The GOP’s Panic Over Rick Santorum

Personally, I find Michael Medved to be a conservative extremist much of the time. All too often he's in total agreement with the far right Christianist of the Republican Party base for whom moderation - not to mention respecting the views and beliefs of others - is an unknown concept. Thus, it's telling to see him describe the panic that is gripping the GOP now that uber-Catholic, freedom of religion denying, bedroom policing Rick Santorum continues to be at the top of polling in the 2012 GOP presidential contest. In many ways Santorum's polling make perfect sense: all the moderates and just about all of the sane people have left the Republican Party, so only the Christianists and Tea Party crowd remain. As I have noted many times before, the GOP leadership brought this situation on themselves. Here are highlights from Medved's analysis in The Daily Beast:

For more than six months, worried conservative chieftains talked up the need to unite behind a single rightist candidate in order to block the potential victory of the “mushy moderate” from Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. Now, on the eve of crucial primaries in Michigan and Arizona, and with Super Tuesday looming just one week later, some of those same leaders speak privately of the need to unite behind that same, once-dreaded Romney in order to avert an even more dire disaster: the nomination of Rick Santorum.

For Republicans, the key question is no longer whether they’ll overcome their reluctance and skepticism to accept Romney for the nomination. The bigger dilemma now is whether they can overcome their panic and outright dread and embrace Righteous Rick as their standard bearer. Despite his lead in Gallup’s preference poll, less than a third (32 percent) of GOP voters see Santorum as the strongest challenger to Obama; a big majority (58 percent) agrees that Mitt has the best shot.

Why, then, Santorum’s continued strength in national surveys and his strongly competitive numbers in Michigan and Arizona? In part, this willingness to support Santorum while still viewing Romney as vastly more electable relates to the spreading gloom over Republican prospects in general. With an apparently improving economy and rising approval ratings for the president, a plurality of Americans now believes that Obama will “definitely” win the race. For some conservatives, the mounting sense that any champion they select will inevitably lose in November encourages the idea that the Republicans might as well send a passionate, politically incorrect, in-your-face message with bomb-thrower Santorum rather than making a safe, dull, practical choice for Romney.

Political insiders, however, must worry about more than electoral disappointment at the presidential level: for those who hold elective office, their own careers are at stake if a polarizing, unpopular candidate drags down the entire Republican cause.

The overwhelming preference for Romney among elected officials didn’t come through some conspiratorial establishment anointing: like all questions concerning the motivations of politicians, it’s easiest to explain these endorsements in terms of self-interest.

With Democrats promising to spend hundreds of millions in a determined bid to recapture the House, and with Republicans mounting a supreme effort to win the four Democratic seats they need to win control of the Senate, the members of Congress naturally want a candidate at the top of the ticket who will make their own races easier, not harder.

Moreover, some strategists and activists worry that a Santorum nomination could damage the GOP brand in a way that would continue to harm the GOP cause for a generation. The former senator appears appallingly eager to entangle himself with a cluster of controversies that would make him especially unpalatable to younger voters. His enthusiastic insistence on condemning contraception (even while saying he’ll do nothing to restrict it), as well as making disapproving (and utterly unnecessary) comments about prenatal testing, women in combat, premarital sex, and the satanic takeover of Hollywood and the NBA, leave him with few supporters among the millions of Americans between 18 and 25 who may be voting for the first time in 2012.

Those votes count as especially important because once a young person identifies with a political party it shapes a habit that influences future choices. . . . . Even for Republicans who assume that any nominee would lose to Obama, it therefore makes sense to fear a Santorum catastrophe (like Goldwater’s devastating, across-the-board wipeout in ’64) more than a more conventional defeat for Romney (perhaps in the style of Bob Dole in ’96, when the GOP retained both houses of Congress).

Though many Republicans feel resigned at the moment to likely defeat in the presidential race, the way that they lose (and the extent of their losses in down-ticket races) will exert a profound influence on the long-term future of the party.

Meanwhile, here in Virginia the Virginia GOP seems Hell bent to alienate younger voters and women and to severely damage the GOP brand - and Bob McDonnell's chances on the national stage. Allowing the patients to take over the asylum can be dangerous and the GOP leadership should have taught more about this problem years ago.