Everyone in the media seems agreed that Rick Santorum had a bad week. I guess that’s so, but there has been relatively little comment on the most important thing he said all week. It was in a back and forth with Romney about “Taking one for the team” and “Politics is a team sport” that Santorum said: “You don’t know what you are talking about!” He went on to explain that the legislative process is rather complex and sometimes a senator or representative has to vote for a bill that contains something he doesn’t like in order to get the part he does like. Romney can’t accept that and says it won’t happen if he is elected. In other words, Romney is saying there won’t be any compromises. Apparently he believes that there is some “right way” to do everything and a majority of legislators should be able to write that into bills with complete agreement on the absolute correctness of every subparagraph. This is a recipe for a dictatorship or a cult. For once, and only once, Santorum is right. Romney may understand how to buy companies, strip them of their assets and resell them, but this is not a skill transferable to a system based on compromise and the public interest. There’s a blog printed today on the Post’s Op-Ed page which notes Republicans are no longer able to elect a senator president, because senators necessarily have voting records similar to Santorum’s. So maybe Republican voters don’t understand the legislative branch any better than Romney, and they will find comfort in his new cult.
On “Meet the Press,” Santorum joined his Republican colleagues in dumping on the President for apologizing to the Afghans for inadvertently burning some copies of the Koran. He said you don’t apologize for inadvertent mistakes. So…..if you bump into someone in the street, don’t apologize unless you did it deliberately.
My favorite this week was when Santorum called Obama a snob for suggesting that everyone should go to college and that he wants to remake everyone in his image and “get some liberal college professor to indoctrinate you.” I asked myself why “all” college professors are liberal? Is it because they are smart and well educated? Jerry Brown said he would have said it differently from Obama, but that he too thought everyone should have more training after high school and suggested trade union and management cooperation to create apprenticeships as one possibility. It’s great to watch an old pro at work.
In honor of the Oscars last night, Chris Matthews ran a short clip that looked like scenes from The Artist to suggest that Romney would have more success campaigning if he never had to say anything. See it here: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/02/the_artist_gets.php
I thought Joe Klein had the best Sunday morning comment: “Republican primary voters live in an alternative universe where Rush Limbaugh is God.”
Some Google searches:
1. Crate Gate
2. Santorum. The definition of this neologism has fallen to third place
3. I was looking for Newt when I tried “mean nasty grandiose prevaricator” but got Reagan instead.
Best political rumor: There is a handshake agreement between Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.
Corrections: 1. My brother tells me that the joke about aspirin between the knees as a form of birth control has been around for a long time and suggested I missed it because I was overseas so much. He also said it wasn't Bayer Aspirin; it was St. Joseph's. 2. Yes, blog followers, I had to rewrite this because I originally attributed the snob quote to Romney. What was I thinking?
Romney as "The Artist" is actually pretty funny. I'm still waiting for Romney to flip-flop on being a Mormon.... Would he do better as a Rastafarian? Wiccan?
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