Rick Santorum had a pretty lousy night in Arizona, but his candidacy has raised some valuable social questions, as I argue in my latest print column (available to TIME subscribers). His candidacy also demonstrates the traditional problems that long-term members of Congress have when they attempt to run for President. Legislative democracy is complicated and untidy. You have to make difficult choices all the time–and, to my mind, the decisive moment in Wednesday night’s debate came when Santorum empretzeled himself in an effort to explain why he’d voted to fund Planned Parenthood, of all things.
“I did vote for Title X,” he began–and thereby lost much of the audience. Title X? Members of Congress speak a tortured sub-species of the English language and often forget that, say, regular human beings might not know that a “Title” is a section of a bill. Santorum went on to explain that Title X was part of a humongous health appropriations bill, most of which he favored. And then he empretzled himself even more by saying that he had fought to include–wait for it–a Title XX in the bill, appropriating funds for abstinence education.
Ron Paul was having none of it. He didn’t believe the government should appropriate funds for either Planned Parenthood or abstinence education. And he used the example to show how Congress transforms the most well-intentioned conservatives into liberals: if you vote against the health appropriations bill, your opponent in the next election can pick out all the wonderful provisions in the bill–cancer research, childhood vaccinations–and run ads saying that you voted against them.
This was a relatively uneventful and boring debate, but that little moment of civic education was worth the price of admission.
Paul and Gingrich had nice nights for themselves, which is proof that the farther you are from the prize, the easier it is to debate. Mitt Romney had a strong debate too–Santorum’s attacks on RomneyCare and Mitt’s other acts of sanity as Massachusetts governor, which were so effective a few debates ago, have grown old and wilted. On the other hand, Romney’s attacks on Santorum are fresh meat. Santorum didn’t even try to explain why he’d voted for the “bridge to nowhere,” another example of the mind-numbing abstruseness of Congressional democracy. If Romney goes on to win the presidency, he should thank his lucky stars that he lost to Ted Kennedy in that 1994 Senate race, thereby saving himself from 18 years of awkward votes.
A final note: Gingrich and Romney were disgraceful and demagogic on the subject of Iran. Gingrich was earning his Adelson money, obviously, but in the process exposed himself as either uninformed or purposefully misleading. He ranted against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad–as if Ahmadinejad had any power over the Iranian military or nuclear program. He doesn’t. The Supreme Leader does. In fact, Ahmadinejad is about to lose much of the remaining, hollow power he has: allies of the Supreme Leader have banned most of Ahmadinejad’s supporters from running for re-election to the Iranian parliament in March.
Romney took up the cry against Ahmadinejad–just as John McCain did in 2008. And so you might ask yourself, why do these Republicans insist on turning a guy with no power into–excuse me, Senator Santorum–a major-league Satan? Because most people know that Ahmadinejad is a villain, a holocaust denying anti-Semite. He sounds insane. He makes it easier to argue that Iran’s leadership is a fanatic religious death cult. He might make it easier to pry some Jewish voters from their traditional liberal home in the Democratic Party. It certainly makes it easier for Gingrich to pry dollars from people like Sheldon Adelson.
But it is a phony, baseless argument. Iran has one of the worst, oppressive governments in the world–but it is a thinly veiled military dictatorship, not a religious death cult. (Most of the mullahs disdain not only Ahmadinejad, but also the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was a decidedly undistinguished minor cleric before he chivvied his way to power.) The leaders of that dictatorship are making careful calculations about whether or not to actually go for a nuclear weapon–and it’s a tough decision: if they build a bomb, they will have deterrence against an Israeli attack and also the grudging respect, and promises of aid, that rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea have gained. But they also run the severe risk of having their economy crushed by the sanctions regime and worse, the possibility of a pre-emptive attack by Israel or the U.S. It is not impossible that the pressure Obama has organized against Iran will force the Supreme Leader to back down. But even if it doesn’t, the facts on the ground do not even vaguely represent the situation as described by Gingrich et al.
Once again, Ron Paul was right: people like Gingrich, Santorum and Romney are pushing us toward war under false pretenses. They should be ashamed of themselves.
MORE: Rick Santorum’s Roll