Thankfully, the twentieth GOP presidential debate has come and gone.<\/p>\n
If the American voter doesn\u2019t know these candidates by now, he never will.<\/p>\n
Of the four remaining candidates, three are virtually indistinguishable from one another.\u00a0 This much has been established time and time again throughout this election season.\u00a0 It is true, of course, that there exist some differences between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich.\u00a0 But such differences are negligible, both in themselves and, especially, relative to the enormity of the similarities that they share.<\/p>\n
To those spectators who are all too aware of the unbridgeable chasm between their rhetoric of \u201climited government\u201d and their respective records, the spectacle of each of these three presidential aspirants leveling allegations of hypocrisy and inconsistency at one another can\u2019t fail to appear comedic at best, pathetic at worst.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Most comical\u2014or pathetic\u2014is the front runner of the week, Senator Rick Santorum.<\/p>\n
Socialized Health Care<\/strong><\/p>\n The universal health care legislation\u2014i.e. \u201cObamacare\u201d\u2014that the Democrats succeeded in enacting into law is unpopular among the electorate, and woefully unpopular among Republicans.\u00a0 It is no surprise, then, that all of the GOP candidates promise to repeal it.\u00a0 To his credit, Santorum has regularly drawn the nation\u2019s attention to the undeniable fact that their protestations against Obamacare notwithstanding, both Romney and Gingrich have in the past favored a government mandate <\/em>requiring citizens to purchase health insurance.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Santorum is himself guilty of precisely that of which he accuses his Republican opponents.<\/p>\n Granted, unlike Gingrich, Santorum never actively argued on behalf of a mandate.\u00a0 And unlike Romney, Santorum can not be said to have supplied the original blueprint\u2014\u201cRomneycare\u201d\u2014for Obamacare.<\/p>\n Still, the former Senator from Pennsylvaniais not without his share of blame for having made the way for Obamacare easier than it otherwise would have been.\u00a0 For as long as Medicare and Medicaid have been in existence, the federal government has involved itself in health care to a much greater extent than anything that previous generations of Americans could have envisaged.\u00a0 Actually, Americans from an earlier time would have found it at once impossible and undesirable that the federal government would involve itself in health care at all, a statement the truth of which is born out by the fact that those who ratified the Constitution ratified a federal <\/em>government\u2014not a national <\/em>one.\u00a0 The federal government is possessed of a severely circumscribed set of \u201cpowers\u201d that the Constitution expressly assigns to it.\u00a0 The authority to make provisions for health care is not <\/em>a member of this set.\u00a0 In spite of this, Medicare and Medicaid are entitlements.<\/p>\n And Santorum, along with Romney and Gingrich, express no intention of revoking them.<\/p>\n Moreover, while in Congress, Santorum voted in favor of Medicare Part D, a prescription drug benefit that marked the largest expansion in Medicare since its inception.<\/p>\n In other words, Santorum is no less supportive of socialized health care than is Romney and Gingrich.<\/p>\n In the past, Santorum has also, again correctly, noted that while Governor of Massachusetts, Romney\u2019s version of universal health care provided funding for abortion and coerced Catholic hospitals into offering contraceptives for emergency purposes.\u00a0 This, Santorum rightly insists, is entirely unacceptable from the conservative\u2019s point of view.<\/p>\n Yet just Wednesday night, Santorum admitted that he himself had voted in favor of appropriations bills that supplied funding for Planned Parenthood\u2014<\/em>an organization that provides both contraceptives and <\/em>abortion services.\u00a0<\/p>\n What this in turn means is that while Santorum may not have issued an Obama or Romney-like directive to Catholic institutions requiring them specifically <\/em>to violate the sacred teachings of the Catholic Church, he did indeed endorse a policy that would require all <\/em>Catholic taxpayers to violate their <\/em>consciences in subsidizing practices to which their faith tradition has always been vehemently opposed.\u00a0 For that matter, it isn\u2019t just the convictions of American Catholics over which Santorum ran roughshod.\u00a0 The convictions of all Americans who object to the government\u2019s confiscating their resources in time, money, and labor for the sake of financing contraceptives and abortion have also been undercut by Santorum and his colleagues in Congress.<\/p>\n Bailouts<\/strong><\/p>\n Santorum remarked, truthfully, that Romney and Gingrich supported the bank bailouts of 2008.\u00a0 Yet Santorum himself supported the airline bailouts of 2001.\u00a0 According to the current front runner, the airlines were on the verge of economic collapse because of the federal government\u2019s decision to ground their planes during the days following September 11, 2001.\u00a0 Thus, since responsibility for the airline companies\u2019 problems rested on the shoulders, not of the airlines themselves, but of the government, it was only just that the government should come to their aid.\u00a0 In the case of the banks, however, matters couldn\u2019t have been more different.\u00a0 Because blame for the banks\u2019 woes rested squarely with the banks, they should have been left to fail.\u00a0<\/p>\n Santorum\u2019s rationale for distinguishing just bailouts from unjust bailouts simply will not wash.<\/p>\n First of all, that the government\u2019s suspension of all flights in the wake of 9\/11 injured the airline industry is obvious.\u00a0 That it is the ultimate cause of its economic troubles is entirely untrue.\u00a0 The industry had been suffering losses for some time.\u00a0 The events of September 11 exacerbated them\u2014it did not <\/em>give rise to them.<\/p>\n Secondly, even if Santorum\u2019s account was cogent, by his own reasoning, then, Romney and Gingrich were right <\/em>in endorsing the bank bailouts.\u00a0 While the government was not the cause of the airline industry\u2019s financial crisis, it was, <\/em>ultimately, the cause of the banking industry\u2019s <\/em>financial crisis.<\/p>\n In order for George W. Bush\u2019s \u201cHome Ownership Society\u201d\u2014a utopian scheme if ever there was one\u2014to come to fruition, the government compelled lending institutions to radically undercut the traditional criteria in accordance with which they have always issued mortgages.\u00a0 As a result, multitudes of bad mortgages were given to millions of people who could not afford them.\u00a0 In time, as some, like Ron Paul, predicted, the housing bubble burst and those same lending institutions\u2014along with the entire economy\u2014found themselves on the precipice of ruin.<\/p>\n In short, by Santorum\u2019s own logic, he stands condemned for supporting the airline bailouts and <\/em>supposedly opposing<\/em> the bank bailouts.\u00a0 At the same time, Gingrich and Romney are vindicated.<\/p>\n No Child Left Behind<\/strong><\/p>\n If President Obama\u2019s agenda can be said to be socialistic\u2014and it can\u2014then that of his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, can be said to be the same.<\/p>\n Not only did Bush and his Republican Congress fail to diminish, much less eradicate, the Department of Education, through the now notorious \u201cNo Child Left Behind\u201d act, they exponentially strengthened its powers.<\/p>\n Santorum was as much a supporter of No Child Left Behind as anyone else\u2014although he now\u2014now\u2014<\/em>claims to regret having cast his vote for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Wednesday\u2019s debate, Santorum said that although this infamous law conflicts with his own values, in voting for it he intended to do nothing more or less than \u201ctake one for the team.\u201d\u00a0 Politics is a \u201cteam sport,\u201d he explained, and sometimes circumstances demand that players advance the team against their better judgment.<\/p>\n Doubtless, it is with justice that politics has been described as the art of compromise. But compromising in the short term for the sake of advancing one\u2019s deepest convictions in the long term is one thing; violating one\u2019s deepest convictions in the short term for the sake of advancing one\u2019s party in any <\/em>term is something else altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whether Santorum really did object on moral grounds to No Child Left Behind at the time that he voted for it is questionable.\u00a0 If he did not, then in telling us otherwise, he lies.\u00a0 If he did, then he violated his own conscience for a lesser good and acted immorally.\u00a0 Either way, Santorum has not conducted himself in a manner befitting a statesman, and certainly not in a manner befitting a genuinely conservative <\/em>statesman.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is, however, what we would expect from a cynical and opportunistic run-of-the mill politician like Santorum.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Rick Santorum is not a real conservative.\u00a0 Rather, he is a neoconservative Republican.\u00a0 Between the former and the latter there is all of the difference in the world.\u00a0 To put this point another way, Santorum is just another champion of Big Government who, when election time rolls around, talks the talk of \u201climited government\u201d and the rest.<\/p>\n If <\/em>Republican voters really <\/em>are concerned, first and foremost, with reshaping the federal government so that it comes to resemble more closely the ideal embodied in the Constitution, then <\/em>they have no option but to dismiss Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich as the pretenders that they are.\u00a0 Furthermore, if <\/em>it is a restoration of the Constitutional Republic for the sake of which our Founding Fathers labored indefatigably that Republicans really <\/em>desire, they have but one candidate to whom they can turn this time around.\u00a0<\/p>\n And that candidate is Ron Paul.<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published at The New American\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thankfully, the twentieth GOP presidential debate has come and gone. If the American voter doesn\u2019t know these candidates by now, he never will. Of the four remaining candidates, three are virtually indistinguishable from one another.\u00a0 This much has been established time and time again throughout this election season.\u00a0 It is true, of course, that there…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n