Rick Santorum’s mysterious, paradoxical manifesto, ‘It Takes a Family’:

 Character Sketch

By Walter Shapiro | The Ticket – Fri, Feb 17, 2012

Every presidential race has its mysteries. Who really won the recent low-turnout Maine caucuses--and why are the Republicans having so much trouble counting caucus votes? Did Mitt Romney's dog-on-the-roof Irish setter Seamus actually try to defect to Canada? But the biggest campaign riddle wrapped in an enigma remains, Why does any politician fantasizing about the White House ever put his name on the cover of a book?

Rick Santorum, who should be basking in his sudden star turn as the poll-vaulting anti-Romney, is the latest author to pay a political price for his literary ambitions. Making the rounds of last Sunday morning's talk shows, the former Pennsylvania senator came under fire for his unflattering comments about "radical feminists" in his half-forgotten 2005 book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good. On "Meet the Press," host David Gregory challenged Santorum to defend his book's claim, "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Rather than try to justify his implicit critique of women of childbearing years finding fulfillment in the workplace, Santorum vaguely affirmed a woman's right to choose her career and gallantly insisted that "the section was written in large part in cooperation" with his (non-working) wife, Karen.
From this TV exchange, it would be easy to assume that Santorum's book is a political screed filled with short paragraphs, wide margins, angry put-downs of liberals and lots of exclamation points. And, in truth, Santorum's language does get overheated at times: "We now have a generation that has grown up with the belief, inspired by the Sixties' free-love assault on sexual mores, that true love is a feeling, and that it should not be resisted or constrained--rather, its ultimate validation is through sexual relations, without regard to the outdated social convention of marriage." (Unless he was a particularly precocious conservative, Santorum is channeling the opinions of others in his scorn for the Sixties. He was 11 years old at the time of Woodstock).
But what is fascinating about It Takes a Family is that it is far more a densely argued social conservative manifesto than a standard-issue political volume designed to win votes or provide the policy framework for a presidential campaign. Newt Gingrich--the author of 23 books, including memoirs, policy pronouncements and political potboilers--purports to be the conservative intellectual in the Republican presidential race. But Santorum, in his zeal to be taken seriously as a thinker, mobilizes a wide array of social-science research (including some citations from liberals) to buttress his argument that hedonistic individualism is jeopardizing traditional families and their irreplaceable role in raising children. This, of course, is an explosive topic--and it is unlikely that Santorum can win many converts among liberal and moderate skeptics. But it is hard not to be impressed by the energy that Santorum devotes to his argument.
Written on the eve of Santorum's uphill 2006 reelection bid for a third Senate term (he lost by 700,000 votes), It Takes a Family offers an unusual window into the mind of its author. This is not a volume to study in order to decipher Santorum's governing agenda, although it is safe to predict that he would be the most ardent social-conservative president in history. What gives the book value in the middle of a presidential campaign is that it provides lasting clues about the thought processes that Santorum would use to make decisions in the Oval Office. The former senator is both a devout Catholic and a lawyer--and it is easy to see the influence of both intellectual frameworks in It Takes a Family.
"In developing my understanding of social policy," Santorum writes, "I have learned a lot from the tradition of Catholic social thought." Here Santorum is referring to the Catholic concept of "subsidiarity," which he defines as "the principle that all social challenges should be addressed at the level of the smallest social unit possible, preferably the family." This belief structure is compatible with the embrace by constitutional conservatives of the Tenth Amendment and the states rights doctrines that go with it. But it also allows Santorum to discuss innovative family-based and church-based approaches to fighting poverty.
Romney recently compounded his too-wealthy-for-compassion problem when he said, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there." In sharp contrast, Santorum wrote, "For our part, conservatives, with respect to the poor, haven't tried hard enough ... The real solution, the conservative solution to the problems of low-income America, is to structure all our programs around the family." These words were written in 2005, granted, when it seemed like America had the financial resources to tackle any problem it chose, from reconstructing Iraq to adding an expensive prescription drug benefit to Medicare. Now that the political discourse is dominated by the $15 trillion national debt, it is hard to imagine that anti-poverty legislation would rank high on any president's agenda.
The other intellectual pillar buttressing Santorum's worldview is his legal education. Sometime, presumably early in his studies at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law, Santorum was introduced to the concept of the slippery slope--and it changed his mental life. In It Takes a Family, Santorum repeatedly warns about the legal consequences flowing from popular Supreme Court decisions. He laments the reasoning behind the 1965 Griswold decision (overturning--yikes!--a Connecticut law that banned the sale of condoms) because it introduced the constitutional zone of privacy that later allowed the Supreme Court to legalize abortion. Santorum even expresses his concern with the precedent set by Loving v. Virginia, the landmark 1967 civil-rights decision that decreed that states could not ban interracial marriages. What troubles Santorum is not the result (ending Jim Crow legislation) but that "16 years later, the IRS ruled that religious groups opposed to interracial marriage could be stripped of their tax-exempt status."
Arguments like this are at the core of Santorum's idiosyncratic mindset. What other 21^st century senator, facing an arduous reelection battle in a diverse northern state, would risk criticizing the Supreme Court for eliminating the legal barriers to interracial marriage? What other politician with national ambitions would be so zealous about defending the rights of religious groups to flirt with bigotry? There is something both admirable in Santorum's quest for intellectual consistency and worrisome about the imprudence of some of his judgments.
This gets close to the Santorum paradox. On one level, he is a thoughtful conservative, wearing his erudition on his sleeve, bragging in his book about working with Senate Democrats (even Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton) to sponsor legislation that tried to achieve liberal goals through conservative institutions like the church and traditional families. But then, a few pages later, Santorum goes all fire and brimstone as he writes: "Conservatives trust families and the ordinary Americans that are formed by them. Liberals don't. They border on disdain for the common man."
That is an indefensible passage, both inflammatory and untrue. No one in American politics opposes a father and a mother guiding their children through the vicissitudes of life. In similar fashion, it is ludicrous to believe that a political party can thrive for decades while disdaining the common man and average voters. By writing lines like this, Santorum was pandering to the worst excesses of the right wing's liberals-hate-America mythology. It would have been one thing if It Takes a Family were a campaign tract designed to score cheap political points. But Santorum wants to establish his credentials as a Serious Thinker rather than to emulate the prose style of, say, Ann Coulter.
If Santorum defeats Romney on Feb. 28 in the Michigan primary, the former senator in a sweater vest will become the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican nomination. Often ignored and belittled as he persisted in his quixotic quest to appeal to social conservatives before narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses, the under-funded Santorum will have seized the lead without most national Republican voters having taken his full measure.
A careful reading of It Takes a Family compounds the puzzle. Is Santorum an underrated conservative intellectual willing to wrestle with ideas and follow them to surprising conclusions? Or is he a political arsonist who hurls anti-family invective at liberal Democrats and issues jeremiads against gay marriage? Who is Rick Santorum? That's the biggest mystery in presidential politics.

Walter Shapiro, who is covering his ninth presidential campaign, writes the "Character Sketch" column for Yahoo News, examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates. He is also a special correspondent for the New Republic. Follow him on Twitter at @waltershapiroPD.

Choose your own conservative: CPAC puts candidates’ differences on display:

 Character Sketch

By Walter Shapiro | The Ticket – Sat, Feb 11, 2012

WASHINGTON — We have reached the dazed and confused phase of the 2012 campaign: Frontrunner Mitt Romney is dazed and anyone who tries to handicap the GOP race from here on is confused. Against the backdrop of a Republican nomination fight certain to last until the March 6 Super Tuesday primaries — and quite likely well beyond — the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) could not have come at a better time. Friday was the moment for all three remaining plausible GOP nominees (Romney, Rick Santorum and the wobbly Newt Gingrich) to renew their sales pitches at a Washington convention hotel filled with right-wing firebrands ranging in age from college Republicans to septuagenarian spear carriers from the 1964 Barry Goldwater uprising.

Normally, at this stage of the campaign, formal speeches in vast hotel ballrooms have been supplanted by 30-second TV spots and debate performances. But with the GOP race upended by Santorum's three-state sweep last Tuesday, the candidates understood that CPAC provided their last major opportunity to deliver an extended argument before the avalanche of late winter primaries. Much of their language was designed to stir this conservative audience. Santorum, for example, declared, "We should recognize, as conservatives and Tea Party folks, that we are not just wings of the Republican Party. We are the Republican Party." (Like all good political rhetoric, the Santorum line was inadvertently borrowed: During the run-up to the 2004 primaries, Howard Dean inspired liberals by claiming to represent "the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.")
Beyond the political hucksterism that shaped the TV clips and morning-after newspaper headlines, the three candidates provided glimpses of strikingly different approaches to the presidency. These fleeting pictures of a Republican in the Oval Office in 2013 consisted of more than just boilerplate pledges to rescind Barack Obama's health-care reforms and quixotic promises like Romney's "I will finally balance the American budget." Even if they agree on the broad strokes of issues positions, Santorum, Romney and Gingrich offer the Republicans a choice of conservative leadership styles. And the CPAC speeches underscored the stakes for GOP voters as the topsy-turvy nomination fight moves from a handful of early states to a national canvas.

Rick Santorum: The jobs conservative
As a full-throated social conservative, the former Pennsylvania senator was as much in his element at CPAC as George Soros is at Davos. Unlike Romney (who supported abortion rights until — shazam! — he didn't) or Gingrich (who aspires to be the only twice-divorced president in history), Santorum does not have to worry about airbrushing his image with conservatives. "We know each other," Santorum said at the beginning of a key passage in his address to CPAC. "We've worked together in the vineyards. We have taken on the tough battles that confront this country."
These words were a prelude to a job-creation topic rarely publicly discussed in a presidential campaign: Who will be hired for the White House staff, the Cabinet and the sub-Cabinet if Santorum is elected? Most newly elected presidents strive to be inclusive—like Obama choosing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and keeping Republican holdover Robert Gates at the Pentagon. Ronald Reagan not only tapped primary rival George Bush as his running mate, but he also named Bush's campaign manager James Baker as his first White House chief of staff. Even George W. Bush, far more ideological than his father, selected centrist Colin Powell to be secretary of state.
Santorum at CPAC signaled a litmus-test approach to staffing his would-be administration. Belittling unnamed appointees from prior GOP administrations who scoffed at ideological fidelity, Santorum promised, "As president of the United States, we will surround ourselves in this administration with people who share our values, who are committed to the principles that made this country great — leaders of the great conservative movement."
Leaving aside Santorum's use of the royal "we" in the prior sentence, and the long odds against his ever making it to the Oval Office except as a visitor, it was telling that he chose to make this pledge before CPAC. This was not a speech line that launched a thousand tweets or will be excerpted in a TV commercial. But it is clear that Santorum — probably during his long and lonely months touring rural Iowa as the ultimate GOP underdog — has thought about this staffing issue. He pointedly quoted conservative direct-mail king Richard Viguerie's shrewd line about the presidency, "Policies are personnel." And in an implicit jab at Romney, Santorum stressed the importance of "knowing the people who … bring the wellspring of ideas to conservatism." Listening to Santorum's words, I wondered how many right-wing idea mavens in the audience at CPAC began fantasizing about their West Wing offices.

Mitt Romney: The shape-shifting conservative
Some days it's hard not to be impressed with Romney's dogged, pooch-on-the-roof, determination to get it right with the right. In his speech text, put up on his website before he spoke at CPAC, Romney described himself as "a conservative governor." But when he actually delivered the remarks, Romney switched it to "I was a severely conservative Republican governor." It is a weird linguistic formulation like a Democratic politician describing himself as "loosely liberal."
This awkwardness reflects Romney's awareness that — certainly compared to Santorum and Gingrich — he is a Mitt-fit as a standard-issue movement conservative. Speaking directly to the hundreds of college students in the audience at CPAC, Romney speculated, "My guess is that some of you got here by reading [Edmund] Burke and [Friedrich] Hayek." In contrast, Romney said, "When I was your age, you could've told me that they were infielders for the Detroit Tigers." Rarely in one speech riff will a Republican presidential candidate confess both his lack of understanding of the intellectual roots of conservatism and the gaps in his record as a baseball fan.
The argument that Romney made to CPAC is that his ideological journey to the right "came from my family, from my faith and from my life's work." Ignoring his pioneering health-care legislation, Romney recast his record in Massachusetts as "defending conservative principles in the most liberal state in the nation." The one-term former governor bragged, "If there was a program or an agency or a department that needed cutting or elimination, we did it."
In reality, Romney was not nearly so severely conservative a governor.  As Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman point out in their new biography, The Real Romney, "His cuts to the state bureaucracy, however, turned out to be fairly modest. After four years, he reduced the payroll of agencies under his direct control by 603 jobs, according to his administration's tally." At this rate of downsizing government, Romney would have to serve more than fifteen hundred years as president to trim the federal work force by 10 percent.
Don't misunderstand: Romney would probably be a very conservative president. It would not be because of his prior record in Massachusetts nor even his guiding ideology, but instead because of all the promises Romney will have made to get the GOP nomination. At CPAC, Romney pledged that as president, "I will not be cutting the military budget." Gingrich, in contrast, often describes himself as a "cheap hawk" to underscore that he is concerned about military effectiveness rather than budgetary line items. But Romney was using a formulation that he never would have employed in business to prove his conservative bona fides; imagine the man from Bain Capital vowing never to reduce the marketing budget for Staples whether the company needed it or not. All this leads to the assumption that a President Romney would always be worried about a 2016 primary challenge from his right flank, much as Pat Buchanan bedeviled George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Newt Gingrich: The sand-trap conservative

Facing the indignity of being reduced once again to a Banquo-esque ghostly figure in the GOP race, with Santorum soaring as the anti-Romney candidate, Gingrich deployed his wife Callista in an uncharacteristic speaking role at CPAC. "Newt is an enthusiastic and committed golfer," she said, proudly introducing her husband. "He gets in and out of more sand traps than anyone I've ever seen."
Callista Gingrich may have meant this joking reference to her husband's lack of athletic prowess as a way of humanizing the former House speaker. But it also works as a metaphor to describe the trajectory of Gingrich's erratic quest for the nomination — and quite likely the contours of his would-be presidency. Like his Democratic counterpoint Bill Clinton, Gingrich is at his best politically when he has to dig himself out of the sand trap and at his worst when he is standing triumphant on the green as his ball drops into the cup.
Say what you will about a GOP field dominated by Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, with Ron Paul still offering libertarian brickbats from the sidelines. In stylistic terms, it does offer GOP voters — as Barry Goldwater once famously put it — a choice not an echo.
Walter Shapiro, a special correspondent for the New Republic, is covering his ninth presidential campaign. Follow him on Twitter at @waltershapiroPD. This is part of a series of Yahoo News columns examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates.

Mud studies: What do negative TV ads tell us about the men who would be president?

Character Sketch

By Walter Shapiro | The Ticket – Fri, Feb 3, 2012

You've got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mister In-Between

When Johnny Mercer wrote those lyrics in the depths of the Depression, it is safe to assume that he knew nothing about politics. These days, accentuate the positive won't get you elected sixth-grade hall monitor. Small wonder that in the bloodbath Florida primary, accentuate the negative was about the only thing that united Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. This campaign's most revealing political statistic was 92 percent--that was the share of political ads in Florida that went for the jugular. Romney, the runaway Florida victor, did not run a single positive TV commercial in English.

This is not the place for a heartfelt, if ineffectual, lament about the morals of modern campaigning. The sad truth is that a fusillade of attack ads could morph Meryl Streep into a tongue-tied failed actress. Going negative the firstest with the mostest works. As Romney proved in Florida, the low road is the time-tested route to becoming the candidate crowing about "a great victory" on primary night.

But do negative ads tell us anything worth knowing about the fitness of candidates (both the attacker and the attackee) to be president?

Richard Nixon aside, it is hard to detect a direct connection between campaign tactics and style of governing. George H.W. Bush in 1988 ran one of the most sharp-elbowed White House races in modern times (remember Willie Horton?), but he was a bipartisan conciliator as president. So I am inclined to give Romney and Gingrich a pass for the character of their Florida campaigns--unless there is evidence that either candidate instructed his media consultant: "Tell lots of lies. The more vicious, the better. The voters won't notice.")

What about the ads themselves? From time to time, "Character Sketch" will examine campaign commercials based on their relevance to the White House. This will not be a Fact Checker subjecting campaign claims to a Truth-O-Meter, because news organizations are already doing a laudable job on setting the record straight.

The standard will be simple and, yes, subjective: What does this nugget tell us about governing the nation in 2013? A TV commercial that wins a top score for relevance (example: the 2008 Hillary Clinton red phone ad) will be awarded four Oval Offices. A bogus claim or a complete irrelevancy (bragging about loving America as if the other candidates are visitors from the Planet Krypton) will get the lowest score: the sidewalk outside the White House grounds.

Let's apply this Oval Office standard to the onslaught of negativism that Republican voters were subjected to in Florida by scrutinizing the four political ads that logged the most broadcast time:

Mitt Romney's "History Lesson": In the closing days of the Florida campaign, the Romney campaign transported Tom Brokaw back to the NBC anchor desk. Over well-justified protests from Brokaw and NBC News, the Romney campaign ran an excerpt from a January 1997 news broadcast highlighting Gingrich's reprimand for ethics violations, and the $300,000 fine his colleagues levied against the House speaker.

Relevance: Throughout his career in Congress, Gingrich continually got chalk dust on his trousers from brushing against (and, yes, crossing) the line governing House ethics. About all that can be said in Gingrich's defense is that successful presidents like Lyndon Johnson (example: Lady Bird Johnson's questionable acquisition of lucrative Texas broadcast licenses) were not always paragons of selfless financial sacrifice in public office. But now that Gingrich is wealthy enough to qualify for a six-digit credit line at Tiffany (Romney, in contrast, could easily pay cash), it seems unlikely that as president he would still be blurring the line between governing and Newt Inc. For all his ethical tribulations, Gingrich has never used the power of the federal government to harass his political foes (see: Nixon, Richard) or accepted cash in white envelopes (see: Agnew, Spiro).

Rating: Two-and-a-half Oval Offices.

Newt Gingrich's "Trust": As long as the Republican primaries last, Romney will continue to come under fire from conservatives for his centrist record as governor of Massachusetts. This Gingrich spot lambasted Romney for increasing state "fees and taxes by $700 million" during his four years in office. While the statistics are accurate, the TV commercial (surprise) ignored the context as described by Romney biographers Michael Kranish and Scott Helman: "The budget was in meltdown." Romney's political reinvention as a staunch conservative prompts the tagline in the ad, "If Romney would mislead us on all this, can we trust him on anything else?"

Relevance: For all of Romney's non-stop boasting about knowing "what it's like to start a business," his four years as governor are the best evidence we possess for imagining him as president. But despite Romney's mixed record in Massachusetts, it is nearly impossible to imagine any 21st century Republican president raising taxes like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush did. A President Romney--taking office with lingering right-wing skepticism--would continually worry about a conservative 2016 primary challenge on the model of Pat Buchanan in 1992. Whatever Romney's core beliefs (and it may require a team of political spelunkers to find them), he would be hamstrung as president by the promises he made to get the Republican nomination.

Rating: Two Ovals.

Restore Our Future's "Reagan": This commercial, sponsored by the free-spending pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, mocked Gingrich for his panting eagerness to link himself with the last universally popular Republican president. As the voiceover put it, "From debates, you would think that Newt Gingrich was Ronald Reagan's vice president." The TV spot noted that for all Gingrich's claims of kinship, he was mentioned only once in Reagan's diaries. It is a fair criticism, especially since Gingrich gets equally scant billing in Lou Cannon's definitive biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.

Relevance: Even though Gingrich was a congressional backbencher throughout Reagan's presidency and his boasts about helping orchestrate the 1980 victory are (to choose a word at random) grandiose, he does have substantive grounds for claiming to be a political heir. As Cannon points out, "More than half of the proposals in the Contract [with America] were taken verbatim from Reagan's 1985 State of the Union address." When it comes to steadfast Reaganism, Gingrich certainly tops Romney, who changed his party registration to Republican five years after Reagan left the White House. But for all the efforts of Republican contenders to get right with the Gipper (and Rick Santorum is no slouch in this department), the contemporary relevance of Reagan and his Cold War convictions fade with each passing campaign.

Rating: One Oval.

Winning Our Future's "Best Friends": If Gingrich's personal failings bequeath a target-rich environment to opposition researchers, the same can be said about Romney's ideological meanderings in Massachusetts politics. It has been surprising that Romney has more often been slammed for his record at Bain Capital than for putting his signature on the Massachusetts health care law. Perhaps too little too late, this commercial by the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future (political consultants probably work overtime dreaming up impenetrable and interchangeable names for SuperPACs) depicted Romney as an Obama clone on health care. The spot even accused Romney of inventing "government-run health care," conveniently forgetting that a fellow named Lyndon Johnson passed Medicare nearly a half-century ago. The most politically devastating clip in the commercial showed Romney during his 2002 gubernatorial campaign saying, "I'm not a partisan Republican. I'm someone who's moderate. My views are progressive."

Relevance: If Romney is the Republican nominee, by November we will have seen enough weathervane attack ads to stock a New England antique store. Beginning around 2005 when Romney first began thinking about the presidency, his ideological reinvention resembles more a company retooling its ad strategy than a candidate shedding a few awkward political positions. But the current Romney boasts pretty much the same political persona as he did in 2008, aside from less visible pandering to social conservatives. It is certainly conceivable that the moderate governor of Massachusetts, rather than the conservative frontrunner for the Republican nomination, was the convenient political fiction.

Rating: Three Ovals.

Rick Santorum's "Deal": Santorum was AWOL from the Florida airwaves in large measure because he did not want to squander his limited financial resources on a winner-take-all primary that he had no chance to win. But the former Pennsylvania senator is no stranger to saloon-brawl politics, as this anti-Gingrich commercial designed for the upcoming Nevada and Colorado caucuses proves. Using a setup suitable for three-card Monte, the Santorum spot asks ominously which three politicians are on the other side of the hidden cards. The ad then offers heavy-handed clues: all three supported cap-and-trade legislation, health care mandates and Wall Street bailouts. When the face cards are turned over, they show Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and (whap!) Newt Gingrich. The tagline is, "Rick Santorum: He doesn't just talk a good conservative game, he lives it."

Relevance: The truth is that each of the remaining Republican candidates (except Ron Paul) have regularly deviated from ideologically pure conservative positions when it suited their self-interest. That is how politics works, unless you set out, like Paul, to be a gadfly protest candidate. Santorum, for example, opposed conservative right-to-work legislation while in the Senate and backed his moderate colleague Arlen Specter (who later became a Democrat) in a 2004 primary against Pat Toomey. What is telling about the ad is that the target is Gingrich (battling with Santorum for the title of Conservative Challenger) rather than Romney.

Rating: Two Ovals.

Since Johnny Mercer won't work, we need a song to symbolize the tenor of the down-and-dirty Republican primary race. The winner comes courtesy of the 1950s British comic duo of Flanders and Swann. Their ode to the courting rituals of the hippopotamus is perfect, especially the chorus, "Mud, mud, glorious mud. There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood." Or arousing an apathetic Republican voter.

Walter Shapiro, who is covering his ninth presidential campaign, writes the "Character Sketch" column for Yahoo News, examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates. He is also a special correspondent for the New Republic. Follow him on Twitter at @waltershapiroPD.

Second term, same as the first? Obama needs to explain what he has learned in office:

Character Sketch

By Walter Shapiro | The Ticket – Thu, Jan 26, 2012

President Obama delivers his third State of the Union Address (Evan Vucci/AP)

In a brave but corny attempt at State of the Union humor, Barack Obama bragged Tuesday about rescinding a cockamamie federal regulation that required dairy farmers to spend as much as $10,000 to protect against milk spills. "With a rule like that," the president declared, "I guess it was worth crying over spilt milk."
Actually, Obama's third address to a perpetually divided Congress marked the end of the spilt-milk phase of his presidency. Whatever might have happened during the first three years of the Obama administration (a more aggressive battle against unemployment, a less credulous faith in the president's efforts to built bipartisan bridges), it is too late now for regrets. Barack Obama goes into his reelection campaign with the public record that he has rather than the one that he might have wanted or wished to have.
Little that Obama said during his 66-minute State of the Union address offered new clues about what kind of a president he would be if granted a second term. The print edition of the Wall Street Journal headlined the speech, "Obama Makes Populist Pitch." But Obama, a believer in meritocratic government, did not morph into William Jennings Bryan. In a presidential election year, it is dangerous to overinterpret focus-grouped tonal shifts in Obama's rhetoric as if the political language offered a window into his soul.
The second-term question that fascinates me about Obama--and one that I intend to make an ongoing theme of this column over the next 10 months--is, What has he learned after three years in the Oval Office?
Self-criticism is not normally part of the president's workout routine. But in her revealing new book The Obamas, Jodi Kantor reports that after last summer's debt-ceiling debacle, Obama and Valerie Jarrett, his closest confidant in the White House, "had long, searching conversations about the failure." The president, according to Kantor, would ask other advisers, "What do you think we did wrong?"
For Obama and company, the takeaway lesson was the folly of attempting to negotiate grand compromises with congressional Republicans in the current venomous political environment. Kantor, a New York Times reporter, stresses that Obama's political image was built around his gauzy promises to bridge the chasm between red America and blue America. But now, she writes, "He was faced with the consequences of his overconfidence, his naiveté."
Ryan Lizza, a writer for the New Yorker who obtained hundreds of pages of internal White House memos (mostly on economic policy), offers a similar assessment of Obama this week. Summarizing Obama's political missteps dating back to 2009, Lizza, the magazine's Washington correspondent, writes, "He clung too long to his vision of post-partisanship, even in the face of a radicalized opposition whose stated political goal was his defeat."
Kantor and Lizza are both saying that Obama's entire theory of the presidency was wrong. The bring-us-together motif was a powerful 2008 campaign theme, but it was also Obama's personal governing philosophy, the secret sauce that made him different from other Democrats. Now it has been relegated to the president's greatest-hits album. In the State of the Union, when Obama made a brief, ritualistic appeal to rise above partisanship ("We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction"), he conveyed the sense that he had no expectation that a single resident of Washington would alter his or her behavior.
Reliving the internal economic debates in the White House by reading Kantor and Lizza, I was reminded of what a former Obama adviser told me, "Even now, I am not certain of exactly what he believes on the economy." With no firm moorings as a Keynesian or a deficit hawk, Obama charted a zigzag course on the economy. Lizza identifies a key moment with the economy still misfiring in 2010 when Obama was forced to choose between making the case for a further stimulus or yielding to the clamor for budget cuts. Rather than use his supposedly legendary powers of political persuasion, Obama chose the course of least resistance. He began larding his speeches with lines that Herbert Hoover might have used in 1932: "Americans are making hard choices in their budgets. We've got to tighten our belts in Washington, as well."
In The Obamas, Kantor deftly conveys the First Couple's frustration at their isolation in the White House. The difference is that while Michelle Obama is naturally gregarious, her husband is probably America's first introverted president since Calvin Coolidge. Almost every night after a family dinner, the president retreats to his upstairs office, formally known as the Treaty Room, to review memos. Kantor writes: "Obama almost never made decisions downstairs, around other people ... As a result, many of the important moments of Barack Obama's presidency had no witnesses at all: they took place upstairs, the president silent and alone in his office."
There is no correct decision-making style for a president--neither garrulous meetings nor PowerPoint presentations necessarily achieve better results. But the lonely man in the Treaty Room is a compelling metaphor for the insularity of this presidency. Obama's first chief of staff (Rahm Emanuel) is now mayor of Chicago; his second chief of staff (Bill Daley) was the son of one Chicago mayor and the brother of another. Now, Emanuel, Daley and most of the senior staff (aside from Valerie Jarrett) are gone. In a year when reelection politics trumps governing, it is easy to assume that the current White House configuration under the newly appointed third chief of staff, Jack Lew, is merely a holding pattern until November.
No one is equipped on Inauguration Day for the burdens of the presidency, not even former vice presidents like George H.W. Bush. For all the glib confidence of Mitt Romney with his 59-part economic plan and Newt Gingrich with his since-the-dawn-of-civilization historical vision, either of them would face rocky months and unpleasant surprises in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama is now three years into the world's most grueling ordeal of on-the-job training. As tempting as it may be for Obama to airbrush away his mistakes and to piously blame the hurly-burly of partisan discord in Washington, the nation needs to hear in the months ahead how he thinks a second term would be better or, at least, different.
Obama will probably never be a leader who transforms the nation's political culture. But he does retain the capacity to be a sadder but wiser president.

Walter Shapiro, a special correspondent for the New Republic, is covering his ninth presidential campaign. Follow him on Twitter at @waltershapiroPD. This is part of a series of Yahoo News columns examining what we know about the character and personalities of the 2012 candidates.

For Santorum voters, he's a candidate like them

  By Samuel P. Jacobs | Reuters – Sun, Feb 19, 2012

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) - Sporting his signature sweater vest and telling stories of his coal miner grandfather, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum has struck a chord in the Rust Belt that is helping propel his once long-shot candidacy.

Although he is a millionaire, Santorum has found a common touch that has helped put him atop opinion polls in the industrial states of Michigan and Ohio and raised serious doubts about whether longtime front-runner Mitt Romney can win the Republican nomination to take on President Barack Obama in the November 6 election.

Santorum's portrayal of himself as the blue-collar Republican has managed to overshadow Romney's jobs message in a part of the country troubled by unemployment.
In conversations with nearly a dozen voters preparing to cast ballots for the former Pennsylvania senator in the Ohio and Michigan primaries, not one person volunteered that Santorum was the best candidate to revive American industry.
Instead, voters said they were coming to Santorum's side because his everyman style and Christian faith reminded them of themselves.
"He's basically down-to-earth," said Janice Thomas, 56, of Pickerington, Ohio, who is retired.
"Maybe I think he is more like me," said David Diyani, 58, a pastor at the Vineyard Church in Etna, Ohio. "I feel like I can relate to him."
Santorum's life, though, is far from ordinary.
He spent 12 years in the Senate, known as the "world's most exclusive club," and earned degrees in law and business. He purchased a luxury Audi sedan and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars as a consultant in recent years. Santorum's 2010 salary - $923,000 - placed him squarely within the top 1 percent of income earners in America.
Yet he can still draw a sharp contrast to Romney, a former Massachusetts governor whose fortune is estimated at up to $270 million and who often makes gaffes that show a lack of familiarity with ordinary Americans' struggles.
"I do my own taxes," Santorum said at the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday. "Heck, Romney paid half the taxes I did. He doesn't do his own taxes. Maybe I should hire an accountant in the future."
Santorum's previous criticism of the government bailout of the auto industry in 2009 might be a problem in Michigan where millions of people rely on the car companies. But Romney was a more vocal opponent of the rescue, leaving his rival's opposition to it largely overlooked.
A Detroit News poll, released last week, showed Santorum leading Romney 34 percent to 30 percent in Michigan, the state where Romney was born and where his father was governor. A Quinnipiac poll had Santorum leading Romney 36 percent to 29 percent in Ohio. Michigan's primary is on February 28 and Ohio votes on March 6.

GINGRICH DEFECTORS

Part of the Santorum surge can be accounted for by disaffected supporters of Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

"I decided to support him three weeks ago. Before that, I was for Gingrich," said Steve Izev, 34, of Westerville, Ohio. "The more popular he got, the more I liked him."

Santorum's rise in the polls is also fueled by the same phenomenon that successively lifted Texas Governor Rick Perry, former pizza magnate Herman Cain, and Gingrich to the front of the pack: He is not Romney.
In a Pew Research Center poll released last Monday, 50 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning respondents nationwide said Romney was not a strong conservative.
"They are the 'anybody-but-Romney' people. They are the 'un-Romney' people," said Bill Ballenger, editor of the "Inside Michigan Politics" newsletter. "There is no reason in Michigan that they should be for Santorum. They don't really know who he is really."
A political climate featuring renewed debate over religious freedom, contraception and gay rights has benefited the devoutly
Catholic Santorum among evangelical Republicans.
In the Inside Michigan Poll, Michigan voters who said social issues were most important to them chose Santorum over Romney by 64 percent to 19 percent.
Faith is never far from the Santorum campaign. At a phone bank for Santorum in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the Ten Commandments were nailed to the wall. Paintings of Jesus and Mary hung in a back room.
Supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement praise Santorum for his frequent references to the U.S. Constitution. Santorum campaigns with a pocket-sized version that he removes from his coat for emphasis on the campaign trail.
In a MRG/Inside Michigan Poll released on Wednesday, Santorum bettered Romney among Tea Party supporters by 51 percent to 22 percent.

Female voters are the most resistant to Santorum. In Michigan polls, where Santorum leads Romney among a number of groups, the two are neck and neck in support among women.

In recent weeks, Santorum has drawn controversy with comments about working women and women in the military.

On the campaign trail, Santorum stokes voters' outrage that they are underappreciated by people in power.

"You are not being talked to as adults," Santorum told a Tea Party rally in Columbus on Saturday. "You are being treated as mindless, fly-over-country rubes who don't need to know the truth."

"We used to be called the Silent Majority," said Terry McGiffin, 69, a retired management trainer from Westerville, Ohio, describing Santorum's supporters.

Many supporters confess a lack of familiarity with Santorum's policy prescriptions but say they find him to be the Republican field's most likable entrant.

"I don't know a lot about him," said Gary Henson, 32, the owner of a medical supply company in Columbus. "I like his demeanor. I like his personality."

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Peter Cooney)

What Super Tuesday Means to Four GOP Candidates

By William Browning | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Sun, Feb 19, 2012

In just more than two weeks, several states will hold nominating contests on Super Tuesday for the Republican Party's choice for president in the general election. The Chicago Tribune reports Newt Gingrich is focusing on those states.

Here's why Super Tuesday will be important to the candidates.

* The New York Times reports 11 states will hold some form of elections March 6. That represents the most states in any single day during the entire primary election season for Republicans.

* Alaska, Idaho, North Dakota and Wyoming will hold caucuses. Georgia, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia will have primaries.

*There are 466 delegates to the Republican National Convention at stake. Georgia has the most with 76; Vermont has the fewest with 17. Delegate counts are set by the Republican National Committee.

* Delegate counts are increasingly important as the nominating process moves forward. Through eight races, Mitt Romney has 105 delegates. Rick Santorum is second with 71. Gingrich is third with 29 and Rep. Ron Paul has 18. Any of the candidates can take a big lead with decisive wins on Super Tuesday.

* Romney has won four states, half of the races. Santorum has three victories. Gingrich won South Carolina. Super Tuesday can be a momentum changer for a candidate who can sweep several states.

* Home states will be vital for two candidates. Romney has the Michigan presidential primary Feb. 28, a week before Super Tuesday. Gingrich has Georgia among the Super Tuesday battles.

* Polls open as early as 6 a.m. EST on March 6 in Vermont and Virginia. Party hopefuls in Alaska submit their choices in the presidential preference poll from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. AST, four hours behind EST.

* Polls will be open somewhere from 6 a.m. to midnight EST on March 6. Super Tuesday doesn't just mean a lot of states with results -- it also means long hours for election watchers.

* A total of 1,144 delegates are needed to secure the GOP nomination for president. That person will be officially selected in August at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

William Browning is a research librarian specializing in U.S. politics. Born in St. Louis, Browning is active in local politics and served as a campaign volunteer for President Barack Obama and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Super Tuesday -- Oklahoma Primary Preview

By Roy A. Barnes | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Sun, Feb 19, 2012

The Oklahoma primary is scheduled for March 6. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is scheduled to campaign in the state Monday at Tulsa, while former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum visited earlier this month, drawing a crowd of around 4,000 in that city, according to Tulsa World.

Here is some important information regarding this contest in the Sooner State. 

* 43 delegates are up for grabs, with 40 bound and three unbound. Those candidates who get at least 15 percent support are eligible to share the delegates, according to Free Republic. 

* This is a closed primary. Only registered Republicans can vote. 

* Voters have to have voter identification cards and be at least 18 years old to vote. Those who will be 18 years old within 60 days of the primary could've applied for a voter identification card 25 to 60 days before the primary. Voter registration cards won't be issued within 24 days of the contest. 

* Those who want absentee ballots must submit their request in writing to their county election board, and this year the deadline to submit a request for a ballot by mail is on Feb. 29 at 5 p.m. 

* In-person absentee voting will take place at county election board offices on March 2 (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.), March 3 (8 a.m. to 1 p.m.), and March 5 (8 a.m. to 6 p.m.). 

* Some 46 percent of those Oklahoma citizens surveyed in a 2011 Gallup poll are Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party, while 40 percent are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party. 

* The 2010 U.S. Census shows whites make up the biggest ethnic group in the state with 72.2 percent. The three largest minority groups are Hispanics/Latinos (8.9 percent), American Indian/Alaska Natives (8.6 percent) and blacks (7.4 percent). Males make up less than half the state's population (49.5 percent). 

* Arizona Sen. John McCain won the Oklahoma primary four years ago with 37 percent support. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney finished third with 25 percent, while Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, got 3 percent support. The latter two are the only two major GOP presidential candidates currently running that ran in 2008.

Rick Santorum questions Obama's Christian values

Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum prays during the Ohio Christian Alliance conference Saturday, Feb. 18, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

 

By STEVE PEOPLES | Associated Press – Sat, Feb 18, 2012

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Lashing out on two fronts, Rick Santorum on Saturday questioned President Barack Obama's Christian values and attacked GOP rival Mitt Romney's Olympics leadership as he courted tea party activists and evangelical voters in Ohio, "ground zero" in the 2012 nomination fight.

Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator known for his social conservative views, said Obama's agenda is based on "some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology." He later suggested that the president practices a different kind of Christianity.
"In the Christian church there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity," he said. "If the president says he's a Christian, he's a Christian."
The Obama campaign said the comments represent "the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity."
Santorum was forced on his heels in recent days after a top supporter suggested women use aspirin to prevent pregnancy.

In Ohio, a Super Tuesday prize, he shifted decidedly to offense before friendly crowds. Trailing Romney in money and campaign resources, Santorum is depending on the tea party movement and religious groups to deliver a victory March 6 in the Midwestern contest.

More delegates will be awarded in Ohio than in any other state except Georgia in the opening months of the Republican campaign. Ohio and Georgia are two of the 10 contests scheduled for March 6, a benchmark for the primary campaign that often decides who can continue to the next level.

Santorum has surged in recent opinion polls after capturing Republican caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and a non-binding primary in Missouri on Feb. 7. Several polls have shown him ahead in Romney's native state of Michigan, where primary voters cast ballots a week from Tuesday.
Obama's campaign team has responded by starting to consider the possibility that Santorum rather than Romney could be the Republican nominee. The Chicago-based organization has begun scrutinizing Santorum's past record and asked its Pennsylvania allies to look for information that might be used against Santorum in future ads and speeches.

Even as he criticized Obama, Santorum also went after one of Romney's most promoted achievements — his leadership at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

"One of Mitt Romney's greatest accomplishments, one of the things he talks about most is how he heroically showed up on the scene and bailed out and resolved the problems of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games," Santorum said. "He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake games — in an earmark, in an earmark for the Salt Lake Olympic games."

The Romney campaign does not dispute that congressional earmarks helped save the games. But they noted that Santorum voted for those earmarks, among many others, when he was a senator.
"Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. "There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo."
Santorum used a later appearance before the Ohio Christian Alliance to go after Romney for using his financial advantage as "as a club to beat anyone who gets in his way." But he saved his most pointed criticism for Obama, suggesting that the Democratic president's health care overhaul encouraged abortions by requiring insurance plans to cover prenatal screenings.
"It saves money in health care. Why? Because free pre-natal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled from our society," Santorum said. "That too is part of ObamaCare. Another hidden message as to what Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country."
Santorum planned to finish his day in Akron before heading to Georgia on Sunday. While 63 delegates are at stake in Ohio, Georgia offers 76.
"There's no state that can shout louder. You are the biggest state. You've got the biggest trove of delegates," Santorum told the Brown County Republican Party on Friday night. "This is ground zero. Ohio."
Questions about whether Santorum can sustain his rise in the polls come amid signs of stress within his campaign, mainly disorganization. Romney's machine, coupled with new scrutiny for Santorum's view of social issues as well as governmental policies, will give Santorum little margin for error.

As an example, one misstep by a Santorum supporter kept the former senator off message at times for two days.

Foster Friess, the main donor behind Santorum's "super PAC," created a stir Thursday when he related on MSNBC an old joke about how aspirin used to be a method for birth control. "Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception," Friess said with a grin. "The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly."

Friess apologized Friday in a blog post. But Santorum was repeatedly forced to distance himself from his surrogate's comments, which Santorum described as "a bad joke." The comments drew unwanted attention to Santorum's own musings about contraception and women's issues.

"Santorum has been in the position of explaining on all of these issues. And when you're explaining in politics, you're losing," said Phil Musser, a GOP strategist who doesn't work for either campaign.

Santorum defends 'theology' remark, Hitler inference; blames media

5
hours

ago

By NBC’s Andrew Rafferty

Uploaded by freedomsfool2009 on Feb 19, 2012 UPDATE: This just popped up on YouTube and is one of his speeches yesterday from which the 'theology' comments were taken from. The so-called controversial part comes just before the 5 min mark, and it's clear in his comments that he only mentioned the Bible because he said the word 'theology' simply to note that he wasn't talking about Biblical theologies. But of course the MSM twisted this to mean an attack on Obama and his so-called Christian faith when it wasn't even about that.


STEUBENVILLE, Ohio -- Facing newfound scrutiny as a frontrunner in the Republican presidential race, Rick Santorum today fired back at national media who he says have given undue attention to comments he made this weekend questioning the president's theology. He also defended comments about World War Two that some saw as linking Hitler and President Obama.
On Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, Santorum told a Tea Party crowd, "It's not about you. It's not about you. It's not about your quality of life. It's not about your job. It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology, but no less a theology. "

But in front of a crowd of more than 500 people here on Monday, he said the comments were not meant to question the president's religious beliefs, rather a critique of what he called the "extreme" environmental regulations of the Obama administration.

"I referred to it the other day,” he said, “and I got criticized by some of our less than erudite members of the national press corps.”
When pressed by reporters after Saturday's comments, the former Pennsylvania senator maintained he did not mean to suggest that the president is not a Christian. But he did say the president is trumping religious freedoms.
"You may want to call it a theology; you may want to call it secular values,” Santorum said. “Whatever you want to call it, it’s a different moral values. And the president of the United States is exercising his values and trumping the values of the church.”
Today, Santorum did not use the word "theology," instead attacking the president's "ideology."
He was also asked about comments made last night in Georgia that compared America now to Europe during World War Two.
“I’m sure some of you have ancestors who were part of the Greatest Generation,” Santorum said last night. “Why were they the Greatest Generation -- because they were better than we were? Smarter? More courageous? They were they greatest generation, because when their country needed them, at a time of great peril, they met the challenge. Your country needs you. It’s not as clear a challenge. Obviously, World War Two was pretty obvious. But at some point, they knew. Remember, the greatest generation for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness.
“While our closest ally Britain was being bombed and leveled, while Japan was spreading its cancer all throughout Southeast Asia … America sat in 1940 when France fell, December of 1941…Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, well, you know it’ll get better. Yeah, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This will be okay. I mean, yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy after a while, after a while you find out some things about this guy over in Europe who’s not so good of a guy after all. You know what … we’ll just take care of our own problems. We’ll just get our families off to work and our kids off to school and we’ll be okay. So with the optimistic spirit of America, sometimes, sometimes it’s not okay. It’ll be harder for this generation to figure it out. There’s no cataclysmic event.”

Santorum defended the comments today. "It’s a World War Two metaphor,” Santorum said. “It's one I've used 100 times."

In response to whether he meant to compare the president to Hitler, Santorum said, "No, of course not."
Those comments were not the only ones from the weekend that the former Pennsylvania senator found himself explaining. In front of the Ohio Christian Alliance, he said the 2010 health-care bill signed by the president encourages aborting children with disabilities by requiring prenatal testing that can detect if a child will not be born healthy. It is an assertion he did not back down from.
"I was criticized for making the comment about prenatal testing when it came to amniocentesis,” he said. “Amniocenteses are done by-in-large later in pregnancy whether the child in the womb has a disability.” And he claimed, “[A]s we all know, 90 percent of Down Syndrome children in this country are aborted once the mother and father find out that that child is going to be less than what they wanted it to be.”
The candidate, now surging in the polls, has focused almost all his attention on the White House and not so much as mentioning chief rival Mitt Romney. Stumping in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio, Santorum has focused his message on manufacturing and environmental issues like hydrofracking and the Keystone pipeline. Both are issues in which Santorum argues the president has ceded to environmentalists, costing the country jobs.
Just 40 miles outside his hometown of Pittsburgh today, Santorum played up his blue-collar roots growing up as the grandson of a coal miner.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we need someone who understands, who comes from the coal fields, who comes from the steel mills, who understands what average working people in America need to be able to provide for themselves and their families,” he said.

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Obama takes tougher stance on higher education

By KIMBERLY HEFLING | Associated Press – 8 hrs ago

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Access to college has been the driving force in federal higher education policy for decades. But the Obama administration is pushing a fundamental agenda shift that aggressively brings a new question into the debate: What are people getting for their money?

Students with loans are graduating on average with more than $25,000 in debt. The federal government pours $140 billion annually into federal grants and loans. Unemployment remains high, yet there are projected shortages in many industries with some high-tech companies already complaining about a lack of highly trained workers.

Meanwhile, literacy among college students has declined in the last decade, according to a commission convened during the George W. Bush administration that said American higher education has become "increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive." About 40 percent of college students at four-year schools aren't graduating, and in two-year programs, only about 40 percent of students graduate or transfer, according to the policy and analysis group College Measures.

College drop-outs are expensive, and not just for the individual. About a fifth of full-time students who enroll at a community college do not return for a second year, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to an analysis released last fall by the American Institutes for Research.

There's been a growing debate over whether post-secondary schools should be more transparent about the cost of an education and the success of graduates. President Barack Obama has weighed in with a strong "yes."

During his State of the Union address, Obama put the higher education on notice: "If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down," he said. "Higher education can't be a luxury— it's an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford."
He wants to slightly reduce federal aid for schools that don't control tuition costs and shift it to those that do. He also has proposed an $8 billion program to train community college students for high-growth industries that would provide financial incentives to programs that ensured their trainees find work. Both proposals need congressional approval.
At the same time, the administration is developing both a "scorecard" for use in comparing school statistics such as graduation rates as well as a "shopping sheet" students would receive from schools they applied to with estimates of how much debt they might graduate with and estimated future payments on student loans.

American's higher education system has long been the backbone of much of the nation's success, and there's no doubt that a college degree is valuable. It's now projected that students with a bachelor's degree will earn a million more dollars over their lifetime than students with only a high school diploma, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says.

But Obama's statement to Congress jolted the higher education establishment, which believes that college isn't just to create foot soldiers for industry and that the use of measured outcomes would hurt the humanities, meaning fewer students will turn to Shakespeare and instead study engineering, said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. The community has already been reeling over an earlier administration decision to require career college programs — many of which are at for-profit institutions — to better prepare students for "gainful employment" or risk losing federal aid.
"It's the notion that the ...federal government will begin to say we want to know what we're paying for and we want to make sure that people don't pay for education programs that take them nowhere, especially if the program is supposed to get them a job, we want it to get them a job, Carnevale said.
Some fear that Obama might want to apply the "gainful employment" standards to traditional four-year degree programs. Robert Moran, director of federal relations at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, said reporting requires time and resources, and it's even more difficult to gauge the success of a graduate with an English degree than someone with a very specific career certificate.
Duncan said in an interview he doesn't see a big need to go in that direction now, although he does think it's important to track factors such as graduation rates and tuition costs. He said he tracked his graduates while serving as chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools and noticed that some universities were graduating them at rates of 75 percent or more, while others were graduating them at a small fraction of that.
"Colleges aren't too dissimilar to high schools. Some have done a great job building cultures around completion and obtainment and some haven't," Duncan said.
Historically, policy conversations have centered on getting students into college. Duncan said graduating is just as important.
"To be real clear, I think that's been the problem with federal policy in the past is 100 percent has been focused on the front end on inputs, that's clearly important, but that's the starting point. That gets you in the game. The goal isn't to get to the game, the goal is to get to the finish line," Duncan said.
Obama isn't the first president to encourage dialogue on making higher education more affordable and accountable. In addition to convening a commission to study higher education in America, Bush's administration issued grants to states to link transcript data with other records to better track the success of graduates from public institutions. The Obama administration has continued the program.
But Obama is taking the conversation to another level. That doesn't mean, however, he's abandoning the issue of accessibility. His administration has expanded the availability of Pell grants, supported a tax credit for tuition costs and is attempting to make it easier for some graduates to pay back loans.
Experts say some of the challenges in higher education result from too many students entering the doors without basic math and English skills. There's also the question of how to measure how effective colleges are and whether tuition increases are appropriate — especially for public institutions facing dramatic budget cuts.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the former president of Mayland Community College, said the issues raised by Obama are being addressed at the state and local level, where she said they should be handled, and that many schools are coming up with innovative ways to cut costs and to find ways to work with local industry. As an example, she recalled developing, while a community college president, a course in supervisory training after local industry sought it.

"All of these things the president talks about can be done at the local and state level, and are being done at the local and state level," Foxx said. "It isn't the role of government to guarantee somebody a good job after they graduate from college or community college."

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., takes a different view.

"Right now, the information about the potential of various careers, the track records of colleges and the like is essentially strewn all over the countryside," said Wyden, who authored a bill on making college costs more transparent.

He added, "I think students and their parents are now saying in addition to accessibility, we want to wring the maximum value out of every dollar we're spending on education."

_____

Follow Kimberly Hefling on Twitter at http://twitter.com/khefling

_____

College Measures: http://collegemeasures.org/

American Institutes for Research: http://www.air.org/

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

American Association of State Colleges and Universities: http://www.aascu.org/

Rep. Virginia Foxx: http://foxx.house.gov/

Sen. Ron Wyden: http://wyden.senate.gov/

‘My Child Was Not Stillborn!’: Rick Santorum Gets Heated With Bob Schieffer During Prenatal Testing Discussion

The Blaze – Sun, Feb 19, 2012

Rick Santorum clashed with CBS "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer Sunday, which included a tense exchange about the death of the GOP presidential candidate's infant son.

After asking Santorum about his comments regarding President Barack Obama's "theology," Schieffer seized on remarks Santorum had made about prenatal testing the day before.

"One of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing in every insurance policy in America," Santorum said during a campaign stop in Ohio Saturday. "Why? Because it saves money in health care. Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society."

Schieffer asked:"You sound like you're saying the purpose of prenatal care is to cause people to have abortions...I think any number of people would say that's not the purpose at all."

"The bottom line is that a lot of prenatal tests are done to identify deformities in utero and the customary procedure is to encourage abortion," Santorum said. Clarifying that he had only referred to prenatal testing, not prenatal care, added: "We’re talking about specifically prenatal testing and specifically amniocentesis, which is a -- which is a procedure that creates a risk of miscarriage when you have it and is done for the purposes of identifying maladies of a child in the womb, which in many cases, in fact, most cases, physicians recommend, particularly if there’s a problem, recommend abortion.”

He continued, getting increasingly passionate: "90 percent of Down Syndrome children in America are aborted. So to suggest where does that come from? I have a child who has Trisomy 18. Almost 100 percent of Trisomy 18 child are encouraged to be aborted. So I know what I'm talking about here."

"I know you know what you're talking about, I know that well, I know you also had another child that was stillborn," Schieffer said.

" -- no he was not stillborn, hold on Bob, whoa whoa whoa," Santorum said.

"Just a minute, just a minute," Schieffer said, "Didn't you want to know -- "

"Just hold on," Santorum interjected. "My child was not stillborn -- my child was born alive. He lived two hours and by the way, prenatal testing was done, we had a sonogram, they detected a problem and yes, the doctor said you should consider an abortion. This is typical Bob. This is what goes on in medical rooms around the country. Prenatal testing, amniocentesis, does in fact result more often than not result in abortion."

Schieffer, first acknowledging that Santorum was "absolutely right" about his son, asked Santorum whether he was advocating to "turn our back on science?"

Santorum said no, but he disagreed with a government mandate.

"People have the right to do it but to have the government force people to provide it free just to me has -- is a bit loaded," he said.

The death of Santorum's infant son has been raised before during the campaign: Fox News' Alan Colmes apologized after saying the former Pennsylvania senator and his wife took the body of the two-hour-old baby home and "played with it."

Watch below, via Mediaite:

Ron Paul’s ‘Fascist System’ Statement Draws Cheers

By William Browning | Yahoo! Contributor Network – 22 hrs ago

Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, made a campaign stop in Missouri at Kansas City's historic Union Station. The Kansas City Star reports around 1,000 people attended the rally. The placement and timing of the rally were no mistake, even though Missouri's caucus is four weeks away.

Paul's speech was rare in terms of GOP presidential hopefuls in Missouri.

* The Texas representative said, according to the Associated Press, "We've slipped away from a true Republic. Now we're slipping into a fascist system where it's a combination of government and big business and authoritarian rule and the suppression of the individual rights of each and every American citizen."

* Paul also touted entitlement programs for Americans must end because the government has no money to spend on them. Once again, he used the word "revolution" when talking about his campaign.

* Paul received more than 30,000 votes in Missouri's primary on Feb. 7. He finished in third place out of three major candidates since Newt Gingrich wasn't on the ballot. The votes from that primary don't count as Republicans chose to caucus March 17 so they can choose delegates.

* The Missouri caucus is in four weeks. Kansas holds its caucus March 10. A stop in Kansas City supports both states.

* Missouri Republicans were meeting at an annual Lincoln Days gathering not far from Union Station. Some Republicans slipped out of the banquet to hear Paul speak. Kansas GOP leaders were also meeting on the Kansas side of the border at the same time as Paul's rally. Although the national candidate claimed he didn't know about the previously set gatherings, his aides did, according to CBS News.

* Among four mainstream candidates, Paul is the only one who has yet to win a nominating contest. His best showing has been in Maine, where he lost to Mitt Romney by fewer than 200 votes and just 3 percent. The New York Times reports Paul has 18 delegates out of the 1,144 needed to secure the nomination at the Republican National Convention in August. Romney leads with 105 delegates, not even 10 percent toward winning the nationwide nomination for his party.

* Missouri has 52 delegates at stake when GOP members caucus. Kansas has been allocated 40 delegates for its caucus event. Paul's campaign stop is one stepping stone to try to earn more delegates towards his goal of winning the right to take on incumbent Barack Obama in the November general election.

William Browning, a lifelong Missouri resident, writes about local and state issues for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. Born in St. Louis, Browning earned his bachelor's degree in English from the University of Missouri. He currently resides in Branson.