Who Will Slay the Dragon? Santorum and the Mississippi Run-off

Rick Santorum was in Madison, Mississippi last week to support Chris McDaniel’s effort to unseat incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS). And for good reason.

We Constitutionalists and people who are Taxed Enough Already are distressed over the Federal government’s pedal to the metal spending over the last decades. Such spending feeds the growing and increasingly invasive Beast of federal government, and puts into peril the economic security and prosperity of ordinary citizens; it fetters and ravages our future generations with crippling and devastating debt from which there will be no remedy. Regions of the country that benefit from federal spending channel the resources from outlining areas to the Beast, much akin to the plot of The Hunger Games. This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned, to say the least.

People in both parties are guilty for our present and coming tribulation, for different reasons. Democrats philosophically are committed to pedal to the metal spending and feeding of the Beast. Republicans are philosophically opposed to the growth of the Beast, but many of its members make no valiant effort to fight the Beast or to take steps to fix the problem. Sometimes, Republican members conspire and coordinate their votes with other legislators in support of projects that unduly increase federal spending. As the third ranking Senate Republican, Thad Cochran is one such legislator.

Thad Cochran deserves a great deal of praise for serving his state well in his 36 years as a US Senator. He obviously loves his country, and he has gotten so many things right over the years. Still, it’s a new day, and Cochran has done nothing to restrict the Beast’s diet. In 36 years, he has not stood up to fight against out of control spending. In no small measure, it is because of Republicans like Cochran that we are now $18 trillion in debt. It is because of complacent and entrenched Republicans like Cochran that people like Chris McDaniel are challenging Republican incumbents.

Santorum picks his endorsees carefully. He likely sees in Cochran an echo of his own battle with the Beast, going back to the 1995 Balanced Budget Amendment. Our present spending and deficit tribulation would not be ours had a particular uncommitted Republican senator voted differently. The amendment was one that Santorum had managed while in the House, and was the first bill he co-sponsored as a Senator. The vote failed by a single vote, and Oregon Republican Mark Hatfield should have been the vote to restore fiscal sanity to our country. Hatfield, however, as the Chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, loved to spend money and voted with the Democrats. Santorum’s well-placed indignation led him to call for Hatfield to resign his chairmanship, and Hatfield did not run for re-election the next year.

Ironically, Hatfield and Cochran have more in common than their spending habits. Cochran, too, served as the Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which might account for his love of spending.

Tuesday’s run-off election between Cochran and McDaniel allows voters to get the fiscal issues right this time. Will Mississippi send a real fighter to Washington, or will it send Cochran back to cruise his way toward retirement and a 2016 gubernatorial appointment?

At the rally in Madison, McDaniel glowingly spoke about Santorum’s fighting spirit and ability to inspire. We see that same fighting spirit in McDaniel, and might even imagine a St. George fighting the dragon, and resisting its concerted effort to fundamentally transform the country into its image. 

RLC 2014 Round Up

RLC 2014 Round Up

He did not announce his candidacy, but Santorum’s presence at the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference was more than a cameo appearance.

In 2012, Santorum ran on the argument that Mitt Romney was the worst possible Republican candidate to challenge Obama. I’ll not review the subpoints, but in post-election reflections, all the pundits suddenly came to the same conclusion, and did so as if it were their own discovery.

Santorum was the last not-Romney candidate, and by the end of the campaign, he carried 11 states, despite party elitist meddling to prevent victory announcements in Iowa until after the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. The most frequently expressed complaint against Santorum was that he had no chance to win; what a difference the end result would have been if South Carolinians had seen Santorum victorious in Iowa.

Santorum had been labeled as a one-song candidate for social values. This was a marginalizing and tidy pigeon hole, a popular narrative that put Santorum into a precisely defined category for a media and an electorate focused more on Gangnam style in 2012 than on the future of the country. In reality, Santorum was the candidate most expert in the Middle East, the candidate with the most comprehensive economic recovery plan, the candidate whose balanced budget plan was projected for five years precisely so that he and the House and Senate members supporting it would be held responsible by the voters in a second term election. Indeed, it was by a single Senate vote that Santorum’s 1995 Balanced Budget Amendment failed, a day whose infamy should be altogether clear to Americans who now face an $18 trillion deficit with a clear path and a pedal-to-the-medal Legislature that will see that number double and triple by the time Hillary’s grandchild will be enrolled in NYC’s most prestigious elementary school.

What is Santorum up to now? He’s making sure that everyone knows him as the Blue Collar Conservative, one who consciously integrates his social values into a compelling economic message that should rebrand and re-vision the Republican Party. He capably explains how this is a winning message for Republicans and that it is a message which brings with it all the urgencies of conservative Constitutional Republicans. Santorum sang a different song at RLC, one which was dominated by this new vision, with red meat anti-Obama rhetoric served only in small portions so that the audience might grasp that one does not win elections by anti-Obama-ism alone, but with a message which each American’s name on it.