Good news, joke writers: You can take your santorum jokes out of cold-storage and start thawing them out. The man with the name that launched a thousand cringes has clearly set a date for his presidential splash: May 27. A Wednesday. Humpday. How perfect.
I predict Rick will say he’s deadly serious about running again, despite having been an also-ran the last couple times he tried running. Santorum just runs, I guess. He’s a runny guy. But is he really worth talking about? Isn’t he supposed to be a joke at this point?
I hate to say this but… ugh… we may need to start taking Rick Santorum more seriously.
Here’s the thing: Yes, his polling is currently in the dumps. (He’s polling close to last place, and some surveys aren’t even bothering to include His Frothiness.)
But at this point, surveys tell us next to nothing about who’s going to prevail in the primaries. They’re still almost a year away, and a lot of things can happen in a year. The debates will shake things up a bit. And half of the “candidates” currently siphoning off support from Santorum aren’t seriously running; they’re just auditioning for spots on Fox News. They’ll drop out once they get a solid job offer or their donors get bored.
Santorum has been here before. In 2012, he was virtually invisible until a few weeks before the Iowa straw poll, and then, out of nowhere, he trickled up into second place. His dark-horse status was actually an asset, since it meant that many of the other candidates didn’t bother to attack him. He also spent a lot more time and money in the state. He visited every county, crafted clever messaging to bring down Gingrich, and dog-whistled Huckabee voters.
Unlike so many rich kids, Santorum is willing to work hard for what he wants. So while everybody’s laughing at him for thinking he’s got a shot, he’ll be out there pouring his blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids into earning every single vote.
His other asset: persistence. His competitors come and go, but Santorum stays put like a stain on a bedsheet. He can do that because he tends to run a lean campaign, and also because he has a few very wealthy patrons: Last election cycle, it was Foster Friess, a mutual-fund billionaire who kept pumping money into Santorum’s bid, even as he damaged his own reputation with an absolutely jaw-dropping joke about how women wouldn’t need birth control if they weren’t such sluts. Friess is once again rallying millions of dollars to Santorum’s cause, so hopefully we’ll be treated to more of his “hilarious” comedy stylings.
Do I think we’re facing the possibility of President Santorum? Ha-ha-ha, no. But his rhetoric alone is harmful: His go-to technique for pandering to his base is to say awful things about queers, which has a real impact on people, including closeted gay kids dragged to Santorum rallies by their parents. Who knows what he will be spewing after the Supreme Court rules on marriage in June. His reliably shitty attitude could push the candidates into a death spiral of homophobia, with each one vying to outdo the other.
He also thinks “rectal feeding” Guantanamo detainees isn’t torture, he wants English to be the official language of Puerto Rico, he called Obama a “snob” for advocating college programs, he called birth control “a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be,” and he runs a freaking Christian film studio for crying out loud.
