Explaining Santorumentum

I submitted my column on Rick Santorum’s Friday Brown County appearance in the wee hours this morning, and ended up with a leftover which I want to put up now.

It’s a list, beyond the few already cited in the column which are I believe are more important (which of course will have to wait) of many of the reasons for his remarkable surge before and since the three February 7 contests in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri:

1. Mitt Romney’s ignorant comment about the poor and the “safety net,” which in the real world is all too often a demotivating trap.
2. Romney’s simultaneously weird and foolish self-identification as a “serious conservative” at CPAC.
3. Gingrich’s bitter post-South Carolina implosion.
4. Romney’s failure, 17 years after Ted Kennedy whipped him in the 1994 U.S. Senate race on the very same issue, to adequately defend and detail his record at Bain Capital.
5. Unhinged defenses of the most indefensible aspects of Romney’s record, i.e., RomneyCare and same-sex marriage, by people who should (and I believe do) know better like Ann Coulter (literally cheerleading for RomneyCare) and Maggie Gallagher (falsely claiming that he did all he could to stop same-sex marriage in Massachusetts) that anyone with knowledge of the facts saw through.
6. Rick Perry’s withdrawal, which ultimately benefited Santorum in the wake of Gingrich’s problems.
7. Talk radio hosts, including Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh, making their distaste for Romney and his cheerleaders and their appreciation of Santorum a bit more clear.
8. Finally, and arguably the most directly helpful item to Santorum, the Obama administration’s religious freedom-crushing rule requiring first-dollar coverage of all contraceptive and post-fertilization abortifacient pre-implantation pharmaceuticals and technologies, even by institutions which are morally opposed to some or all of them. The Catholic bishops’ response (“HHS Must Rescind the Mandate”) to the administration’s “compromise” which was nothing of the sort made the battle lines clear.

I believe that the most important element of Santorum’s surge (perhaps not the most influential, but in my opinion definitely the most important) is his message, which I explain in the column, which will go up in the next day or two (or three).

Related: At the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, via Jim Taranto —

If you’re a Republican in New York or another big city, you may be anxious or even terrified at the prospect that Rick Santorum, the supposedly unelectable social conservative, may win the GOP presidential nomination. Jeffrey Bell would like to set your mind at ease.

Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, “The Case for Polarized Politics,” has a winning track record for the GOP. “Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” he observes. “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.”

The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Mr. Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”

That’s for sure.

Those who break out in hives (that would include you, Mitch Daniels) when anyone asserts that social issues are fundamental and foundational should know that Santorum’s message, explained more fully in the column, melds and unifies the social and economic aspects of conservatism and frames them around our founding documents.

What Santorum is articulating is impressive and important. Stay tuned.