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<div class="timestamp">February 13, 2012</div>
<h1>The Do-Over Derby</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/frank_bruni/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Frank Bruni" class="meta-per">FRANK BRUNI</a></h6>
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<p>
To “the dog ate my homework,” we can now add “my wife wrote the chapter.” </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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 —
<a title="NY Times piece. " href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/us/catholic-bishops-criticize-new-contraception-proposal.html?scp=1&sq=bishops%20birth%20control&st=cse">antipathy</a> to birth control. </p>
<p>
He even came up with perhaps the most ridiculous <a title="New Yorker post. " href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/02/santorum-sees-a-guillotine.html">hyperbole</a>
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.
</p>
<p>
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? <a title="The Hill. " href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/polls/210259-two-polls-find-santorum-leading-in-michigan">The polls</a>,
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
In the 1990s Ron Paul’s name <a title="Wash Post story. " href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ron-paul-signed-off-on-racist-newsletters-sources-say/2012/01/20/gIQAvblFVQ_story.html">bedecked pamphlets</a>
spewing racist sentiments, which he now disavows. “My letterhead did
it” is his excuse. He’s the hapless victim of a stenographic hijacking.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
Santorum’s <a title="ABC video. " href="http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/">appearance</a>
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 <a title="Times piece. " href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/us/politics/santorum-faces-questions-on-women-in-work-force.html">noted</a>
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. </p>
<p>
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? </p>
<p>
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. </p>
<p>
But it’s also true that Santorum, hammered for recent remarks that women should be <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/santorum-clarifies-remarks-on-women-in-combat/?scp=1&sq=rick%20santorum%20military%20combat&st=cse">barred</a>
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. </p>
<div class="authorIdentification">
<p style="text-align:center">•</p><br clear="all"></div></div><br>-- <br>Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)<br><a href="mailto:art.deco.studios@gmail.com" target="_blank">art.deco.studios@gmail.com</a><br>