Rick Santorum
During last Thursday’s Republican presidential debate, Rick Santorumwas asked to explain why GOP voters should make him their national standard-bearer even though he was crushed by his Democratic opponent by 18 points the last time he stood for election.
The question went a long way toward explaining why Santorum, a 52-year-old who represented Pennsylvania in the Senate for two terms before that defeat to Bob Casey in 2006, has such a remote (read: nonexistent) chance of capturing his party’s White House nod. He did his best to put a positive spin on it, but there’s really nothing that Santorum can say to free himself from the label that the ’06 result inflicted on him: Loser.
Simply put, presidential candidacies that are launched in the wake of high-profile electoral defeats are doomed, unless the candidate has benefited from some sort of major, image-altering development in the intervening years. A failure like Santorum’s in '06 signals to activists and opinion-shapers within a party that the candidate is damaged goods and lacks the basic appeal and campaigning skills needed to win over swing voters across the country. The media picks up on this too, treating the candidate as a has been, someone who is relevant because of what he once was -- not what he might someday be.
Thus, by virtue of his status as a former senator, Santorum enjoys most of the perks that major White House candidates are afforded: Influential players take his calls, he’s invited to participate in debates, forums and candidate cattle calls, his name is used in public opinions polls, he makes plenty of talk show appearances, and the media provides at least some coverage of his campaign. But this is all mainly a courtesy. For Santorum, reeling in meaningful endorsements, raising serious money, and gaining polling traction just isn’t in the cards, because to the GOP’s elites -- activists, elected officials, interest group leaders, fund-raisers, and commentators – he is, first and foremost, a loser.
Granted, there’s something thoroughly arbitrary about this. Santorum was hardly blameless for his 18-point defeat in 2006. He’d always been a cultural conservative, but his comfortable reelection in 2000 seemed to embolden him, and his second term was marked by noticeably more visible – and polarizing – rhetoric on social issues. His 2005 pledge, for instance, not to let the Terri Schiavo die "on my watch," surely left a negative impression on many of Pennsylvania’s swing voters. But the 2006 election was bigger than Santorum and his antics, shaped by a mighty anti-GOP tide brought on by Bush fatigue, chaos in Iraq and congressional scandals. That Santorum fell in that climate (and in a swing state) tells us no more about his skills as a candidate than his initial Senate victory in 1994, a year that was defined by a fiercely anti-Democratic tide.
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