Posted on 02/17/2012 5:48:02 AM PST by Kaslin
In a campaign defined by Republican reluctance to embrace Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum has emerged as the latest not-Romney candidate to surge ahead. While it's impossible to predict what will happen in this volatile election season, the data suggests that Santorum might be more of a challenge for Romney than earlier flavors of the month.
The latest Rasmussen Reports poll of the GOP race shows that Rick Santorum leads Mitt Romney by 12 points, 39 percent to 27 percent. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul are far behind. In and of itself, that's nothing new. The man from Massachusetts has at times trailed Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich in the polls.
What is new are the numbers from a head-to-head matchup with no other candidates in the race. Santorum leads Romney 55 percent to 34 percent. None of the earlier Romney alternatives could manage better than a toss-up in such a contest.
Those numbers show that Santorum picks up 16 points when other candidates drop out. Romney adds just 7 to his column. Santorum makes huge gains among conservative voters when others drop out of the race. Among non-conservatives, Santorum and Romney gain roughly equal amounts. For the first time, the numbers show that if one of Romney's challengers drops out, the other challenger will overwhelmingly benefit. Gingrich supporters, by a three-to-one margin, would vote for Santorum over Romney if that was the final choice.
Both Romney and Santorum are well-liked by Republican Primary voters, but Santorum has a slight advantage on this pointm as well. Seventy-five percent offer a favorable opinion of Santorum, while 66 percent say the same of Romney.
There is a huge passion gap favoring Santorum, though. Forty percent of Republican primary voters have a very favorable opinion of Santorum. Just 18 percent are that enthusiastic about Romney.
The one thing keeping Romney afloat is that he is still perceived as the strongest general election candidate. For some Republicans, that's enough. But to survive the Santorum challenge, Romney needs to give primary voters something more, something positive. GOP voters want a reason to vote for him beyond the fact that he has the most money and the best organization.
Team Romney needs to acknowledge that Republican voters are not only strongly opposed to President Obama's agenda but that they don't think much of Washington Republicans, either. They want a president who would shake up the good old boys network in Washington rather than join it. To date, Romney's attitude signals that he'd be more comfortable leading the club than challenging it.
Santorum has a very different challenge. First, he must survive the onslaught of ads coming from the Romney campaign. Then, he must convince Republican voters that he can win the general election in November. Electability is still the most important factor for Republican voters. If Santorum can neutralize the electability argument, he could become Romney's worst nightmare.
The next primary competitions are slated for Feb. 28 in Arizona and Michigan. If Romney wins both states, the race will probably be over. However, if Santorum can pull off a victory that day, he will be far more than the latest flavor of the month.
As others here have quite correctly pointed out, Reagan was not a libertarian, was not pro-gay, and strongly believed in the need for a moral foundation for society.
Was Reagan a member of the Christian conservative religious right movement as defined today? Probably not, though I've read the people who are able to make a credible case for Reagan's personal faith. He certainly wasn't bashing Christian conservatives, however, like some in the modern Republican Party.
It simply is not fair to assume that someone whose primary political activism ran from the 1950s to the 1980s will have views that fit nicely into the categories of 2012 politics.
What **IS** important to say is that it is not a violation of the Reagan legacy to say that being conservative is more than “get government off our backs.” Reagan believed in the need for a moral foundation for society.
Libertarianism simply does not work. If people aren't taught to run their own lives in a decent moral manner, the society falls apart. When people don't have a shared morality, government is forced to step in to prevent chaos, and that means government starts to regulate things people should be regulating for themselves.
On that point, I don't see Rick Santorum saying anything Ronald Reagan would not have said.
You can argue about definitions and what or what is not a misnomer in our modern political context but Reagan very famously quoted himself “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”
Glad I can make you laugh because no one is capable of making you see what you refuse to see.
Deception/evil is that ugly and deceitful politicians NEED your type to survive so consider yourself a useful idiot to them as they are laughing at you while America weeps.
I think we concur that he who defines, wins.
I believe a credible argument could be made that the libertarianism represented by Freedom Communications and the Orange County Register, an early backer of Ronald Reagan, is very different from the amoral or even anti-morality libertarianism we're seeing today. The older libertarianism taught that there is such a thing as social morality that's necessary to govern people's personal lives to have a functioning society, but taught that it's the role of the family and the church to teach morality, not the role of the government.
I might be able to concur with that point of view in the 1950s or earlier when we still had a common moral consensus, but today we're seeing liberals who, when they have taken over government, actively use it to go to war against traditional morality. In our current context today I believe we must fight against libertarianism as a steppingstone toward liberalism, but I'm not sure I would have said that a few decades ago.
I used to work for Freedom Communications, BTW, and I'm not unaware of the influence of people like that in the history of the Republican Party in California and more generally in the West. Freedom Communications was in many ways the last significant conservative media operation in the United States after the Pulliams sold their newspaper company centered in Indiana and Arizona, and I've been disappointed to see what's happened to the company as the newspaper industry has collapsed.
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