No Re-election

No, Mr. Santorum will lose his 2006 race for re-election to presumptive Democrat nominee Bob Casey Jr. because he has thumbed his nose and furiously waggled his fingers at a large cross-section of his conservative base.

And to him homosexual marriage is an abomination that will open the door to legally sanctioned man-canine matrimony, right? Woof-woof.

Some would say Santorum has allowed politics to trump principles. Others would say he has become a pandering opportunist. Actually, it's a combination of both. And being an unprincipled pandering opportunist is a lousy way to treat those who brung you to the dance.

The highly rated and eminently fair National Journal analysis gave Santorum a perfect conservative voter rating for 2003. He was one of 13 "perfect" Senate Republicans.

But last year, Santorum was rated slightly left of center. Thirty-two GOP Senate brethren had more conservative voting records. A trend has emerged.

As political gurus Terry Madonna and Michael Young noted in a recent column -- slicing and dicing the same National Journal numbers -- Santorum "consistently shifts toward the center in those years just before his re-election. Santorum may continue to talk like a conservative, but he's voting like a pragmatist"...

Some argue that the National Journal rankings are akin to painting a fine detail on a rich canvas with a flat shovel. You can't call Santorum a latent or emerging liberal just because of a few votes for, say, mandatory gun locks or restricting U.S. government contracts to U.S. companies, folks like Horsham, Pa., blogger Bill Fitzpatrick put it last month.

True, a few votes like that would tend to drag down one's overall score; indeed a few F's have a way of dragging down one's GPA.

But Santorum's problem has grown deeper than his spotty voting record. It's a problem that suggests a wholly oxymoronic principled relativism. It's that other "P"-word, the one Messrs. Madonna and Young certainly don't use as a pejorative: It's "pragmatism," the new choice moniker of liberals and socialists -- a synonym for unprincipled.

Rick Santorum's greatest political challenge wasn't beating Doug Walgren for the old 18th District U.S. House seat in 1990. Neither was it knocking off appointed U.S. Sen. Harris Wofford in 1994. And it certainly wasn't his pasting of eight-of-67-county-winner Ron Klink in 2000.

Santorum's biggest political challenge came in 2004. He claimed victory again but he lost on principle when he supported Sen. Specter for re-election over ideological soulmate Pat Toomey, then the Lehigh Valley congressman. To Santorum's base, however, it was a deep betrayal. The wound remains open.

Many are quick to argue that Santorum had no choice. After all, he was (and is) the Republican Conference chairman. It's the No. 3 Senate leadership post. One of the post's primary jobs is to make sure incumbent GOP senators get re-elected.

But we always have choices. Had Santorum chosen principle over politics -- or more accurately, principle over power -- Mr. Toomey would have ousted Specter in last April's primary and easily beaten Joe Hoeffel in November.

That didn't happen because Santorum was not about to give up his chance for greater power: to succeed Bill Frist as Senate majority leader in 2007. Santorum blew one opportunity -- albeit the long shot of a dark horse -- when he failed to accurately assess how damaged then-Majority Leader Trent Lott was in the Strom Thurmond affair of 2002 and began courting support far too late to matter.

Had Santorum supported Toomey, he not only would have lost his leadership post but, automatically, any chance of succeeding the departing Mr. Frist. As political irony goes, his loyalty to the leadership post -- to the power base -- paid a lousy dividend; Santorum doesn't have the votes to succeed Frist.

Santorum sought to counter Sen. Ted Kennedy's bad plan to increase the minimum wage with an equally bad plan of his own -- to raise the minimum wage a little less but cover his tracks with breaks for business.

Santorum called his plan "more reasonable," imposing "less of a burden on small business." It's like being a little bit pregnant.

Interventionism only begets interventionism. Once government intervenes, it must continually intervene to prevent the public from discovering how bad every prior intervention failed. It's a lie.

Two Saturdays ago, I spoke to the Rogues, a spirited Republican group in Pittsburgh's South Hills. These are real conservatives -- rock-ribbed GOPers who generally have great disdain for what Republicans have become. They're more likely to have photos of Barry Goldwater on their walls than Ronald Reagan. And they take no guff from the party's power brokers.

They lament that Republicans can be elected but cannot lead. They're tired of capitulation. They've grown weary of the lip-service. They actually moan when you mention Rick Santorum's name.

There's lots of moaning going on around the state within similar groups of grassroots Republicans who are fighting to take the party back and force it to stand for something -- anything.

Indeed, the 19 months between now and November 2006 is a lifetime in politics. Perhaps Santorum can get his act together. But the moans are not encouraging right now. And given the "pragmatic" path Santorum has chosen, they're only likely to grow louder.

There is absolutely nothing Sen. Rick Santorum can do (or could have done) to keep his Senate seat in 2006. Moving to the right would certainly help him with the base. But support for Pat Toomey would have been yet another one-trick pony. Pennsylvania is simply too moderate for fire-brand Republican politics.

In fact, Santorum's problem is that he is truly too conservative, and Democrats have been salivating to find a strong candidate to take him to the mat. They finally found one in Robert Casey Jr., and there is little Santorum could have done to save himself except move to a more red state.