Would Santorum’s Surge Part Iowa Waters but Sink Him in General Election?
Hooray, just one more day till the Iowa Caucuses will be over. Then we can immediately start obsessing about New Hampshire. Meanwhile, what do you think about Rick Santorum’s chances for a strong finish tomorrow night?
Arena Asks: On the last full day of campaigning before Iowa’s GOP caucuses, Mitt Romney is working to hold on to his narrow advantage as he faces a surging Rick Santorum. A Des Moines Register poll released Saturday showed Romney and Ron Paul locked in a close race, with Santorum rising swiftly to challenge them.
Will Santorum’s surge last? How much of a threat does the former Pennsylvania senator pose to Romney’s lead?
My Answer: Elections are like rivers–never the same twice. Every election is a unique moment in time. And Iowa’s political waters are parting for Rick Santorum at the crucial moment, just before the caucus votes, leading some to anoint him the next Moses they hope can lead the party to victory next November.
With the solid workhorse and seemingly mainstream Republican candidate Mitt Romney is on one side and candidates on the other who are either loaded down with baggage or are just plain wacko, Santorum’s political fortunes could easily rise so significantly as a result that he becomes the strongest vice presidential candidate, even if his lack of money and organization prevents him from being a real contender for the top of the ticket.
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Of course, because Santorum’s virulent anti-gay and anti-women’s reproductive freedom track record goes beyond rhetoric to policy leadership while in the Senate, he is ideal for the Republican Right’s true believers. But when it gets to the general election, that strident position, which will come to sound as loopy as Michele Bachmann’s outlandish assertions about the HPV vaccine, should sink any ticket he’s on in defeat.
Key constituencies beyond Iowa will remember that Santorum’s outrage about the Lawrence v. Texas decision that struck down Texas’s anti-gay laws caused him to reveal his opposition even to Griswold v. Connecticut which legalized birth control. Santorum told the Associated Press: “[If] the Supreme Court says you have the right to consensual sex within your home, you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery…It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold–Griswold was the contraceptive case–and abortion.”
Here’s the link to my original post on Politico…
GLORIA FELDT is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, a sought-after speaker and frequent contributor to major news outlets, and the Co-Founder and President of Take The Lead. People has called her “the voice of experience,” and among the many honors she has been given, Vanity Fair called her one of America’s “Top 200 Women Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” and Glamour chose her as a “Woman of the Year.”
As co-founder and president of Take The Lead, a leading women’s leadership nonprofit, her mission is to achieve gender parity by 2025 through innovative training programs, workshops, a groundbreaking 50 Women Can Change The World immersive, online courses, a free weekly newsletter, and events including a monthly Virtual Happy Hour program and a Take The Lead Day symposium that reached over 400,000 women globally in 2017.
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Gloria, not all feminists are so trusting of the medical establishment as you seem to be. At the risk of sounding loopy myself, I will embrace controversy and assert that all vaccines are dangerous to those who react badly to them. The HPV vaccines are no exception. Or do you also consider the distraught parents mentioned in this article loopy and outlandish?
Gardasil has also been implicated in some deaths, though of course Merck denies it had anything to do with it. What exactly did Rep. Bachmann say about the HPV vaccine that you consider loopy and outlandish? That was one of the few occasions when I thought she made some sense, but after catching major flak, she was not willing to maintain her position. Merck has advertised this vaccine as a cervical cancer vaccine, which is highly misleading at best. I could call that claim loopy and outlandish, but it was actually a shrewd move to capitalize on the fears of women, to convince parents and politicians this usually innocuous extremely common virus is so dangerous every girl must be vaccinated against some of its strains that are linked to cervical cancer. Need I reel off some of the other ways conventional medicine has endangered the health of women and girls?
More to the point of your post, I think Romney is unstoppable. He managed to pull off an upset in Iowa, and I think the next several primaries will be easier for him. If the economy goes into a double dip recession, which seems almost unavoidable, I expect he will be the next President.
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