Hey! I want to call foul here — a foul on both sides.
I'm not writing this to know-nothing yahoos pounding on keyboards in back rooms somewhere. I've been reading Free Republic much longer than I've been posting, and while I don't personally know either C. Edmund Wright or AmericanInTokyo, it's clear that both of you have deep roots in the Republican Party, and not at low levels, either.
I'm guessing that if I knew more about your bios I wouldn't be writing this post because I'd feel ashamed to be criticizing legitimate leaders. (Given where he lives, AmericanInTokyo will understand the concerns of a younger man criticizing older people.) Both of your credentials are much better than mine, and I don't think it will help my reputation on Free Republic to be pointing out stuff like Gerald Ford writing my college recommendation letter or Richard Nixon giving my father post-election awards in 1968 or my mother's ties with Michigan Gov. William Milliken dating back to the 1950s in Traverse City. I burned my bridges with that wing of the Republican Party decades ago.
Now that I've smeared myself with some readers as a compromising weak-kneed RINO based on my background from decades ago that doesn't represent anything I believe today, let me say this — have we gotten to the point that we're attacking people's wives for things that **EVERYBODY** on all sides agrees she repented of more than two decades ago? I'm no moderate, I'm all for hard-hitting bare-knuckle politics, but we need to hit the right target and use the right argument to do so.
To my knowledge there is nobody anywhere on the Republican political spectrum who argues that Mrs. Santorum still thinks its okay to be living in sin with a man or to be an abortionist, and nobody has ever made a credible claim that Rick Santorum supports extramarital relationships. As far as I can tell, all that happened is Rick Santorum agreed to marry a woman with a seriously sinful past who has demonstrated her repentance by the way she's lived her life for the last several decades. Some of us would consider that to be evidence of a remarkably forgiving man.
Also, Mrs. Santorum is not running for office — I'm not saying the Republican attacks on Michelle Obama are totally out of line, but many of them do more harm than good to us. The average voter doesn't like what are perceived as cheap shots, even if they're valid.
On the other hand, those of us who support Rick Santorum need to stop acting as if everything Gingrich has done has been a disaster. He deserves credit, as C. Edmund Wright correctly said, for the 1994 election takeover of the House of Representatives. Virtually **NOBODY** thought there was the remotest possibility of that happening. We're so used to the idea now that Republicans don't have to be a permanent minority working out coalitions with conservative Democrats to get to 50 percent margins that we've forgotten that Gingrich **DOES** deserve credit for a massive victory that upended virtually all of modern House of Representatives history. Gingrich opened the door to an ideologically based two-party system in the House rather than the older de-facto three-party system of coalition “go along to get along” politics we had for many years in the House of Representatives. Greatly reducing the old Southern Democrats as a political force is something for which Gingrich deserves great credit.
I think Gingrich and Santorum supporters need to remember that we **ARE** on the same team. Gingrich may say he's not a team player, but he knows he can't win by himself, and even if he somehow did, he needs others to govern effectively once elected. On the other side, Santorum knows he needs to be willing to break eggs to make omelets — he was part of the anti-corruption Gang of Seven, after all — and he knows how much good Gingrich did to win back the House of Representatives.
I don't have a problem with seeing tapes of Newt Gingrich saying things two decades ago that don't look good. He's a historian, and if he didn't know that his words will be used against him, that's his fault, and if there really are skeletons in his closet it's good to get them out. I've already watched videos of Santorum and Specter together, and that isn't pretty either. We need to see those things now, because we're going to see them this fall used by Barack Obama if either of these men are our Republican nominee.
What I fear is we're going to spend so much time beating up on other that Romney wins the nomination and then Obama wins re-election.
That would be an exceedingly bad outcome if we destroyed two flawed but acceptable conservative candidates and got a nominee who is much worse than either of them.
That sir, is the most reasonable post to me from any Santorum supporter during this entire process. In fact, if so many of the Santorum supporters, including RS himself, didn't walk around acting like that never happened, there would be a helluva lot less venom between the two sides. RS has criticized Newt about 100 fold that Newt has criticized RS - and that has indeed burnt the rear ends of many Newt supporters over the course of the campaign.
On that common ground you stated above however, you and I will get along great even in disagreement.
Yes, (as expressed in) this preceding paragraph I will indeed give him credit.