Dateline: Goffstown New Hampshire, the New Hampshire Institute of Politics.
D'ye know what the problem with Rick Santorum is?
He is a mean rigid authoritarian minded man with vocal hatreds, who is somehow trying to pass himself as a nice well mannered clean cut neighborly type of candidate.
In this he resembles nothing more than Leave It to Beaver's "Eddie Haskell" who we will recall was an obsequious toady to those above, insolent & insufferable to those below.
But a strong finish in the Iowa caucuses has temporarily raised Santorum's stakes to the level of "Potential President", a heady rise given the fact he was the last and most battered harlequin out of the GOP Clown Car not five weeks ago.
Here he was making a solo appearance at a forum sponsored by the Atlantic Monthy entitled "The Economy and the Electorate".
And I will give Rick some props, he is a fountain of specific proposals compared to the cataract of applause lines and sound bytes that gush forth from Mitt Romney's pie hole.
If I had to compare Santorum the candidate to anyone, his closest DNA match might be the late Paul Tsongas of all people. Both candidates were focused on reviving the USA's assembly line manufacturing economy almost to the exclusion of all else.
It is just that Tsongas' proposals might actually have sparked some sort of a renaissance in the manufacturing sector, Santorum's ideas are pretty much GOP boilerplate, tax cuts and deregulation and after that, The Utopia!
Oh and education, like ninety nine point nine percent of Washington DC, Rick thinks this is the sole and only way to redress income disparities.
Here too he betrays no great reserve of original thinking.
Oh and Hope, Rick is big on Hope, just like Bill & Hilary Clinton and Barack OBama and John Kerry, despair never gets equal time in the New Hampshire Primary lets face it.
On the other hand, maybe his handlers are telling him "talk about Job, Education & Hope because when you talk about gay marriage people cover their children's ears and leave the room".
For all that, Santorum is marginally more sincere than Mitt Romney which isn't saying much he tends to drone on though. Sometimes though, those beady weasel eyes of his narrow his brow darkens and you can just tell Rick Santorum is dreaming of mass arrests and sweet smell of burning witches.
But that is a "downer" in the patois of the spin doctors, so Santorum and the rest of the GOP field are running pretty much as cheerful dismantlers and smiling salvage experts. There is actually almost no substantive disagreement between any of them so far as I can see. They all favor slashing the federal budget, cutting taxes, wholesale deregulation, ending "Obamacare" by any means necessary. There is truly broad consensus on the right these days, its just all the GOP candidates hate each other personally.
Thus as of today, the race is to come in a strong second in New Hampshire on Tuesday and rebound into the shitkicker primaries as some sort of GOP Thunder God of Vengeance. Here I think Santorum falls short, it seems clear to me watching him at Saint Anselm College the he hasn't the time, money or volunteers to make his case in the Granite State. I suspect he may well come in third behind Ron Paul and I'm not even prepared to put money even on that.
The Man has Shot His Bolt in other words, he needed two or three weeks to catch Romney and he is not gonna get it under the pitiless primary schedule currently in place.
As I left the hall Santorum was starting to work his way towards the issue of abstinence education and the promotion of marriage, you could just feel the room get colder.
This is how it ends for a crazy Catholic version of Paul Tsongas and the very living avatar of Allen Drury's "Senator Fred Van Ackerman".
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