As Rick Santorum was taking on water in the Michigan primary, the campaign press pack and the pundits agreed on the diagnosis of his woes: Loose lips sink ships.
Santorum's penchant for creating news clips and headlines with his fiery and revealing rhetoric was widely depicted as a fatal blunder. After all, in the closing days in Michigan, Santorum ridiculed the president as a "snob" for wanting universal post-secondary education and confessed that reading JFK's speech on the separation of church and state made him "throw up." His free-wheeling stump speeches wandered over the political landscape, and Santorum's earnest answers to voter questions (including a nine-minute discourse on Social Security) sounded more like a fledgling congressman trying to explain his views to constituents than a presidential candidate rattling off time-tested sound bites.
The campaign press corps reacted to Santorum's style--and, yes, the substance of his remarks--as if the candidate had just flunked an online course from the Political Training Academy. Politico, on the eve of the Michigan primary, reported on the concern among Republican insiders about Santorum constantly "having to explain away off-message comments about topics other than the economy." After the returns came in, the Washington Post linked Santorum's hot-button remarks to a sense that "Republicans may be starting to conclude that a Santorum candidacy is too risky for a party desperate to beat Obama." And writing in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove sniffed, "Mr. Santorum couldn't beat Mr. Romney mano-a-mano. Unforced errors played a role. Mr. Santorum's crude dismissal of John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech advocating the strict separation of church and state didn't come across well."
It is easy to understand why a partisan strategist like Rove would disdain a candidate so independent that he actually says what he thinks. No political consultant waved a poll to convince Santorum to make a barf-bag crack about John Kennedy. This was Santorum unplugged--a sleep-deprived candidate using passionate language to explain to voters why he believes that religion should not be banished from the public square.
(Now for the parenthetical where I explain that, while I strongly disagree with the substance of Santorum's comments on these topics, I will defend to the edge of my computer keyboard his right to say them in the heat of a presidential primary).
What is much harder to justify is why the political press gleefully ridicules candidates who depart from the campaign scripts written by their handlers. Rather than appreciating spontaneity in a presidential contender, most political reporters--echoing the worldview of campaign consultants--view it as a crippling character flaw.
What the press corps respects is the professionalism of a presidential candidate who hides his personal views behind the veneer of poll-tested banalities. If a would-be president provides a candid glimpse of the values that would animate him in the Oval Office, the news media brands the candidate as a loser for his unseemly breach of message discipline.
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