Santorum was rated the most conservative senator in the senate by the American Conservative Union. For that reason alone, the DNC poured a record amount of money into the state in their attempt to defeat him. Their advertisements included blatant lies and exaggerations of the truth, and many believe that they were the main reason for Rick’s resounding defeat. He did not have the manpower, or the money, to compete with the national democratic machine.
Add to that the fact that most Pennsylvania republicans did not yet understand Rick’s reasons for endorsing Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey two years earlier (reasons that came out later when Specter revealed that he had promised Santorum that he would see to it that any Bush Supreme Court nominee would be confirmed – which may have played a large role in the confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito). Many conservatives – quite a few of whom I knew personally -- not yet being aware of Rick’s motives in endorsing Specter, took their anger to the polls with them in 2006.
Add to that the fact that Rick was running against the namesake of the most popular governor in half a century, and a (supposed) pro-lifer to boot, which took away Rick’s advantage with the single-issue pro-life voters. Exit polls also showed that a measurable percentage of uninformed (understatement of the century) democrats also believed they were voting for Robert Casey, Jr.'s father -- the extraordinarily popular former governor -- once again.
But of all of the factors working against him in 2006, the most powerful and disingenuous one was the tens of millions that were poured into his opponent’s coffers by the national DNC in their efforts to unseat the most conservative senator in Washington. Money is power, and it’s hard, if not impossible, to run against such power, and such lies that blanketed our television screens for a solid two weeks before the election.
For that reason, the robo-calls that have recently been made portraying Santorum as a has-been unelectable, and the new advertisement that was to begin airing this week, focusing solely on his 2006 defeat as a reason not to vote for him now leaves an incredibly bad taste in my mouth, since it represents a second victory for the DNC’s underhanded tactics of six years ago – a republican using the results of those despicable tactics to his advantage six years later.
With that said (and said for the last time), I hope that Rick Santorum remains a strong voice for conservatism on the national scene, and that he has a powerful say in the party platform in Tampa. It is time for all republicans, and all conservatives, to fall in line behind our nominee and do all that is within our power to see to it that Barack Obama is not elected to a second term.
That is no minor challenge. The broad ignorance of many in the electorate brought on by their willingness to swallow whole the propaganda that passes for ‘news’ among the mainstream media, the financial backing that the Obama machine will have at its disposal (including a promised $400 million from unions alone), and the massive voter fraud that is already in the works by a reconstituted ACORN and their ilk, are all going to make this a very difficult election to win. But the stakes are so high as to make losing not an option. The very survival of America as a free republic hangs in the balance. |
