Tag Archives: Conservative

News

150 evangelical leaders agree to endorse Rick Santorum after two-day conference

1 Comment
Rick Santorum Iowa Caucuses
Rick Santorum Iowa Caucuses

From Life News.

Excerpt:

After a Friday-Saturday meeting with more than 150 leaders and representatives of evangelical, pro-family and pro-life groups, the organizations have declared consensus support for Rick Santorum’s Republican presidential campaign.

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a participant in last night’s private meeting, addressed a press conference call today to provide additional information about the decision and expected endorsements from some of those attending.

Perkins said the leaders of the evangelical groups came to the meeting each supporting the various different GOP candidates seeking to replace pro-abortion President Barack Obama. Participants engaged in a question and answer session with representatives of each of the campaigns, except for former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who did not send a spokesman to the event.

After the session, the leaders discussed the presidential race amongst themselves and then undertook a three-round ballot process. Perkins said the discussion culminated in an agreement that the groups and leaders each have “an overriding passion and desire to defeat Barack Obama” this November. Although the leaders of the various organizations strongly support various candidates, they eventually decided to support Santorum.

“I think it was vigorous discussion of who they felt best represented the conservative movement and who they think had the best chance of succeeding,” he said, but adding that there would not be a “coordinated effort” amongst the groups and leaders to endorse Santorum.

“There is a hope and expectation that those represented by the constituency will make a difference in South Carolina,” he said, adding that some in attendance threw their support behind Santorum to avoid having a repeat of 2008 where conservative candidates split the vote.

Perkins indicated Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry but only Gingrich and Santorum made the final ballot. There were 114 votes on the final ballot, as some leaders had to catch returning flights home, and Santorum emerged with a majority (85) of those voting, the FRC president said.

[…]The names and groups participating were not released, but Perkins mentioned former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer as another organizer of the private meeting. He said the names of organizations and leaders participating will become public as they begin making endorsements.

[…]Last week, the pro-life group CatholicVote issued an endorsement for Santorum.

Bauer has already endorsed Santorum. I agree that Gingrich is definitely the runner-up, and would be a fine choice for conservatives, but Santorum really is the best overall. My biggest concern about this is how younger evangelicals are so apathetic when it comes to politics and have no idea how to think carefully about things like free market capitalism, abortion, marriage and peace through strength. The young evangelicals are largely illiterate, making their decisions based on emotions and intuitions, because they think that Christianity is about being “nice” so that more people like them. Oh well.

What I find interesting is when even moderate conservative bloggers – ones who are not evangelical – are beginning to notice that there is an integrity argument for Rick Santorum.

Look at this comment from Jeff Goldstein – he’s replying to some Ron Paul person, I guess:

BMoe –

We’ve talked at length about this here, so if you haven’t already done so, I’d say go back and look at the various riffs on how Santorum’s ideas of family as the unit of individual autonomy is tied to his Catholicism / Thomism. Also, how family communitarianism is not at all like collectivism.

My own belief — and James Pethokoukis took this up, as well (I believe I did a post on it), is that Santorum is reacting in the excerpt on individualism you cite, to the Objectivists — those whose ideological foundation is Rand. That is, the libertarians. You may disagree with Santorum — and there’s plenty of room to do so — but it does no good to caricature the belief. Santorum is not a collectivist. And his ideas about the family — and government’s role in nurturing that unit — amount to things like increased tax credits for producing new citizens, or increased credit for charitable giving, so that charity is taken away from the state.

And he tries to balance his own views with the constraints placed on elected officials by the Constitution, which for Santorum includes the 9th and 10th Amendments.

These are often difficult waters to traverse. But with Santorum, he tells you what he thinks and believes. For me, that’s a net positive.

Romney mouths platitudes about limited government, and yet it’s clear he doesn’t believe a word of it. Santorum believes in a social safety net for the truly disadvantaged and indigent, but he tempers that with an animus toward those who would game the system — and toward programs that have the net impact of institutionalizing dependence on government.

What I liked about Cain — he didn’t have all the answers, because he hasn’t studied every question — I like about Santorum. You can see his thinking. He shows his work.

And a bit later, same guy:

Also, BMoe, I think it pretty obvious by now I’m not a social conservative. I’m just far less bothered by them then I used to be back when I was given to accepting the caricature of such creatures.

Nowadays I see that it is the “liberal” secularists who are far more dangerous, because their God is the State, and they therefore serve their God by granting that ever more power comes from the State.

The religious folk simply want the state to leave them the f**k alone, often times. And me and my spaghetti bulbs tend to commiserate.

I think that’s right. I am not thrilled with Santorum’s blue-collar worker economic plan. I’m an investor and a white collar software engineer. I’m chaste and have no children and no plans to marry, so Santorum’s tripling of the tax deduction for children won’t help me. But what is appealing about the man is his vision: he wants more working families and he wants them to face less financial pressure if they have more children, and more choice in education. I get that. It’s not applicable to me, but I get it. I get what his vision is.

Rick Santorum at the Values Voters Summit

Here’s a 3-part speech by Rick Santorum at the Family Research Council:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

The Family Research Council is my third favorite think tank, behind the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.

Here’s something to read if you can’t see the speech.

Related posts

Videos

Santorum and Gingrich expose Romney’s liberal record in Sunday’s NBC debate

Leave a comment

Here’s a clip from the NBC debate on Sunday.

Here’s Rick Santorum on same-sex marriage:

You can watch the full video of the NBC debate here (70 minutes).

What about Mitt Romney?

Here’s an excellent ad by Newt explaining Mitt Romney’s record on tax hikes:

Mitt Romney has a net worth of $250 million dollars. He was born in a rich family and has no experience of what ordinary Americans are facing.

Romney has a pro-abortion record and pro-gay-marriage record. Mitt Romney raised taxes by $740 million as governor of Massachusetts. He passed Romneycare in Massachusetts, which is substantially similar to Obamacare. Why is he running as a Republican? I don’t see anything in his record that would cause me to believe that he is a Republican.

You can see Mitt Romney explaining all of his liberal views in his own words in these videos.

Commentary

Is Rick Santorum conservative or liberal? What are Rick Santorum’s political views?

2 Comments
Rick Santorum Iowa Caucuses
Rick Santorum Iowa Caucuses

Quin Hilyer explains, in the pro-Romney National Review, of all places.

Excerpt:

On taxes, for instance, Santorum has always been superb. The Club for Growth’s white paper on Santorum, calling his tax stances “very strong,” confirms that “Santorum has consistently supported broad-based tax cuts and opposed tax increases either by sponsoring key legislation or by casting votes on relevant bills.”

His record on a host of other conservative issues is as solid as that of any politician in the past two decades. He has been firmly and repeatedly against all sorts of regulatory abuse, against McCain-Feingold and other restrictions on political speech, for school choice, for tort reform, for a strong military, and for a balanced-budget amendment.

Obviously he has been as stalwart a defender of social conservatism, for 20 full years, as any other public figure. And as virtually every conservative involved in the judicial wars during Santorum’s time in the Senate has confirmed, in person or in print, Santorum and his staff were the go-to people in the Senate when you needed to find tireless, committed advocates for conservative jurists. Santorum is, wrote Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “the candidate in whom I have by far the greatest confidence” in terms of how likely he would be “to appoint excellent Supreme Court justices and lower-court judges and to work tenaciously to get them confirmed.”

Meanwhile, as Santorum frequently (and entirely accurately) reminds anybody who will listen, his work on the single most important conservative policy reform of the past half century, the 1996 welfare-to-work effort that cut spending and poverty rates simultaneously, was seminal, indefatigable, and remarkably effective. Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley explained to the Des Moines Register a week ago that he was unconvinced about welfare reform until Santorum paid him an office call and “took a lot of time to convince me of his point of view… The sincerity and effort that he has to get his point across in the presidential campaign is almost a total reflection of how he operated as a United States senator.” Grassley yielded and voted for reform.

More broadly, until Rep. Paul Ryan’s recent prominence, nobody in Congress has been as passionate and fearless an advocate for entitlement reform as Santorum. Medicaid block grants. Investment accounts for Social Security. Medicare payments controlled by the beneficiaries rather than third-party payers. Choice rather than government mandates. Indeed, Santorum was the first candidate this year to fully embrace Ryan’s proposed reforms — with this exception, as he reminded me in a phone interview on Thursday: “I’ve criticized Ryan on one thing: waiting ten years [for many of the reforms to kick in]. We can’t afford to wait. We’ve got to start now.”

[…]As for overall spending and his much-discussed history of support for “earmarks” (a position also shared by tightwad Ron Paul), conservative groups’ ratings show that Santorum was better than the average Republican, despite representing a state far bluer than those of most of his Republican colleagues. He demonstrated particular courage in his support for the Freedom to Farm Act and in frequent opposition to floor amendments that would have put additional spending in appropriations bills. Denizens of Capitol Hill in the 1990s fondly remember Santorum’s repeated use of a prop during floor debate called the “Spendometer,” which he used to make a persuasive (and entertaining) case against wasteful federal largesse.

Out of office, he vociferously opposed TARP, the various “stimulus” packages, and the bailouts of car companies and of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. All those stances were perfectly in line with the voting record he had established in the House and Senate.

Evangelical Christian stalwart Gary Bauer is endorsing Rick Santorum.

Excerpt:

Social conservative leader and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer will endorse Rick Santorum in South Carolina, he confirmed to The Hill on Saturday.

Bauer said that he didn’t want to get into the details of the endorsement since it was officially still embargoed, but confirmed his support and said he’ll work to get other social conservatives on board for Santorum.

“I want to do whatever I can to convince my colleagues that Sen. Santorum is the right man,” he told The Hill.

[…]Bauer has organized a Friday meeting with top social conservatives in Texas to see if they can coalesce behind one candidate. He said the point of the meeting is not to try to stop Mitt Romney from being the Republican nominee, but that he believes Santorum would be the best candidate to beat President Obama, as well as the best commander in chief.

It’s worth remembering what Rick Santorum did to encourage critical thinking in public school science education, too. This is good news for us who want to have evidence for and against things like naturalistic macro-evolution and anthropogenic catastrophic global warming presented to students. That’s above and beyond the basics of conservatism, right there – and he’s solid on school choice.

The best thing about Santorum, though, is that he has a working class background and he isn’t afraid to debate with people instead of just speaking about his beliefs and generalities. He tries to convince people, and to reason things out with them.