[Vision2020] The Do-Over Derby

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


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February 13, 2012
The Do-Over Derby By FRANK
BRUNI<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

To “the dog ate my homework,” we can now add “my wife wrote the chapter.”

That’s the excuse, more or less, with which Rick Santorum is distancing
himself from a snippet of his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” in which
“radical feminists” are disparaged for giving women the idea that they
might find greater fulfillment outside the home. By using the passive voice
in the last stretch of that sentence, I’m cutting him a break. I could have
said “he disparaged” those feminists, because he’s the only author listed
on the book’s cover, and there’s no acknowledgment of literary assistance
from the hard-typing, home-schooling, house-tethered missus. So even if
he’s not a troglodyte, he’s something of a credit hog.

You gotta love politics, and you gotta love Santorum. For much of this
campaign, he has been content to occupy the rightward extremes of social
issues, where he obviously felt he would best find traction. For most of
last week, he stood there proudly and loudly, championing the Roman
Catholic bishops in their archaic — and, let’s be clear, irresponsible —
antipathy<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/catholic-bishops-criticize-new-contraception-proposal.html?scp=1&sq=bishops%20birth%20control&st=cse>to
birth control.

He even came up with perhaps the most ridiculous
hyperbole<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/02/santorum-sees-a-guillotine.html>in
a political season thick with it. He said that “the path of President
Obama and his overt hostility to faith” would lead the country to “the
guillotine,” an apparent assertion that for Obama, hope and change are the
smokescreen, deficits and decapitation the real agenda.

Given all of Santorum’s regressive bluster, why should he suddenly evince
alarm over seeming to be out of touch with the aspirations, emotions and
rights of women? What’s changed? The
polls<http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/polls/210259-two-polls-find-santorum-leading-in-michigan>,
for one: two new Michigan surveys show him ahead of Mitt Romney there. And
his tally of victories rose last week from one (Iowa) to four (if you count
Missouri). Once preposterous, his candidacy is newly plausible, giving him
fresh motive to blunt some of his divisive edges. Nothing rewrites the past
like pumped-up designs on the future.

That has been a vivid leitmotif of the Republican contest so far. It’s the
Do-Over Derby, in which the only candidates not asking for a mulligan are
the ones demanding dozens of them.

While Newt Gingrich’s romantic history makes the Hamptons of “Revenge” look
like the Sunnybrook Farm of Rebecca, he implores us to focus instead on his
ostensibly devout Catholicism today and his marriage to Callista, who
stands so snugly and immovably at his side that their connection seems less
intimate than umbilical. Watching him on TV recently, I noticed that the
camera couldn’t press in close enough to edit her Newt-riveted profile out
of the frame. She — or at least the tip of her nose — kept poking into it.

In the 1990s Ron Paul’s name bedecked
pamphlets<http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ron-paul-signed-off-on-racist-newsletters-sources-say/2012/01/20/gIQAvblFVQ_story.html>spewing
racist sentiments, which he now disavows. “My letterhead did it” is
his excuse. He’s the hapless victim of a stenographic hijacking.

And then there’s Romney, whose primary campaign is one long quest for a
clean conservative slate on which “Romneycare” and “Obamacare,” for
instance, have little in common.

To understand voters’ bottomless cynicism, look no farther than
politicians’ boundless revisionism. Republicans have no monopoly on it, but
they occupy center stage at the moment, shedding culpability for past deeds
even as they ask us — as leaders do and should — to take responsibility for
our own.

Santorum’s appearance <http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/> on the ABC News
show “This Week” on Sunday was just the latest example. Questioned by
George Stephanopoulos about that “radical feminists” lament, he professed
unfamiliarity with it, saying, “That’s a new quote for me.” But as Brian
Knowlton noted<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/us/politics/santorum-faces-questions-on-women-in-work-force.html>in
the Times, it couldn’t have been, because Stephanopoulos had asked him
about the same lament back in 2005. What’s more, it came under fire the
following year, during Santorum’s failed bid for reelection to the United
States Senate.

On Sunday he told Stephanopoulos that his wife, a nurse and lawyer who
became a stay-at-home mother, had “co-written” the “radical feminists”
section of “It Takes a Family.” This dodge was curious on several fronts.
Wouldn’t it still leave him as the other co-author? Isn’t it an ungallant
bit of blame shifting? And if he and she weren’t on the same page, why was
she at the keyboard?

Besides which, there’s some truth to the charge that, in the past, women
who opted out of the work force were at times put wrongly on the defensive,
and that feminism is rightly about access to all opportunities, not
adherence to one script.

But it’s also true that Santorum, hammered for recent remarks that women
should be barred<http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/santorum-clarifies-remarks-on-women-in-combat/?scp=1&sq=rick%20santorum%20military%20combat&st=cse>from
front-line combat, must now seize chances to maneuver toward a more
enlightened aura, integral to general-election viability. And that
apparently takes a family of fall guys (or gals), along with a highly
selective memory.

•


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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