Two Decades Too Late
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/290450
For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed working-class concerns at the center of the election debate. Nevertheless, Santorum remains in third place in the GOP race. Does this suggest that Republican efforts to address working-class angst are politically ineffective?
No, it doesn’t. The problem is twofold: Santorum has not emphasized this aspect of his campaign enough, and the agenda he has presented seems designed to resurrect an idealized past rather than to lead worried workers into a new future.
Santorum is trying to resurrect the Reagan general-election strategy of 1980 — first and foremost, to win over the conservative base on fiscal and social issues by portraying himself as a man of principle, the only candidate who will not waver. This means that for most Republican-primary voters, Santorum is a strong conservative first and an advocate of the working class a distant second, if at all.
But Santorum’s greater problem is that he is out of touch with today’s blue-collar reality. His message presumes that white-working-class voters are essentially the same as they were in 1980. Reagan Democrats in the Midwest — the Santorum target — were characterized in 1980 by their religion and their occupations. They were disproportionally Catholic, serious about their faith, and likely to work in manufacturing or live in manufacturing-dependent neighborhoods and towns.