Don’t expect a New Nixon campaign from Rick Santorum.
While the former Pennsylvania senator may not push his family values agenda as much as he did in 2012 in his effort to win the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, he’s not shrinking from it. But he’s also trying to break through the Big Media stereotyping of his candidacy on the nut right fringe of the party by exhibiting the same foreign policy experience and appeals to everyday workers as he did four years ago.
Nixon famously rebounded from his grumbling denouement – “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more” – following his loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign to become a team-playing, whirlwind campaigner for senatorial candidates in 1966 and a solutions-offering, bring-the-boys-home presidential candidate in 1968.
During Santorum’s second-place finish to Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican campaign, he was tagged by the national media and left-wing pundits – to use the words of just one – as a “race-baiter,” “adamantly homophobic,” “opposed to reproductive rights” and “hostile to contraceptive use.”
What got less traction were his opposition to the Obama administration’s policies with Iran and Russia, which have now worsened; his desire to repeal Obamacare, which has raised insurance rates for most people who already had insurance; his insistence on no cuts in defense spending in partial light of the threat of radical Islam; his support of a secure border and no benefits for illegal immigrants; and his push for a flatter, simpler tax.