Rick Santorum, Working-Class Hero or Free-Market Fanatic?

[SunsetDreams]

Rick Santorum, working-class hero or free-market fanatic?
The former Pennsylvania senator makes Romney look like the plutocrat he is, but he has no solutions for the economy
By Joan Walsh

*snip*


But whether they’re led by Santorum or Romney, Republicans are not going to suddenly start responding to the needs of the working class, white or otherwise. And certainly not working-class families. A generation of sanctimonious GOP talk about “family” ignores the fact that progressive legislation helped create the family as we knew it from World War II through the ’70s (which is what GOP family values folks hark back to). Certainly it was progressive reformers who scratched and clawed to carve out what we now think of as “childhood,” once reserved for wealthy children, by passing child-labor and compulsory education laws (which Gingrich and the modern GOP, by the way, apparently question). With all due respect to Santorum’s late grandfather, unions protected by liberalized labor-organizing and worker safety laws made dangerous mine work safer and pushed many struggling working-class families into the secure middle class.

It was the New Deal and postwar liberalism that created the conditions to allow at least a couple of generations of white working- and middle-class women to stay home with their children. And it was the erosion of that postwar wages and benefits social compact, probably more than feminism, that sent women surging into the workplace, whether or not they might have wanted to be home with their kids. Unfortunately, the white working class has ignored most of this, undermining its own well-being by embracing the anti-government politics of paranoia and racial division espoused by the modern GOP.

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So I would love to see a Santorum-Obama matchup, not only because I believe the president would clean his clock. Santorum boasted Tuesday night that he was elected to the Senate by the Pennsylvania voters Obama talked about “who cling to their guns and their Bibles,” without mentioning that those voters kicked him to the curb 58-41 for Democrat Bob Casey in 2006. It’s silly to depict Obama as the creature of Harvard Law or an out-of-touch elitist, as Brooks and Santorum attempt to. The president grew up with a struggling single mom and her middle-class parents. I’d like to see him match his family values against Santorum’s any day. An election that was all about the struggles of working- and middle-class Americans would also ensure that the fighting populist Obama we’ve seen in the last four months continues to suppress the bipartisan, deficit-cutting Obama we saw too much until this September.

More here: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/04/rick_santorum_working_class_hero_or_free_market_fanatic/singleton/

[Angry Dragon]

1. santorum is no hero to working people

I ran across a quote from earlier tonight stating
that he thought it was important for children to grow up poor
so they would not feel entitled to government help

also with him near the top his ethics problems will start coming out
such as the state of PA paying for his childrens' cyber education
while they were living in Virginia ..... the amount was $100,000
and other nice things

[SunsetDreams]

3. Exactly, "Poor Children Should Suffer So They Don’t Feel So Entitled" (link)

http://santorumexposed.com/?p=449

Santorum: Poor Children Should Suffer So They Don’t Feel So Entitled
January 2, 2012 57 Comments
We just found this Think Progress video from November in which Rick says that poor children should have to suffer hunger and other ills to prevent them from developing the sense of entitlement that comes from relying on government social programs.
As Rick says in the video, “suffering, if you’re a Christian, suffering is part of life.” Is that what Jesus meant by “suffer the little children”?

(Video at link)

[SunsetDreams]

4. and this: Santorum Surge Brings Ethics Questions

Rick Santorum's powerful finish in the Iowa caucus is bringing fresh attention to his tenure in Congress, including ethics questions that dogged him about a preferred mortgage he received from a bank run by campaign donors, and federal funds that went to a real estate developer who backed his charity.

One of the top donors to Santorum's charity was also the beneficiary of an $8 million Santorum-sponsored federal earmark, according to published reports. Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who filed an ethics complaint against Santorum in 2006 on behalf of a watchdog group, said her organization's website received a tidal wave of visitors in the past 24 hours, and in an interview she said she believes people will discover that the GOP presidential contender is "hardly the moral paragon he purports to be."

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/santorum-surge-brings-ethics-questions/story?id=15287424#.TwVIYNSJfLd

[golfguru]

2. why not look follow countries instead of individuals

Observe which countries are flourishing. Which have low unemployment, low national debts, and good living standards.

Follow those countries examples. Stay away from models such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, & Italy. I like Singapore and Germany.

[SunsetDreams]

5. .