These days I don’t know which fact is more ridiculous: that Rick Santorum actually thought the media would let him win the nomination or that many conservative commentators consider him electable.
Pushed into the blogosphere by Mediate, MSNBC/Nation Marxist Chris Hayes found a video from Right Wing Watch that actually has more bark than bite:
On today’s Up with Chris Hayes, the host unveiled a 2008 talk by Rick Santorum that could possibly be the only thing to make him lose the American religious vote: one in which he condemns “mainline protestantism,” of all things, and claims it is now “gone from the world of Christianity.” Needless to say, these sorts of words coming from a Catholic cannot inspire confidence in the sort of voter that looked askance at John F. Kennedy for being a Papist.
The speech is from a 2008 event at Ave Maria College in Florida, where Santorum notes that America was founded upon a Christian philosophy but “the Judeo-Christian ethic was a Protestant one.” “We look at the shape of mainline protestantism in this country and it is in shambles, it is gone from the world of Christianity as I see it,” he concludes. Hayes finds these comments in the hands of Santorum somewhat less damaging than, say, if Mitt Romney or President Obama would have said them, but nonetheless toxic to a country where mainline Protestantism is so dominant, and where conservative thought of Santorum’s genre in particular is so dominant.
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The giddy panelists enthuse over the clip until Reihan Salam translates Santorum’s conservative ideas for them. This statement won’t drop like a bomb into the primaries, alienating Santorum’s supporters. This critique of Protestant America will ring true with non-Catholics. My conservative Christian friends and colleagues regularly lament other denominations’ watered down variants of Protestantism. They feel no insult.
Team Santorum can explain this to primary voters who speak conservatanese. But to the swing voters who attend the non-Evangelical churches he attacks?
Certainly more and more poisonous material like this awaits, freeze dried and stored away in some Right Wing Watch armory…
Related: See Rick Moran’s The GOP’s Problem with Sex Could Cost Them in November
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