The high point of some baseball teams’ season is opening day. Even basement dwellers with no chance of winning the pennant start the year tied for first place. That’s pretty much the case for Rick Santorum, who officially declared his candidacy for the presidency this morning. Like the perennial cellar-dwelling Pittsburgh Pirates for whom he loyally roots, Santorum is entitled (for today at least) to the pretense that he is as likely to be elected president as any of the other Republican contenders. As the first votes are several months away, he can hold on to those dreams until then. As long as he doesn’t run out of money.
Although he is mainly known for his socially conservative views and his willingness to share those opinions in a manner that hasn’t always served his political interests, Santorum sees his candidacy as being just as much about foreign policy as anything else. As he rightly pointed out to the New York Times today, he has spent most of his time since his 2006 defeat for reelection to the U.S. Senate talking about the danger of Islamist extremism and Iran, not gay marriage. But his main problem is convincing Republicans to forget about 2006 when a lackluster opponent defeated him in a landslide. That year he went from being one of the most influential members of the Senate to something of a punchline, although even that dispiriting result did nothing to dampen his presidential ambition.
After an astonishing upset victory over Democrat Harris Wofford in 1994, Santorum spent his first term in the Senate paying close attention to home and easily won reelection in 2000. But that caused him to lower his guard as he spent much of the next six years spouting off on abortion and gays. Since his new approach played better in the South and the West rather than at home, he was clearly laying the groundwork for a future national candidacy. But he never seriously considered giving up his seat, especially since he was rising in the leadership of the GOP caucus.
Santorum now says that had he not run for reelection, no one would be asking how a man can have a credible chance of being elected president if he lost his own state by 17 points just a few years ago. He complains that Mitt Romney would probably have been beaten had he run for reelection as governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Both assertions may be true, but the problem is that Santorum ran and Romney didn’t, leaving the former looking like a laughingstock and the latter like a statesman. In that case, discretion truly was the better part of valor.
Santorum can curse his bad luck, but it’s more than that. Say what you will about the flip-flopping Romney: his political antennae have always worked just fine. Santorum’s are not so good. Santorum can rightly claim that he’s always stood by his principles but in order to be elected president, you’ve also got to have political judgment and a sense of the possible. Those are qualities that Santorum lacks. That’s why he is rightly considered a marginal member of the GOP field’s second tier with no shot at all of winning next year.
