Did Santorum really say that the GOP would be better off with Obama than Romney?

By Richard K. Barry

Rick Santorum really let it hang out there by saying the country would be better off with President Obama than Mitt Romney, whom Santorum called "the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future."

Here's his comment:

You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who's just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you're going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.

I don't know that it's been possible for even a casual observer to miss the genesis of the "Etch A Sketch" reference, but, if you did, one of Romney's key advisors, Eric Fehrnstrom, was responding to a question on CNN about his candidate being too far to the right to appeal to moderate voters once the general election rolls around. His response was this:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

It's been written about extensively, including here at The Reaction, so I won't cover the same ground. Suffice it to say that Fehrnstrom validated what Romney's critics on the right have been saying all along, that he's a pretend conservative who can't be trusted to hold true to the conservative values he's been espousing on the campaign trail thus far.

Pretty much any pundit worth his or her salt has also been saying that Romney would have to moderate his views in the general election to attract all-important independent voters, so none of this is surprising. It was just really surprising to hear Romney's campaign completely validate what the more conservative part of the GOP base fears most before the nomination race is over.

Having said that, it is remarkable that Santorum went so far as to say that conservatives might as well vote for Obama if Romney is the Republican nominee. What this says to me is that for Santorum the election ahead is a holy war. It's all or nothing. If the GOP isn't going to jam his version of radical social conservatism down the throat of the nation, why bother changing leadership at all?

This isn't about economic conservatism. This isn't about opposition to tax increases or a call for deep program cuts, as facile as all of that rhetoric is from Romney. This is about the hearts and minds of the nation and doing whatever it takes to impose some perverse, radical right-wing, social conservative, theocratic notion of America on its citizenry.

If we're not going to do that, Santorum figures, we might as well suffer with the socialist in the White House. It's not even worth the effort to make a change.

As you might imagine, Romney hit back against Santorum's statement, saying this:

I am in this race to defeat Barack Obama and restore America's promise. I was disappointed to hear that Rick Santorum would rather have Barack Obama as president than a Republican. This election is more important than any one person. It is about the future of America. Any of the Republicans running would be better than President Obama and his record of failure.

I don't think much of Romney, even aside from my wholesale rejection of his politics. I think he's a lousy politician with no moral center, but he probably is a more or less run-of-the-mill center-right conservative. He'll win the nomination. He'll tack towards the center and things will perhaps stop being, in the general election, as silly as they've been in the GOP nomination fight.

Rick Santorum isn't going to win the nomination. This much we know. But what we should also know by now is that he is a tyrant-in-waiting and that if he ever got anywhere near real power a lot of good people would be vilified for not sharing the radical right-wing views of this fool. 

Good that we won't have that to worry about.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)