Game Still On! Why Santorum’s Campaign Cannot Be Leveraged Out to Support Newt

For the past two weeks, Gingrich supporters have argued that Santorum should quit and support their efforts to keep Romney from winning the nomination. This assumes that Santorum supporters prefer Newt to Mitt, a badly mistaken assumption. I’ll explain why.

Preliminarily, let me note that the three candidates have all won a state, and that Rick has beaten Newt in two of the three contests. Moreover, the fundraising boost that Newt will get from winning South Carolina is likely to go to relieve his campaign’s indebtedness, rather than to propel his campaign forward in Florida. In contrast, despite polling badly in South Carolina, the Santorum campaign reached its million dollar goal 24 hours ahead of its 3-day deadline this past week, finishing with 1-1/2 million in the moneybomb. Meanwhile, Santorum already has campaign captains in every Florida county, and his campaign offices are fully staffed by campaign professionals. Also boding well for Santorum is that prior to the South Carolina election, Rick was polling second in Florida. All this to say, pundits like Palin, Morris, and Rove all have good reasons to agree with Santorum that the game is STILL on.

So, the suggestion that Rick should quit is patently absurd. But that Santorum should quit in order to keep Romney from winning is even more problematic.

The reality is that Santorum supporters find both Gingrich and Romney equally flawed. To be sure, we think that Romney is a conservative of convenience, and that when it is no longer convenient to be conservative, his true DNA will re-sequence back to its Massachusetts moderate form. But this is not any worse than Newt’s problems.

Newt is the erratic conservative, or in the words of one of his own supporters, he is “volatile, to say the least” (Bob Livingston, R-LA). We could point to all the anti-Newt talking points of the season, but the bottom line for many of us Santorum supporters is inability to provide principled leadership. This assessment is especially evident in how he was so soundly repudiated by his own caucus in his ethics scandal, with 75% of Republicans joining Democrats for a 395–28 vote against Newt, serving him with a $300,000 fine.

The portrait of Newt’s leadership as unfocused, undisciplined, erratic, volatile, unaccountable, unresponsive, and incapable of nurturing important initiatives to fruition, is reinforced by the testimony of his former colleagues over and over again. Many of them who had kept quiet over the years so as not to kick a dead horse, have come forward now to warn us of his unreliability. The 90s joke has been given new life with Gingrich’s re-emergence, that there was a roomful of filing cabinets in the Capitol Building, with each drawer marked “Newt’s Ideas,” but only one marked “Newt’s Good Ideas.” The fact that Newt kited 22 checks, including one for thousands of dollars, exemplifies this portrait of the undisciplined life.

Conservatives serving with Gingrich have professed a genuine fear that a Gingrich presidency would take on the kinds of complexity and intrigue reflective of his own personal life. They are not so concerned about the moral issues, but about the kinds of bad decisions that entangle and weigh a person down so as to impede progress and to haunt him years later. This pattern was evident in 1998, an election year following the Lewinsky scandal, and when the “six year itch” typically sees the incumbent president’s party losing house seats. We expected significant gains in the House, but Newt’s legacy of complexity and intrigue caused the Republicans to nearly lose their majority. Rather disingenuously, Newt sells this deep disappointment as one of his achievements.

Based on past performance, a Gingrich presidency would afford many occasions when defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory. Such was the case when House Managers were very effectively prosecuting Clinton’s impeachment and pressing their case. At the critical moment, while Clinton was still on the ropes, it was Gingrich who blinked, and the whole process wound down. So also the government shutdown—again, with victory in sight, Gingrich blinked instead of staying the course and delivering victory. One wonders why Gingrich could not stand toe to toe with Clinton.

With such fiascos, Newt projected onto Republicans the reputation of being hard core, without delivering any of the benefits that should have accrued from their uncompromising stance.

During those intense moments of the impeachment trial, what compromises would Newt have offered to keep his own adultery quiet? If Harry Reid were the one in possession of the embarrassing interviews with Marianne Gingrich, what would Newt have offered to keep them quiet? Entanglements like these can hogtie a president and his agenda faster than you can say Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.

Santorum supporters know these things about Newt’s past leadership performance, but they also have other concerns about Gingrich facing Obama in the general election.

In a race that needs to be about the Obama record, Newt is too easily made the issue. It is not a matter of a skeleton in one closet, but a matter of multiple skeletons in many closets. Baggage? Yes, pick a bag, any bag—for there are many bags to choose from. There is so much baggage that the national debt could be paid off in Newt’s excess baggage fees. The Obama campaign would relish putting out a new campaign ad every week exploiting Newt’s own history, personal and public.

Moreover, the whole Santorum campaign has been predicated on Santorum being the full-spectrum conservative, the candidate who best embodies the 3 legged stool of Reagan conservatism: social conservatism, small government and fiscal conservatism, and national security. With Newt’s 10 or 20 year commitment to the individual mandate for health care, and with him carrying water for the global warming alarmists (check out his two books on this issue), much has been said to question Newt on his commitment to small government. But what is indisputable is Newt’s lack of commitment to social issues that are so critical to Santorum supporters.

First and foremost in the Santorum economic plan is the family. The Republican Party is pro-family. Santorum often affirms the Brookings Institutes data that people are most likely to stay out of poverty if they do three things: finish high school, get a job, get married before having children—and stay married. We Santorum supporters are passionate about this, and we cannot stomach a candidate who mainstreams serial adultery and multiple marriage.

Out of principle, we Santorum supporters will not vote for someone to be the candidate for the party of family values whose past personal decisions so profoundly undermine those family values. It is not a matter of us being unforgiving. Rather, it is a matter of whose profile picture is depicted with our banner promoting family values. The very notion of Newt promoting family values is utterly ridiculous. When he refers to himself and his wife by name, we always hold our breath for fear that he will say, “Marianne and I...” or perhaps “Jackie and I.”

All this to say, the effort to leverage Santorum out of the race in order to keep Mitt from becoming the candidate, wrongly and badly assumes that we’d rather have Newt than Mitt. Neither is a viable option for many Santorum voters. For this rease, Santorum MUST not quit this race.