Uh hunh.
Let it suffice to say that your arguments haven’t worked. In Mississippi, 20% of voters said that a candidate having strong moral character was the most important factor and they voted 65-8% or 13-1.6% And that percent is consistent in every primary and you guys can argue about it all you want but Newt is handicapped from winning those voters.
Not surprising. There is always a certain percentage of the population willing to allow themselves to be snookered by big-government "compassionate" conservatives who loudly thump their chests about how moral they are, while voting to expand government and destroy individuals and the family. These same voters are the people who supported Pardoning Mike Huckabee back in 2008.
You’re cherry picking vote to form a narrative that’s simply not true. During 12 years in the Senate, Santorum received 7 grades of A from the National Taxpayers Union during 12 years in the Senate along with 3 B+ and 2Bs, he’s received strong ratings from the American Conservative Union and Citizens Against Government Waste.
Actually, you have it backwards.
See - the grades you cite are the ones I used to cite myself a few weeks ago when I was (briefly) warming up to Santorum, and was defending him both here and on Ace of Spades HQ. Then I actually sat down and started thinking about it, and realised that citing these was not actually a very good or honest argument for Santorum.
It's actually relatively easy to get a good grade from these groups, and nevertheless build up an aggregatively bad voting record, so long as the bad votes are spread out evenly enough that they never impact one particular year's grade. Santorum was in public office for 16 years. One can earn a whole decade's worth of B+ grades from the NTU and still have a terribly big-government voting record over the course of it all.
Besides, as is becoming depressingly typical for Santorum supporters, you didn't actually address the FACT of Santorum's many, many, many bad votes - you merely tried to distract attention from them. Patton@Bastogne posted an excellent list detailing Santorum's immoral voting record. These are on the record, whether you like it or not.
Newt’s speakership was a wasted opportunity. After the government shutdown, he timidly gave in to demand after demand from President Clinton, broke spending caps, and counted on the Lewinsky scandal to deliver Republican gains. He was forced out by conservatives after four years because he could not have been re-elected Speaker. There was a conservative rebellion against him in 1997. Gingrich is a great revolutionary, but lousy at actually implementing anything.
Nice bit of revisionist history there. Nevertheless, the *actual* facts are that Newt delivered on the Contract for America, he delivered on welfare reform, he delivered on capital gains tax cuts and other tax reforms, and he delivered on a balanced budget. He did this, in large part, AFTER the 1995 government shut down, and did it by forcing a hostile Democrat President to accept them.
Notably, Rick Santorum has NO SUCH RECORD of conservative leadership like this. All Santorum has is a long string of votes to increase government size and extent.
Newt left the Speakership because of a "coup" by Reps. Boehner, Paxon, Armey, and DeLay - who revolted specifically because Newt was TOO conservative, and wasn't playing the "go along to get along" game with the Democrats.
Dang! You don’t cut this guy any slack. LOL
You make good posts. Thanks.