It happens to all candidates. As they rise in the polls to become contenders, their past statements and policy positions become subject to attack from opponents and scrutiny from the media. Everything, no matter how far in the past, is fair game.
Only in the case of Rick Santorum, the past is yesterday, or at least the last few days.
Even by the viral standards of today, Rick Santorum had quite a weekend.
In Ohio, the former senator said President Obama’s environmental views are “about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”
Santorum quickly denied he was suggesting the president is not a Christian, adding, “I’m just saying he’s imposing his values on the church, and I think that’s wrong.”
Really? Rick Santorum, you don’t want to impose your values? No, not on abortion, not on gay rights, not on a raft of other social issues.
Hypocrisy aside, the candidate who says faith is THE important part of his life appears deficient in biblical understanding, namely Genesis 1:28, where after creating man in His image, God blesses man and grants him stewardship of the environment: “Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the heavens, and all living things that crawl upon the earth.”
At another stop, Santorum questioned public education, asserting it began “when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.”
Santorum’s views on public education are muddled at best. For one thing, Senator Santorum voted for No Child Left Behind, the Bush program that increased the federal role in schools. For another, the one-room school of nineteenth-century lore -- typical schooling in pre-industrial America -- did not produce well-educated adults. As for home-schooled children in the past, in most cases they likely learned the rudiments from parents who only knew the rudiments.
Besides, Santorum ignores much about the history and role of public education: It is democratic and locally centered, run by school boards elected at county levels. Moreover, public education often is the ladder of social mobility in our society, and it has been the vehicle for socializing the children of immigrants -- in the past and now -- who often learn English in schools as well as the ethos of American citizenship.
To complete his weekend trifecta, Santorum criticized the presidentially backed health care law because it requires insurance plans to offer free prenatal testing, which he claims leads to “more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society. That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country.”
It take a conspiratorial mindset to jump from prenatal testing to some unholy theory of eugenics allegedly touted by the president. Does the former senator really believe Mr. Obama wants to “cull the ranks of the disabled?” Why does favoring a woman’s right to choose morph into an attack on the disabled?
Santorum is learning that his controversial statements are becoming his narrative. Fringe statements on social issues will muscle aside other issues. That was demonstrated during his appearance on Face the Nation Sunday, when defense of his earlier comments left no time for economic issues on which the president may be vulnerable.
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