Rick Santorum and the Need for a New Coalition

The Democratic Party has long made it clear that their commitment to their voting blocks is based on two things: giving them goodies and increasing their numbers.

Now, there’s nothing new about the former. The modern Democrat is a believer in wealth redistribution – in a zero-sum game in which the government allocates the portions.

The Democrat campaigns on his promise to distribute whatever the government has to give – be it tax dollars, borrowed dollars, or printed dollars – in whatever form is desired – entitlement checks, college grants, mortgage forgiveness. He then promises to pay for all this largesse by taxing somebody else, “never you, always your neighbor.”

The Democrat also campaigns on his promise to give to his base other less direct benefits – the promise to be free of prosecution for a host of things once called crimes. Recreational drug use and sale, pandering and prostitution, squatting on others’ land, being a public nuisance on a street corner, aborting one’s unwanted child, euthanizing one’s unwanted neighbor. All these are crimes in the America of the Founders; all are championed by the modern American Democrat. Elect the Democrat, and your immorality will lose its shame.

The Democrat campaigns on giving his base tangibles that are not his to give. While the Right may champion the landlord’s right to refuse an undesirable tenant, or the seller’s right to reject an un-creditworthy buyer, the Democrat passes laws to force them, even when such tolerance is against the seller’s moral code or financial security. The Democrat promises to force employers to give lavish benefits to his employees, regardless of whether the employer can afford to or not. Unmindful of what such largesse will do to the business model of the employer, the Democrat encourages the union to squeeze management right out of business, then whines when the business goes bankrupt as a result of the bleeding from thousands of contractual wounds.

Finally, what does the Democrat do to ensure his political viability? He grows his base.

The Democrat promises to expand the welfare state and the list of recipients of liberal largesse. To gain an ever-growing voter base, he promises to write more checks to more people, to unionize more factories, to pay for more college degrees and abortions and public housing. In growing the dependency class in America over the past century, the Democrats have gained for themselves an ever-expanding voting base, ensuring that the Democrats can never be fully extinguished as a party. They’ll always have that dependent core on which to build, even after an electoral disaster like 2010.

For the most part, the Republicans favor a free market, limited government, and traditional values. With a few exceptions (the corporate welfare of the Illinois Combine, for example), the Republicans don’t favor handouts and giveaways to their base.

That is, in fact, the Republican selling point, at least to people who appreciate American economics and American tradition. Republicans say “Choose us; we’ll keep you free. We reject the welfare state, the looting of your property, the destruction of your society.” And this too is a compelling argument, and an infinitely more moral one.

But the Republican approach lacks one key element that the Democratic approach enjoys: the overriding commitment to growing the base.

The Republican base knows in its heart that if conservative policies are followed, business will grow, and people will move up from poverty to the middle class, from the middle class to wealth. But this basic understanding isn’t the same as a commitment to massive growth of a voting block, especially since it’s never verbalized as such.

Republicans watch the Democrats expand their base at the expense of the Republicans’, and think only of stanching the bleeding. The GOP calls for an end to welfare checks, an end to dependency, an end to the corruption of our culture. All this is right, but it doesn’t obviously lead to ever-increasing numbers on election day, as the Democrat method does.

The mainstream (liberal) media has succeeded in pigeonholing each Republican presidential candidate into a neat box: Mitt Romney is “the fatcats’ candidate.” Newt Gingrich is “the insiders’ candidate.” Rick Perry is “the Southerners’ candidate.” Ron Paul is “the extremists’ candidate.” Rick Santorum is “the social issues candidate.” Jon Huntsman, their favorite, is “the quirky candidate” – a bipartisan minor rock star whose story is more interesting than his positions on the issues.

All these narratives are wrong – they’re all multi-faceted candidates with a great deal to recommend them – but they are most wrong in regards to Rick Santorum.

The former Senator is not only not just a social issues focused candidate… that’s the smallest part of his focus... Oh yes, he’s adamantly pro-life, anti-crime, pro-2nd Amendment, in favor of traditional values. Yes, he proudly authored the Born Alive Protection Act to stop partial birth abortion, and cosponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate to protect the definition of marriage.

But that’s not the focus of his campaign, nor was it the focus of his tenure in the House and the Senate.

Rick Santorum comes from a somewhat different background than the rest of the candidates, and it shows in his philosophy. All Republicans are traditionally “pro-business,” but when you use that term to someone with an immigrant family background in the rust belt state of Pennsylvania, it evokes a different meaning.

To a Romney, Huntsman, or Gingrich, the business world is a mixture of retail and wholesale, manufacturing and distribution, real estate and services. Every kind of business participates equally in the wonderful American economy. And to an extent, this is true.

But to a Rick Santorum, who watched his state – and the nation as a whole – slowly lose its manufacturing base over the years, the term “pro-business” has a special focus: He’s committed to not just improving what we have; he’s vowed to bring back what we’ve lost: America’s factories, which once held all the promise of the industrial age.

There is an unfortunate side effect to depending on the invisible hand of the market. While we marvel at how an entrepreneur can go successfully from owning a carpet cleaning franchise to a pizzeria to a mortgage loan brokerage, we forget that certain types of businesses really are more important to an economy than others.

Proposing that the government should never “pick winners” is a hallmark of conservative economics, and yet, Rick Santorum disagrees just a bit, just on one fundamental point: he knows that manufacturing is critical in a way that no other business is.

If a community’s strip malls have one less pizzeria or one less real estate office, we know that, if necessary, we can make our own pizza or sell our house “by owner”… but we can never make our own furnace, dishwasher, or automobile. Manufacturing is different, and must be recognized as the foundation on which the rest of the economy is built. Our slow and painful transformation to a “service economy,” has destructive effects that some in politics simply don’t seem to appreciate.

In reviewing Rick Santorum’s economic proposals, we see many of the same things we expect to see from any conservative Republican: a general flattening of the personal income tax (he proposes two rates – 10% and 28%, “because if 28% was good enough for Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for me!”)… repeal and replacement of Obamacare, eliminating the AMT, reducing capital gains and dividend taxes to 12%... eliminating energy and most agricultural subsidies. And of course massive reductions in federal spending, starting with a return to the 2008 federal budget levels. All the Republican candidates favor some variety of these basic, pro-business improvements, though Santorum’s are a bit more aggressive in both the tax cuts and spending cuts than most of his competitors.

Then we take a sharp turn from the norm. Santorum proposes cutting corporate income tax rates in half – from 35% to 17.5%. That’s good. It would take us from being the most highly taxed industrial economy to being in the mainstream again.

But then he carves out an exception: For manufacturing, Santorum is calling for a permanent elimination of the corporate income tax. Only for manufacturing. Cut taxes in half for all other business, but eliminate them entirely for factories, because we MUST bring back American factories. And he proposes increasing the temporary 14% R&D tax credit to a permanent 20%. And huge cuts in the tax rates on repatriated income.

Now, we all know that presidential candidates cannot walk into office and get their campaign platforms passed by Congress exactly as written. The odds are that a President Santorum will need to deal with Congressional leadership, and will accept some compromise here. Personally – this is just my guess, of course – I would expect a two-tiered system, in which non-manufacturing pays 17.5% and manufacturing pays much less, perhaps half that, when all is said and done.

But the important thing is this specific commitment to the manufacturing sector – and to the people and communities who live and work in manufacturing – that we simply have not seen from Republican leadership in decades.

On the campaign trail, voters unfamiliar with Santorum are amazed at his speeches.

Expecting some pro-life and anti-gay rant on social issues – because that’s what the press have insisted the man is all about – audiences are struck by this Italian immigrants’ son from the rust belt and his love of the old America of factories and thriving communities. It was an America in which you could start on the assembly line, rise to supervisor, then to foreman, then to plant manager, a proud contributor to the economic engine of the free world, proudly providing for your family by producing a tangible product that your children could see and appreciate.

As he travels across a nation dotted with small struggling towns whose factories have long been closed, his message resonates in a way that few politicians’ can. What he saw happen to his native Pennsylvania is happening all across the nation, as the destructive policies of the Democrats – high taxes, crippling regulations, union thuggery and class action law firms – have caused manufacturers to flee to foreign shores.

Even though the average pro-business conservative doesn’t mean to, the tendency to view “the business community” as a single homogenous block can turn off these key voting groups. They hear a politician say “we’ll save the business community” and they think it means “the accountants and investment advisors will still thrive.” They don’t think of themselves – the factory workers – as a part of the business community, even though of course, they are its very core. But they’ve been forgotten before.

Rick Santorum – by focusing on the manufacturing plants themselves – is able to connect with people who haven’t voted for a Republican since Ronald Reagan (some, perhaps, not since Eisenhower!). As he explains WHY the factories have closed or fled, and demonstrates his commitment – the conservative commitment – to fixing those problems, Rick Santorum has the potential to rebuild the Republican Party as well as the nation’s economy.

What America needs – not just what one demographic or one geographical region needs, but what the country needs – is a rededication to the proposition that American can be self-sufficient. This does not mean that we can’t import and export – indeed we should! – but that we should not sit back and do nothing as we drive industry after industry abroad.

Contrary to the rhetoric of the left, manufacturers don’t leave these shores for China or Indonesia because they enjoy the 14-hour airplane rides to jet-lagged meetings, or because they love the uncertainty of months-longer lead times and high transportation costs. Manufacturers leave because American taxes, American bureaucrats, American environmentalist extremists, union thugs and ambulance chasers have made community after community, state after state, a hostile environment for them. They want to stay, but they’re pushed out by their own countrymen.

The Santorum candidacy proposes a reversal of that decades-long trend. The Santorum candidacy – if it leads to a Santorum presidency with a Republican House and Senate to support it – promises a conservative reawakening of American manufacturing.

We will not only see our economy recover, but we will see a whole class of Americans – the working folks of the factories – realize that they were lied to by the Democrats all these years, and they will convert to the Republican Party, the party of growth, the party of the great American work ethic and the American Dream.

No other Republican candidate is championing manufacturing this way. It’s unlikely that any other Republican on the scene has the personal story and the background to be believed if he tried, no matter how sincere he is. Democrats have been able to claim that they are the party of the American factory worker – even as they destroyed the American factory – because the GOP has been too tone-deaf to make their case for the reverse. The Democrats have created an opening a mile wide, for the right pro-manufacturing Republican to move in. And Santorum is that man.

Commentators have complained that Santorum is not your typical conservative – that he’s right on taxes, but sometimes wrong on spending – and that he “picks winners and losers” – normally anathema to free market advocates – by wanting to carve out special status for the manufacturing sector.

But a case can be made that he’s absolutely right – that manufacturing SHOULD have a special status as the poured-steel-and-concrete foundation of an industrialized society. And a case can also be made that if he’s given the chance to deliver, not only will the recovery be strong, but the political realignment will follow appropriately, as the president who delivers it will have captured the heart and aspirations of the American people, for the first time since Ronald Reagan.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade lecturer. As he travels around the country giving seminars, he sees shuttered factories, empty warehouses, whole abandoned industrial parks, all because of the hostile climate of the death grip that the left has imposed on manufacturing. He welcomes Santorum’s message and the chance to finally reverse this long nightmare.

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At Santorum`s Town Hall Meeting in the Lawrence Barn Community Center Hollis, NH, now live on C-Span, the introductory speaker asked for a raise of hands for those seated if from from New Hampshire- It appears that only 10% of the seated audience raised their hands- 90% were from out of state and one was from another country-Barbados! It appears that the New Hamphshirites are standing near the door. What the H is going on here? Who sandbagged this audience with out-of-staters? Santorum is asking for the audience`s votes on Tuesday. They can`t vote in NH Tuesday- They are from other states.What are they doing in a NH town hall meeting?

Good question. Probably something the Romney campaign engineered.

For more information about Santorum, look up David Schippers’s book, Sell Out.

Senator Rick Santorum and Senator Trent Lott on pages 9-12.

The House Republicans are meeting with the two Senators to coordinate the impeachment of William J. Clinton, and instead were blindsided by the Senate Republicans, Santorum participating.

The more I find out about Santorum, the less I believe he is capable of being a President of whom Republicans will be proud.

He is passing himself off as a Conservative using social issues but there is a vast difference between a whole Conservative and one just supportive of social conservatism while being for big government and Washington busness-as-usual.

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