Finally Hearing from the Republican Core
By DAVID FIRESTONE
NYT
Rick Santorum’s three primary victories last night were the first ones in this campaign season that made some sense. At last, conservative voters united behind a candidate who actually resembles the Republican Party that Americans have come to know in the last three years.
The party that so despises government that it repeatedly tried to shut it down last year in Congress – or ruin its credit rating – is not truly represented by Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich might enjoy closing Washington’s doors out of a sense of pique or domination, but both men are far too invested in the city’s power structure to shut it down out of a sense of belief.
Mr. Santorum is the only one of the three who can actually appear heartfelt when asserting, as he did today on Morning Joe, that “the central issue of the day is government oppressing and taking away our economic freedoms.” For him, as for the true believers who now dominate his party, this isn’t just a cynically crowd-pleasing line at a debate; he actually subscribes to the notion that the federal government is stalking its own citizens and mugging them of free choice, and he has for years.
It was all there in his victory speech last night in a suburb of St. Louis, which was structured in the classic paranoid style. Whether it is health care, the bank bailouts, or the environment, he said, an elitist President Obama deliberately ignored the American people and imposed an oppressive mandate that impoverished the country of its liberty.
(More here.)
NYT
Rick Santorum’s three primary victories last night were the first ones in this campaign season that made some sense. At last, conservative voters united behind a candidate who actually resembles the Republican Party that Americans have come to know in the last three years.
The party that so despises government that it repeatedly tried to shut it down last year in Congress – or ruin its credit rating – is not truly represented by Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich might enjoy closing Washington’s doors out of a sense of pique or domination, but both men are far too invested in the city’s power structure to shut it down out of a sense of belief.
Mr. Santorum is the only one of the three who can actually appear heartfelt when asserting, as he did today on Morning Joe, that “the central issue of the day is government oppressing and taking away our economic freedoms.” For him, as for the true believers who now dominate his party, this isn’t just a cynically crowd-pleasing line at a debate; he actually subscribes to the notion that the federal government is stalking its own citizens and mugging them of free choice, and he has for years.
It was all there in his victory speech last night in a suburb of St. Louis, which was structured in the classic paranoid style. Whether it is health care, the bank bailouts, or the environment, he said, an elitist President Obama deliberately ignored the American people and imposed an oppressive mandate that impoverished the country of its liberty.
(More here.)
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