The new Washington Monthly guy notes that the wingerati is attacking Rick Santorum as too far right. Good luck making that charge work in a Republican primary:
It’s been an implicit part of the rules of engagement in the GOP presidential race that no candidate can be criticized for being too conservative, particularly by Mitt Romney. Thus Rick Perry drew fire not for flirting with secession and nullification theories, or for complaining about “lucky ducky” poor folks who didn’t pay taxes—but for expressing sympathy for the children of undocumented workers. Similarly, Newt Gingrich never got attacked for his anti-Muslim demagoguery or his regular descriptions of the president as a “secular-socialist”—but for once professing belief in the climate change “hoax” and criticizing Ronald Reagan.
[….]As I write this, the top of the Drudge Report has one of those screaming headline “stories” about Santorum’s “Satan Warning”—along with excerpts from the 2008 Ave Maria speech that us liberals have been discussing for the last several days. Drudge very specifically includes a quote from Santorum’s disparagement of mainline Protestants as having left “the world of Christianity.”
Meanwhile, WaPo blogger Rubin has a long, inflammatory post calling Santorum a “reactionary”—not a term you hear often in the Right Blogosphere these days—for talking about theology and contraception and in general “seeking to obliterate the national consensus on a range of issues beyond gay marriage and abortion.”
My feeling is you can’t be too young, too thin, or too right-wing in a Republican primary. Santo ought to amp it up, if anything
Not too messianic or a trifle too satanicPost + Comments (74)