For Republicans: A questionable Santorum surge from the rear

Courtesy of Gage Skidmore’s photostream on flickr.com. Dan Savage’s rebranding campaign has made for some amusing headlines.

by Charlie Pfeifer, 1L

Reading the mainstream media, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, it is easy to forget the way former senator Rick Santorum’s name appeared in print most frequently since his failed 2006 senatorial campaign – was a thinly veiled reference to homosexual anal intercourse and, more specifically, its byproducts. Thanks to nationally syndicated love advice columnist, Dan Savage (himself a gay American), and his well executed 2003 campaign to name the frothy mixture leftover from the physical act of homosexual intercourse after the then senator. While the Oxford English Dictionary has yet to anoint the noun, a quick Google search confirms that, for all public usages, the name probably, um, sticks.

While this fact must be well known to the Republican establishment now starting to diverge from a singular backing of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as Mr. Santorum’s candidacy has been, uhh, surging. Santorum’s donor base has been broadening all month following victories (albeit with nonbinding delegates) in Maine, Minnesota, and Colorado. Is the establishment pondering, then, whether it’s long-harbored views on homosexuality, currently iterated as a battle, nominally, about the term “marriage” being legally applied to the property rights bestowed upon two loving, consenting adults by the state, are becoming anachronistic to an electorate that derives its common usage from Wikipedia and Google.

The mainstream and no so mainstream media outlets have so openly punned with Santorum’s double meaning to comedic results, that the term’s meaning is fairly public knowledge.  (As evidenced by pithy titles of blogs and newspaper articles: “Santorum Bubbling Up Everywhere” (on Andrew Sullivan’s Atlantic blog The Daily Dish), “Santorum Surges from Behind in Iowa” (The Philadelphia Inquirer’s philly.com), and the truly ridiculous winner by an alternative Birmingham, Alabama blogger weldbham.com “Poll: Santorum comes from behind in Alabama threeway.”)  The donors, supporters, and strategizers for Santorum know this. His only possible political move is to sound so stridently anti-gay that he creates a legitimate “homophobia gap” within the Republican electorate that he can, erm, squeeze out Romney from the right.

This again raises the strategic quandary for the Santorum team. If the be-vested lawyer from Pittsburgh actually makes it all the way to the general election in November (the most current polls at the hour of publication have him only a few points off Romney in both Arizona and Michigan, Tuesday’s contests), then he will be running against an American public that, for the first time, has a clear predisposition towards gay marriage, gay rights generally, and a growing distaste for preachy, baroque politics. That may be the bigger issue on their hands, already somewhat be-Santorumed.