Santorum Is Neither a Social Nor an Economic Libertarian...
Mark Kleiman:
Under the Tea Party veneer: The purported small-government libertarianism of the Tea Party was always a fairly thin veneer over its John Birch Society core. Now some libertarians are finding that out; Tea Party voters are going for Santorum over Romney. If Santorum actually becomes the Republican nominee – still a long shot, but no longer a far fetch – we’ll discover what fraction of the glibertarian commentariat actually prefers personal liberty and Enlightenment values to looser regulations on polluting companies and lower taxes on the rich. Damned few, I’ll warrant.
Gene Healy:
Santorum Is Severely Wrong: [T]he Romney-2012 Presidential Unit still has a few bugs in its pandering software…. Rick Santorum… has… a slight lead on Romney among Republican voters nationally….
I'm not severely conservative, but I do have a case of Stage IV libertarianism. And anyone who shares that condition will find Santorum's rise particularly vexing. The former senator from Pennsylvania is libertarianism's sweater-vested arch-nemesis. In a Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon in Harrisburg last summer, Santorum declared, "I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement."…
[V]oting for the No Child Left Behind Act… the 2005 "bridge to nowhere"… expanded national service program…. Santorum's 2012 campaign platform even includes a pledge to "re-direct funds within HHS, so it can create public/private partnerships ... for the purpose of strengthening marriages, families, and fatherhood."…
The Tea Party movement was supposed to represent an end to this sort of moralistic Big Government conservatism. Animated by "fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets," as the Tea Party Patriots' credo put it, the movement had supposedly put social issues on the back burner to focus on the crisis of government growth…. [Yet i]n this year's contests, he's regularly drawn more support from Tea Party voters than Ron Paul, who has been described as the "intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement." Exit polls show Santorum beating Paul among self-described Tea Party supporters in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, trailing him only in independent-heavy New Hampshire and Nevada….
Santorum['s]… agenda rests on meddling with other people, sometimes with laws, sometimes with aircraft carrier groups. "This idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do," Santorum complained to NPR in 2006, "that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn't get involved in cultural issues ... that is not how traditional conservatives view the world." That version of conservatism has a new standard bearer, and he's rising in the polls.
