Has Rick Santorum made “the pursuit of happiness” a campaign issue?

by Eric Shierman

Until Tuesday night few outside Iowa have paid much attention to Rick Santorum. While researching for my book I have been watching him closely for the past two years. Santorum is known for being the most consistent and proven cultural conservative in the race. In an election focused on economics, it is understandable why he has struggled to gain traction with that brand, but Santorum is much more than a staunch religious conservative. He has a nuanced economic message that differs from his opponents as well. The reservations he holds against Thomas Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence is both revealing and fascinating.

Santorum first made his rejection of Jefferson’s belief that we have an inalienable right to the pursuit happiness an explicit campaign issue in the release of his 2005 book It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, a book clearly intended to frame his image for the tough reelection fight he would have the next year. He was running against a socially conservative Democrat named Bob Casey whose father famously sued Planned Parenthood as governor of Pennsylvania, a case that nearly overturned Roe v. Wade. As Santorum tried hard to position himself to Casey’s right on moral matters, a Democratic group named The Lantern Project set up a website called Santorumexposed.com that tried to highlight Santorum’s clarity on these cultural issues. Take a look at this exchange they dug up with Barry Nolan an obscure Comcast Channel talk show host:

This video went viral, but not for the reasons that The Lantern Project had in mind. Even though Santorum would go on to lose by 18%, Santorumexposed.com backfired. The many conservative Democratic voters of Pennsylvania saw clips like the one above and were reminded why they liked Santorum in the first place.

They still voted for Casey simply because he was not a Republican, but as he was losing, Santorum forged a new message. In response to more successful attacks by the Casey camp that tried to paint Santorum as a free-market ideologue, his campaign produced a pamphlet titled Fifty Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum that highlighted votes he had cast where he thought the federal government should help ordinary Pennsylvanians. In a 2006 NPR interview, Santorum tried to bridge his opposition to Jefferson’s classical liberalism from the culture war to economic policy:

Since being voted out of office, Santorum has been working on a platform that is both staunchly socially conservative but also moderately social-democratic, that is to say he wants to tack to the right on cultural issues but slightly to the left on economics. This is a tremendous challenge to pull off in a Republican primary since you just cannot poke your finger into the eyeballs of the establishment this way and expect to raise a lot of money. It requires a consolidated evangelical voting bloc that until now has been shared with Perry and Bachman. It also requires some fudging.

The free market orthodoxy of the Republican Party is too entrenched from the Goldwater/Reagan tradition to be challenged directly. Santorum has had two predecessors to pioneer his path, but both failed for lack of establishment support. Pat Buchanan maintained his limited government image by opposing the welfare-state but was an economic populist against trade and globalization. Mike Huckabee was such a gifted orator, that his strategy was to talk a very convincing story about how Republicans have been too focused on the concerns the wealthy without actually proposing populist policies that deviated from his peers in that regard.

So far Santorum has incorporated both his predecessors’ approach to a limited degree. He has been critical of free-trade, supporting protectionist measures to support Pennsylvania’s steel industry. In this campaign he has been very consistently critical of his party for only promoting the interests of the wealthy. So far the only deviation from Republican economic orthodoxy that he focuses on has been his vision of having the federal government actively promoting manufacturing. If you missed his Iowa speech last Tuesday take the time to watch it in full:

He fills it with well delivered references to family values, but then at the 7:10 mark, after citing the laissez-faire positions he holds, Santorum pivots to an argument that free-markets are not enough. His message is that America needs a powerful and active Federal government that promotes morality and manufacturing.

Santorum has been honing this theme since 2005, but he finally hit a stride in a break-out moment at the Iowa State University debate on August 11. Nearly every Republican candidate is opposed to gay marriage, but they have held a limited government position that the 10th Amendment makes this a state issue. Santorum strongly challenged them on this:

The 10th Amendment is such a sturdy pillar of the Tea Party movement, regardless of whether or not you agree with Santorum on this issue, you have to admire his courage and authenticity. Since that debate the media has written him off so people outside of Iowa did not see how Santorum incorporated this moment into his retail-politicking stump speeches the next day to great effect that finally paid off this week:

I doubt Santorum will get the nomination; the Republican establishment will marginalize him the way it did Pat Buchanan and Mike Huckabee, but I think this novel platform of cultural and economic populism has a future. I just doubt it has a future in the Republican Party. I argue in my book (to be released later this month) that the Democratic Party will pick this theme up. Bob Casey is that future not Rick Santorum.

If you watched Mitt Romney’s speech on Tuesday night, perhaps you did not notice him taking the time to define what the founding fathers meant by the pursuit of happiness and why that vision is so central to his campaign. Now that you know the rest of the story watch it again (at the 6:45 mark):

Other momentous things have happened in America’s political culture this past decade well before Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer decided to generously support religiously conservative Democrats against Republican strongholds in 2006. As Vice President for Government Affairs of the National Evangelical Association, Richard Cizik headed a working group called The Evangelical Project for Public Engagement that produced a document titled For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility in 2004 which you can read here. Rick Warren later forged a very public relationship with Barack Obama that led to his delivering the invocation at Obama’s 2008 inauguration. Imagine that: the most influential evangelical minister in America was picked by a liberal Democrat to lead the country in prayer. These things were unthinkable in the 1990s. Rick Santorum’s rejection of an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is the sign of bigger changes ahead.