What Rick Santorum and Barack Obama Don’t Know
Rick Santorum won the Mississippi and Alabama primaries yesterday, increasing the possibility that he will be the Republican nominee and the next President.
I’m trying to integrate that information, both intellectually and emotionally. For months I’ve used Mitt as a crutch. I assumed he would get the nomination, I fully understood that President Obama was unpopular, and, I thought I could see two alternate realities. I wouldn’t particularly relish a Romney Presidency, but, best-case scenario, it would resemble that of George Herbert Walker Bush-a bit patrician, a bit aloof from the concerns of everyday life, a bit clubby, but no craziness. Santorum is an order of magnitude of difference.
There is a terrific piece by Thomas Friedman in this week’s Sunday Times, “Pass the Books, Hold The Oil”. He talks about his favorite foreign country, Taiwan.
Why Taiwan? Because a little piece of rock with only 23 million citizens and with virtually no natural resources (it literally has to import sand and gravel for construction) has managed to amass the world’s fourth-largest financial reserves. How? Through channeling the enormous creativity, intelligence, and effort of the people who live there. Education through all levels of society is the vehicle for social mobility and success.
Obama gets that, and I think Romney does as well. Santorum-not so much.
To Santorum, higher education (and even public grade schooling) is the purview of “snobs.” Colleges are places to send your child to be indoctrinated by left-wing professors. They have no other value or even purpose.
Of course, Santorum is playing to the base-and the GOP these days is becoming increasingly defined as blue collar, white, older, evangelical, and Southern/Southwestern. This is a group that sees itself as hardworking, observant, steeped in patriotism, family, and home. Santorum is stroking them, and feeding into the continuous trope of Obama as an “other” who, along with the coastal “elites” want to take away their way of life. Clearly, they hear that message, and he hears them.
But he closed his ears to everyone else. Santorum views government as a tool to enforce his personal moral code. That makes him as much of a statist as Romney or Obama. And his anti-intellectualism is aimed directly at me and people I care about. I wonder how welcome my family and my friends will be in Santorum’s world. And I worry about his evident contempt for me and mine. Without knowing us at all, without knowing our values, our lifestyles, our work ethic, even how we bring our kids up, Santorum doesn’t like us. What’s worse, he makes a virtue out of that dislike.
That’s troubling, and causes you to reflect on your place in the world. Are we really so polarized that we have nothing in common with people on the other side of the political divide?
The other day, I came across some clips of “The Straight Story” David Lynch’s small, beautiful film about an old man driving a tractor across Iowa to Wisconsin to reunite and reconcile with his ailing brother. Watching, I realized how little I know about the world outside my little corner of it. And I’m afraid that President Obama suffers from the same deficiency. My provincialism is regrettable, but his, more a benign neglect than an active animus, is a serious flaw both as a candidate, and a leader. He needs to understand them, whether they vote for him or not.
Not a lot happens in The Straight Story. It stars Richard Farnsworth, who spent decades as a stunt man and extra before getting the lead in “The Grey Fox”, and his face is a glorious canvass of wrinkles, sun, and living. Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight, who walks with a pair of canes and can no longer pass the eye test for his driver’s license. Hearing his brother has had a stroke, Alvin buys a small John Deere tractor, no bigger than a lawn mower, and hooks up a little trailer to sleep in, and sets off, at five miles an hour.
Up and down hills he goes, over country roads past endless fields filled with farm machinery and hay and wheat and corn. He sleeps under the stars, the darkness of the night untouched by ambient city light. Sometimes, Lynch just lets the camera speak. Along the way, he meets plain folk in small towns. Little bits of his life come out in conversation, some sweet, some harsh. The movie is filmed with short, quiet vignettes of simple living, of common courtesy, of people looking after each other. He spends a night in a church graveyard, and the priest comes out to talk. There’s a moment of exquisite intimacy with middle-aged woman telling her husband he’s a softie, and she’s glad she married him-despite what her mother said. There’s a pregnant runaway teen scared to go back to her family, and a pair of feuding brothers. There’s two old men in a bar sharing long-buried memories from WWII-a scene so extraordinary you can’t take your eyes off the screen even while they sting.
And everywhere, there’s competence, of people doing little things well, making do and moving forward. Lynch treats everyone with respect-there are no rubes and no fools. Alvin is old and ill, but driven and self-reliant-he can handle a welding torch as well as his tractor. There’s no wealth, no ostentation, no museums or fancy cars, or elite universities. And no politics, no sermons, no witty op-eds or blog posts.
Are these really Rick Santorum folk? Are they so different from my people that there’s no common ground? I can’t imagine that. Neither should the next President.
MM
