Kool-Drinkers Want Romney to Channel Santorum

Let's hope the Romney campaign follows the delusional advise of former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed (who set my gaydar off big time when I met him years ago) and the religious extremism of Rick Santorum becomes part of the Romney game plan. According to Reed, Santorum "previewed the ideological trajectory" of the Republican Party and by extension, America. If that's the case, perhaps the GOP will go the way of the Dodo and the Whigs. Reed has an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here are highlights:

Santorum has been denounced as a sore loser, a religious extremist, a crank. MSNBC host Martin Bashir referred to him as a theocratic version of Stalin. One columnist alleged in the Daily Beast that Santorum would use the power of the presidency to impose “his ideal of a Christian America” on the nation. The New Yorker compared him to Islamic extremists who seek to execute their opponents, adding that we need separation of church and state so that “Santorum and his party can’t impose dominion of one narrow, sectarian, Bible-based idea of the public good.”

But Santorum and his supporters may have the last laugh. From John C. Fremont to William Jennings Bryan in the 19th century to Barry Goldwater, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern and Ronald Reagan in our time, losing presidential candidates have previewed the ideological trajectory of their parties — and often of the nation.

Romney would be wise to remember this in his general-election campaign. Of course he can’t neglect independents, or women, or Hispanics, or other nontraditional Republican constituencies. But his immediate task is to consolidate conservative support and unify the party. The best way to do that is to appropriate the best parts of Santorum’s message. Santorum follows the trailblazing evangelical candidates Pat Robertson and Mike Huckabee, who personified the rise and the maturation of social conservatives as a critical component of the Republican coalition.

In the primaries, Santorum outperformed Romney among two key demographic groups, one religious and cultural, the other socioeconomic — and Romney needs both to win in November. The first group was evangelicals and tea party voters; there is remarkable overlap between them. According to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s analysis of network exit polls, more than half of voters who cast a ballot in a Republican presidential primary or caucus through mid-March were self-identified evangelicals.

The second group with which Santorum performed extremely well was voters who did not graduate from college and who earn less than $100,000 a year. Working-class voters in battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa will be a key vulnerability for Obama in the general election. Romney needs them

Others without Reed's Christofascist agenda see things differently as evidenced by a piece in The Atlantic which argues that Santorum may have permanently damaged Romney who will find himself in the run up to November faced with many poisonous video clips of things he said to out pander Santorum. Here are some excerpts:

Santorum's staunch social conservatism, by contrast, will probably cast a more enduring shadow. . . . . He stoked his socially conservative base with a stream of vehement pronouncements -- pledging to expose "the dangers of contraception"; insisting that states should be allowed to ban birth control (while declaring that he himself would vote against such a ban); accusing President Obama of practicing a "phony theology"; and asserting that John F. Kennedy's famous speech on the separation of church and state made him "throw up." Santorum's unrelenting ardor shifted the race's focus from the economic issues that Romney preferred to cultural confrontations, a movement reinforced by a series of concurrent events that included the GOP backlash against Obama's rule requiring religiously based employers to fund contraception in health insurance and Rush Limbaugh's denunciation of a young woman supporting Obama as a "slut."

Romney didn't match the vitriol from Santorum (or Limbaugh), but he never renounced it either. And Romney embraced comparable positions, proposing to terminate all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, to end federal family-planning money for low-income women, and to allow employers to deny contraceptive coverage if it violated their moral beliefs. "Romney has inextricably identified himself with that current in Republican thinking," insists Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. "And women have noticed that."

[A]an ABC News/Washington Post poll this week, echoing other recent surveys, showed an unprecedented 60 percent of these women backing the president against Romney. If Obama can stay close to that number, he can lose about two-thirds of all other whites and still win reelection (so long as he remains strong among minorities, as seems likely).

Romney began trying to dig out this week by hitting Obama's economic record for women. But the White House believes that many upscale women are feeling secure enough about the economy to vote on their cultural liberalism. If that equation holds through November, Romney may rue his decision not to paddle against the surging conservative current on social issues that Santorum unleashed with his unlikely ascent.