Last Non-Romney Standing???

Amazing! It actually seems to have happened! Rick Santorum is looking to be the ultimate challenger to Mitt Romney. I'm not sure what to make of this. I can think of three points though:

(1) Give him points for sincerity. I know this isn't an original insight, but Santorum looks to be by far the most honest of the Final Four. Mitt Romney is a shameless panderer, telling audiences anything they want to hear. So is Newt Gingrich, although he channels their anger a lot more convincingly. Ron Paul likes to portray himself as the straight talker in contrast to all those other pandering politicians, but his newsletters prove otherwise. The difference is that Ron Paul was pandering to people so far out of the mainstream that most people have trouble imaging why he would want to. Only Santorum looks like a genuine tell the truth and damn the consequences sort of guy.

(2) Santorum is not one of these people who wants to get government out of our boardrooms and into our bedrooms. He thinks it has a place in boardrooms, too. Mitt Romney is a plutocrat. Santorum is not. He holds decidedly un-Republican views on economic issues. This seems to be a key part of his appeal in rust belt states. It may, after all, make him a more formidable candidate than I am giving him credit for.

(3) In the end, though, I think he takes culture war issues too far. Americans like a culture warrior like Ronald Reagan, who saluted Ozzie and Harriet as the ideal, while blithely ignoring the fact that most Americans (the Reagans included) did not live up to it. This makes culture wars a seriously losing issue for liberals. We tend to attack the Ozzie and Harriet ideal as repressive because we tend to interpret any praise of Ozzie and Harriet as criticism of people who fail to meet the ideal. This is a mistake. For most people, 1950's sitcoms still are the ideal, and hostility to that ideal expresses a hostility to people's deeply held values. But culture war conservatives make the opposite mistake and assume that admiration for Ozzie and Harriet translates into a wish to shame people who don't meet the ideal. The trouble, of course, it that most people don't live up to the ideal and resent criticism on that count. Santorum, to all appearances, has it in spades. My own belief is that whichever side is the aggressor in the culture wars ends up as the loser.

But we will soon see.