Santorum and the Future of the GOP

Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum managed to pull off wins in yesterday's "Super Tuesday" primary contest in the states of yesterday Tennessee, North Dakota, and Oklahoma came close to tying Mitt Romney in Ohio. Except for Ohio, none are states that Barack Obama has any likelihood of winning come November. The results say as much about Romney's lack of appeal to far right Christian conservatives as they do about what has become of the Republican Party given the fact that in most circles Santorum is viewed as an extremist who wants to police the nation's bedrooms. While most voters see the economy as the number one issue in the campaign, large sections of the GOP seem to prefer to wage a culture war and elect someone to be the bedroom police man. A column in the New York Times looks at the Santorum base in the GOP and speculates where things may evolve in the future. Here are highlights:

Rick Santorum’s victories in Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota on Super Tuesday, and his very strong showing in Ohio, will give hope to journalists who love the horse race, without changing the underlying dynamics of the Republican contest. Bloodied, balked and widely mistrusted, Mitt Romney is still going to slog his way to the nomination.

The easy explanation for Santorum’s unlikely rise is that he lucked into it. Almost all of the Republican candidates got their surge in at some point, their week or two as a pseudo-frontrunner, and unlike Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry before him, Santorum’s moment in the sun just happened to coincide with the actual voting.

Santorum’s coalition is roughly the same one that Mike Huckabee tried to assemble in 2008. With a demographic mix of evangelicals and blue-collar Republicans, and a message that’s conservative on social issues but more populist than the party’s Wall Street wing on economics, it’s proven capable of delivering states from Minnesota to Mississippi, the Rockies to the Rust Belt.

Of course, like Huckabee, he’s on his way to falling short. But given his weaknesses, structural and personal — including the absence of Huckabee’s trademark wit — it’s remarkable how far he’s come, and how durable this coalition has proven itself from one cycle to another.

[T]he main domestic argument that he’s tried to make – about the link between family breakdown and economic disarray — has more relevance to the challenges facing Americans in the early 21st century than the Reagan nostalgia that too often passes for policy thinking from the party’s tax cutting and foreign policy hawks. Ours is increasingly a country where sky-high economic expectations coexist with middle class wage stagnation, and where the idealization of married life coexists with steadily rising out-of-wedlock births. In this atmosphere, the fusion of a (moderate) social conservatism and a right-leaning economic populism could end up having a broader appeal than many alternative right-of-center visions.

Whether that actually happens depends on whether future Republican presidential hopefuls decide to learn from, adapt and improve upon the Huckabee-Santorum template. If they do, it’s possible that what Santorum has accomplished in the last few months will be remembered, not as the last glimpse of the Republican past, but as a plausible sketch of the Republican future.

The one flaw in the author's view is believing that moderate social conservatism can grow in a party that is increasingly controlled by extremists who even challenge the very concept of the separation of church and state and the idea that freedom of religion extends to others than themselves. I for one believe the social conservatives - who are also anti-immigrant, anti-minorities and, of course, anti-gay - will yet be the death of the Republican Party.