NATCHITOCHES, La., March 24, 2012—Voodoo, vampires and zombies – Louisiana was the perfect place for Rick Santorum to come shambling out of a swamp to claim victory for his undead campaign. Indeed, he may have found just enough true blood in the ballot boxes to take him on to defeat in Maryland, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.
His D.C. loss is a given: His campaign once again didn’t get him on the ballot. His other defeats are only very likely, meaning that right now his campaign is only mostly dead, or mostly undead.
But Santorum’s victory in Louisiana was also a given. The state’s heavily evangelical Republicans are social conservatives first and last. In the state once dominated by the Kingfish, Huey Long, small-government, fiscally responsible conservatism has never been the Republican game. Louisiana Republicans are more strongly motivated by love of guns and God and distaste for gays and abortion than by economic science and nine of the first Ten Amendments.
Santorum showed his appreciation by spending a few days here. Mitt Romney spent only a day in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Ron Paul raced briefly through the state, opening his Louisiana campaign headquarters in Baton Rouge. Gingrich spent some time, and for his efforts will come in third, thus encouraging him to keep claiming that he is better suited to challenge Obama in the industrial states than Santorum or Romney.
In the end, Louisiana makes no difference. It has 46 delegates, 20 of them tied to today’s primary, but no one expected Santorum to lose it anymore than anyone expects Romney to lose Utah. A Santorum loss here would have been hugely important; his win is meaningless.
Santorum will now claim that Romney’s money really can’t buy victory, and that Romney has no pull in the South. To the first claim we can retort that poverty didn’t buy victory in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Alaska, Hawaii, or any of the other states Santorum didn’t win. And if money didn’t win those states for Romney, then it must be that the voters just liked him more than Santorum.
It’s also entirely true that a Santorum will always be more popular in Louisiana than a Romney. What’s not true is that a Romney will always be less popular than an Obama. As Santorum himself took pains to clarify yesterday, he’d cut off his hand rather than vote for Obama, and he will vote for whomever his party’s nominee turns out to be.
So too will most southern Republicans. And if Santorum thinks that winning southern Republicans in a primary is the key to winning presidential elections, he’s badly mistaken.
Social conservatism is the least conservative of all conservatisms. Economic and small-government conservatism are born of hope and a confidence that people will usually do the right thing. Social conservatism is born of the fear that people will do the wrong thing and the urge to impose on them the right decisions.
In that, social conservatism isn’t much different from big-government liberalism.
Both movements attract people who believe they know the best way to live and want to ensure that the rest of us live it. Whether it’s trying to stamp out smoking, marijuana, forbid gays to marry or force Catholics to provide contraceptives, the impulse of these two groups is fundamentally anti-individualist and pro-government power. The only difference is in the direction they want to apply that power.
Most Americans identify as conservative, as Republicans delight in telling anyone who will listen. But most Americans are emphatically not social conservatives. They want to be free to raise their families as they think best, to start businesses, to worship as they please and leave others free to worship as they prefer. They hate abortion but don’t want to ban it. They aren’t convinced that gays shouldn’t be allowed to marry each other, and unlike Santorum, they harbor few doubts about keeping contraceptives legal.
It’s standard for candidates to expand on the importance of states they win and the ultimate insignificance of the states they lose. Their friends and foes do that, too, though in opposite directions, and I may be guilty of the same thing. Even so, Santorum’s win in one of the least typical states in the Union, a state that is as friendly to him as any state can possibly be, is important only as fuel to get him to the next state.
And ultimately, Rick Santorum will lose. What matters now is how he loses, whether by pushing his own virtues and then finally and enthusiastically supporting Romney, or by bitterly denouncing Romney until supporting him isn’t even possible. For Santorum’s sake and the sake of the GOP, let it be the former.
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars’ College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. His little corner of Louisiana looks a lot like Bon Temps. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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