Lee Harris at The American, Explaining the Santorum Surprise:
In the upcoming presidential primaries, those who cast their votes for Rick Santorum will not just be picking a candidate for the nomination of the Republican Party, they will be picking an altogether different kind of presidential election from the one that was supposed to occur. Instead of being a race between two Ivy League technocrats, Romney and Obama, both claiming to have the cure for our economic ills, the election of 2012 could well turn into a messy, highly charged, and emotionally divisive choice between an Ivy League technocrat and a true-blue cultural conservative.
Instead of Romney and Obama arguing who can best manage the decline of America Santorum will be attacking Obama on Obamacare, his heavy-handed treatment of religious liberty, and his dictatorial presidential style of politics. Romney, the big-government, corporatist-smoothie businessman, would like to ignore all that by talking and acting like a guy seeking the CEO job of the largest company in the world. The American people, however, seem to care more about their liberty than which guy will do a better job of running the country into the ground.
…whatever their difference of nuance, both Romney and Obama based their campaign strategy on the shared belief that the surest way to the White House in 2012 lay in appealing to the economic self-interest of the American voter.
Two recent events have called into question the strategic assumptions of both Romney and Obama. First came Santorum’s triple victory over Romney in the Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and the Missouri primary. If 2012 was all about the economy, then a cash-strapped social conservative like Santorum had no business defeating Romney in three states, especially given the fact that Santorum represents the most conservative cultural values in the American political scene.
Next came the uproar over the Obama administration’s decision to compel religious institutions to provide birth control as part of the insurance coverage they offered to their employees. The decision was a terrible blunder, as the administration soon recognized. Yet even as Obama tried to control the damage, he seemed strangely clueless as to the source of the controversy, almost as if he and his inner circle could not quite get their heads around the idea that people could really be up in arms over a purely cultural issue that had nothing to do with economics…
Oh, those darn cultural issues that the Republican establishment so wishes could be swept under the rug and forgotten. No way. So long as the social issues frighten Republicans and make them start to fumble and fizzle the Democrats are never going to leave them lie. Why would they? The way to win in politics is to put your opponent on the defensive. If they foolishly take the bait, as Republicans seem always to do, they lose. The way to beat the Democrats’ ploy is to take them up on it and go on offense against them on social issues. Just as Republicans are vulnerable when they try to run away from those issues, Democrats can be made vulnerable if Republicans go on offense and force them to confront their own position on social issues.
During his appearance at the CPAC convention … Romney pointedly tried to dispel lingering doubts about his commitment to cultural conservatism by claiming, among other things, that he was responsible for keeping Massachusetts “from becoming the Las Vegas of gay marriage.” Obviously, Romney had come to recognize that he could not win the Republican nomination simply by advertising himself as a fiscal Mr. Fix-it. Culture mattered, and Romney had to align himself (or at least pretend to) on the conservative side of the culture war. Furthermore, the contentious cultural issue of gay marriage is not just a problem for Romney. President Obama might well face the matter of gay marriage in the upcoming election, but from the other side of the aisle. Why, after all, hasn’t he come out in support of gay marriage, considering that an enormous section of his base is already deeply committed to it?
In short, despite their best efforts to make this election all about the economy, both Romney and Obama have unexpectedly found themselves in the midst of the ongoing American culture war. They would both like to change the subject and get back to “It’s all about the economy,” but Rick Santorum isn’t about to let them. And this is bad news both for Romney and Obama.
For example, the president was fully prepared to go head-to-head with Romney on the economy, but Obama’s recent display of insensitivity to the values of a large chunk of American voters indicates that he has a serious weak spot that could be deftly exploited by a dedicated cultural warrior like Santorum, a man of working class background who can feel the pulse of the American heartland because it is genuinely his own. In contrast, Obama seems to have no cultural pulse at all, as if he simply can’t understand how issues such as gay marriage (pro or con!) could really matter to people.
Read the whole thing.