Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who came surprisingly close to beating Mitt Romney for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (and probably would have done so if he had a few million more dollars in the bank), is giving it another shot.
Like Mike Huckabee, he seems to be aiming his camapign at the blue-collar conservatives who favored him over Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican primaries. He even dares to support an increase in the minimum wage.
However, I suspect his moment (such as it was) has passed.
As longtime and avid readers of Harry’s Place will recall, Santorum:
—Said in a 2003 interview: “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”
—Opposed extra funding for child care for low-income working parents because “Making people struggle a little bit is not necessarily the worst thing.”
—Compared the danger posed by Nazi Germany to what he believes to be the danger posed by the Obama administration
—Suggested that equal access to decent health care is somehow un-American.
—Warned against using terms like “middle class” because “that’s Marxism talk” and “there’s no class in America.”
—Compared Nelson Mandela’s battle against apartheid with the opposition in the US to “big government” and the Affordable Care Act.
—Couldn’t bring himself to disagree with a woman who called Obama a Communist dictator who tried to nuke Charleston, South Carolina. (That is an actual belief on the far Right.)
Finally, you may recall this dystopian video from Santorum’s 2012 campaign predicting what would happen to the US if Obama was reelected.
I would hope that even those suffering from the most virulent strains of Obama Derangement Syndrome will admit that things haven’t turned out that badly.
