Rick Santorum will never be President.

George Gallup, pride of Jefferson, Iowa, virtually invented modern political polling. So, perhaps one should take heed of the recent Gallup/USA Today poll, which found that former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum leads President Obama 49%-46% in a national poll and leads 50%-45% in a survey of the swing states of Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Despite this survey, I am going to go ahead and call it. Rick Santorum will never be president of the United States of America. There are 4 reasons why Senator Santorum’s campaign is doomed to failure.


First, Senator Santorum has a Google problem. In 2003 Senator Santorum told the Associated Press that homosexual acts were akin to bestiality and pedophilia. This angered, among others, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage. Savage sponsored a contest with his readers to use the word to define santorum as something sex-related. Almost 9 years later, if one googles santorum, one fo the first, if not the first hit, one gets is the definition. Because he is apparently unable to figure out another way around this Google problem, Santorum begged Google to remove the definition (thereby inspiring more stories about the problem). Google said no. As far as I know, America has never elected a president whose name is associated with a sex act or, in the case of Senator Santorum, the by-product of a sex act.

Second, Senator Santorum's own state doesn't like him. It really, really, doesn't like him. As mentioned above, Pennsylvania is a swing state. When Rick Santorum ran for re-election in 2000, he won but received less than 50% of the vote. When Senator Santorum ran for re-election in 2006, he was trounced. He lost to Bob Casey by nearly 18 percentage points. This disparity is the largest margin of defeat of a sitting Republican senator in history.

Granted, 2006 was a down year for the Republican Party. However, consider that in the 2006 Pennsylvania GOP primary both Santorum and the gubernatorial candidate were running unopposed. Santorum received 22,000 fewer votes that the gubernatorial candidate. Put another way, 22,000 Pennsylvania Republican voters declined to vote for him when he was the only candidate. Candidates who can't get re-elected in their own statewide elections are highly unlikely to get elected to higher office.

Third, Senator Santorum doesn't understand what parents want for their kids. This week, Senator Santorum called President Obama a “snob” because, according to the Senator, “President Obama said he wants everybody in America to go to college.” As an initial matter, as the Washington Post points out, the President didn’t say he wanted everybody to go to college. Instead, in 2009, President Obama suggested that people should get at least one year or more of “higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.” So, the President was not saying that he wants everyone to go to college. Moreover, when he was in office, Senator Santorum was “committed to ensuring the every Pennsylvanian has access to higher education.” Some might suggest that lying about what the President said, and perhaps downplaying one’s prior commitment to higher education is shameful. It seems fairly standard politics to me.

In any event, the reason the statement shows Santorum won’t be president is I doubt there is a parent alive who doesn’t want their kids to go to college or at least get some form of job training beyond high school. That isn’t being a snob. Wanting better for one’s kids is an essential part of the American dream. The reason that people are concerned about the high cost of higher education is because they think the high cost might make part of the American dream unobtainable. Making suggestions that is snobbish to want kids to go to college isn’t a viable path to victory.

Fourth, Senator Santorum apparently thinks a theocratic state is a good idea. Senator Santorum told ABC News that then presidential candidate’s John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech where he tried to reassure protestant voters that as president, he wouldn’t take orders from Rome made Senator Santorum want to “throw up.” According to Senator Santorum, President Kennedy’s speech was:

trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can’t come to the public square and argue against it, but now we’re going to turn around and say we’re going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square.

As David Greenberg at Slate points out, Senator Santorum misunderstands what President Kennedy. However, if this was all about not understanding a speech I could have labeled the point “Senator Santorum is an idiot.” That isn't my point and this is the part of Senator Santorum’s remarks that caught my eye:

I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

One might contrast this view with those of Pope John Paul II whose 1980 decree that Catholic priests could not serve in elective office ended the congressional career of Massachusetts congressman Fr. Robert Drinan and derailed the return of office campaign of former Wisconsin congressman Fr. Robert Cornell. This suggests that the Pope thought there was at least some limit to the influence and involvment of religion on the operation of the state.

As an aside, one surprising thing that I learned from researching this post is that Republican pundit John McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Group is a former Jesuit priest. He left the priesthood rather than give up a job writing speeches for President Richard Nixon when ordered to do so by the Jesuits. I will leave it to others to ponder the fact that the two Democratic priests complied with the Pope's order while the Republican priest left the priesthood.

In any event, from his quote I take it that Senator Santorum believes that religious groups or officials should have influence and involvement in the operation of government. He says this, of course, because he wants his religious group to have influence and involvement in government. Imagine, however, the protests that would take place if, for example, a Muslim candidate for president took that position. Such a position would doom that candidate’s electoral chances. It is the same here. After all, the various schisms in Christianity exist because someone got tired of another religious group telling them what to do.

Given these four issues, I think it is safe to put Senator Santorum in the same box as Herman Cain, Thaddeus McCotter, and Newt Gingrich.