Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Rick Santorum

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934158

  ISBN 978-1-62157-241-1

  Published in the United States by

  Regnery Publishing

  A Salem Communications Company

  Washington, DC

  www.Regnery.com

  10987654321

  Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. Write to Director of Special Sales, Regnery Publishing, One Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001, for information on discounts and terms, or call (202) 216-0600.

  Distributed to the trade by

  Perseus Distribution

  250 West 57th Street

  New York, NY 10107

  Blue Collar Conservatives is dedicated to all the hardworking moms and dads who both pursued their dreams and sacrificed them for their children to forge the greatest country in the history of the world.

  To Karen, Elizabeth, John, Daniel, Sarah Maria, Peter, Patrick, and Bella for helping me with this book. You are my American Dream.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1:Blue Collar Conservatives Really Did Build It

  Chapter 2:Restoring the American Dream for Workers

  Chapter 3:A GOP That Stands Up for Everyone

  Chapter 4:Holes in the Boat

  Chapter 5:Renewing the Pursuit of Happiness

  Chapter 6:Government Cannot Read You a Bedtime Story

  Chapter 7:Replace Obamacare Before It’s Too Late

  Chapter 8:Innovating and Personalizing Education

  Chapter 9:Giving the American Worker a Fighting Chance

  Chapter 10:Raising Hope instead of Taxes

  Chapter 11:Believing in America’s Future

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  It was a night I will never forget, November 6, 2012. Another election night, something we had experienced a dozen times throughout the 2012 Republican primary season, only this time we were actually rooting for Mitt Romney to win. I sat with my wife, Karen, and our children at home waiting to see if the exit polls we had seen earlier in the day were going to play out. I felt uncomfortable not being in the action, but mainly I felt frustrated that the two campaigns ended up fighting over mostly minor issues, distracting America from the questions that made this the most consequential election since the Civil War.

  Dramatic, dangerous changes are taking place in America, and this election should have been about them. One such change is a fundamental restructuring of Washington’s relationship with the American people. Our freedom as individuals, families, businesses, and communities is being drastically curtailed by imperious bureaucrats who think they know better than we do how to run our lives. The botched implementation of Obamacare has given us a glimpse of what happens when these grand government schemes inevitably fail. People get hurt.

  In 2012, so much was at stake, yet so little was debated. For more than a century, the growing left wing of the Democratic Party has been pursuing a secularist and socialist agenda for America. Their method is class warfare—pitting one group of Americans against another. It’s the rich versus the poor, men versus women, the 1 percent versus the 99, the insurance company versus the uninsured, and the natural gas driller versus his neighbors. They don’t want to improve on America’s success, correct its mistakes, and help it live up to its promise. They think that something is wrong with America at its core—that it needs to be “fundamentally transformed.”1 Their progress was slow but steady until they achieved their breakthrough in 2008 with the election of Barack Obama and supermajority Democrat control of both houses of Congress.

  After four years of unchecked “transformation,” Americans should have had a chance for second thoughts. But President Obama’s opponent was the wrong choice to lead the charge against the Democrats’ radical agenda. Governor Romney is as fine a man as I know. I supported him for president in 2008. But I also knew that in 2012, the political climate was very different. The challenger to President Obama couldn’t be a wealthy financier who supported the Wall Street bailouts at a time when the “Occupy” movement and the president had successfully created a narrative for Middle America of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. Even worse than a nominee who would be on the defensive against the president’s greatest weapon, class warfare, Romney was, as I often repeated during the campaign, “uniquely unqualified”2 to press our best argument against the president—Obamacare. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed the law that paved the way for Obamacare, the focal point of a conservative movement that rallied the country in 2010 to a historic victory in the House of Representatives.

  That is why Karen and I decided that I should run for president. I felt called to make the case that the establishment candidate could not win on both Obamacare and the 99 percent. I would campaign as a grandson of immigrants who didn’t come from money. I would campaign for the working man. I would campaign on America’s first principles of faith, family, freedom, and opportunity, which are the antidote to President Obama’s secular statism.

  What kept me in the race as I sat at the bottom of almost every national poll were the people I met, particularly in the early caucus state of Iowa. I visited all ninety-nine counties and did about 381 town hall meetings and speeches in that state over the course of 2011. The average attendance at these local gatherings was about twelve, including me, so I really got to know people. What struck me was their passion and concern for our country. They encouraged me to keep fighting, because they believed what I believed.

  The conventional wisdom in the spring of 2012 was that President Obama would be defeated.3 The economy was stagnant. “Hope and change” had provided no hope and only change for the worse. In a contest between Obama and “anybody but Obama,” Obama was going to lose.

  The pundits, as it turned out, were wrong. “Anybody but Obama” wasn’t good enough. It mattered whom the Republicans nominated from both a policy and personal perspective. The critical swing voters—middle- and lower-middle–income Americans from industrial and rural communities with generally conservative values—swung for Obama or stayed home. Ironically, they were the ones who were being hurt the most by Obama’s failed economic policies. They generally don’t look to the government for help. But our party didn’t seem to care about them. After four years of economic insecurity, what hope did we offer them that they would be better off with a Republican president?

  Mitt Romney’s résumé as a venture capitalist didn’t help him here. I defended him in the primaries when others were attacking his Wall Street deals, because people like him create efficient and profitable companies. Venture capitalists nurtured Apple, Intel, and Google. And there’s nothing wrong with making money and living well in America. Mitt Romney is a great businessman, problem solver, and manager, and I can’t fault him for running on his strengths.

  But those strengths played into Obama’s hands in 2012. The Democrats and their allies in the media were determined to turn the election, using the politics of envy, into the decisive battle of the great class war. And the Republican establishment obliged by
nominating what turned out to be the perfect opponent.

  After the election, many Americans were polled on why they voted as they did. Out of all the data and analyses, one fact jumped out at me: those who voted for a candidate because he “cared more” about people like them chose President Obama over Governor Romney by a margin of 63 percent.4 Even if you win the argument on political philosophy, leadership, and managerial competence, it’s hard to win an election when most voters don’t think you care about them.

  As filtered through the media, Romney was wrongly portrayed to America as an aloof Wall Street millionaire—like the guy “who fired your dad,” as Jon Stewart put it.5 Obama, by contrast, was the one who cared. The Americans I met all across the country were worried about the economy, the pace of change in the workplace, and the coarsening culture. They liked it when the president talked about their plight, but they didn’t like his remedy of government handouts. Romney offered the solutions that Republicans have espoused for more than thirty years: cut taxes, slash government, and everyone will be fine. Low taxes and lean government are good macroeconomic policy, but it’s hard for ordinary people to see how that policy will affect them and their families. Republicans like to quote John F. Kennedy’s observation that “a rising tide lifts all boats,”6 but Romney never got across how he would help the people—and there are millions—whose boats are full of holes.

  In my campaign for president, I traveled to corners of this country that national politicians rarely visit, including rural communities with double-digit unemployment. I was down on the Gulf Coast where they are still recovering from Katrina and in the mill towns of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin where manufacturers are fighting for their lives against foreign competition and a hostile federal government. I was in the oil and gas fields where they’re drilling as fast as they can in the fear that President Obama might shut them down. That’s what he did to the coal towns I visited in Ohio, West Virginia, and Illinois.

  The folks I heard from most in my travels were hardworking Americans worried about losing their jobs. Their towns are the America I grew up in and where I’ve spent most of my life. This is the proud America that once thrived and is now tragically broken and largely forgotten in today’s political debates. In these places, millions of blue-jeaned workers have been left behind and see little hope for the future. Skilled laborers who once had good salaries and pensions now seek part-time jobs at big-box retail stores or have even been enticed onto public assistance.

  I talked to many people on the campaign trail who just want to hear there is still opportunity for a good life in America. They seek some stability and security for themselves and opportunity for their children to go to good schools, get decent jobs, and build families of their own. They want reassurance that despite all of the terrible economic news and pain, the American Dream is still alive for them. It seems to them that neither party hears them. They don’t want more government benefits, and they don’t want to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, to grab the brass ring at the top of some corporation or firm. They want someone out there to lift up the people who work a shift, go home to volunteer at the animal shelter, church, or PTA, spend time with their families, and enjoy their leisure time. They want someone to recognize that they are just as important to the success of our economy and culture as the entrepreneur or corporate executive who puts in all of his time at work. We must be the party for them, because America will fail without them.

  The United States must do everything it can to nurture the inventors and entrepreneurs who are the creative spirits of our free economy, and here the case for Republican policies is strong. But that’s not enough. We Republicans must show the unemployed, the underemployed, and the struggling worker that we are on their side and want their support. We cannot forget the blue collar conservatives who are the backbone of this country. We have an obligation to restore the American Dream for them and their families. And until we internalize this as a party, we will continue to lose national elections.

  Republicans are waking up to some startling new realities in American politics. The demographic profile that propelled them to victory in five out of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988—white and married voters—is an ever-smaller portion of the population. If the ethnic and racial composition of the United States were the same as it was in 1992, Mitt Romney, who carried the white vote by more than 20 percentage points, would have beaten Barack Obama in a landslide. We’ve been using a badly outdated playbook.

  My friend and former colleague at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Peter Wehner has assembled for his fellow conservatives a mound of demographic and electoral data that makes our political challenges stark and unmistakable.7 “Republicans,” he concludes, “at least when it comes to presidential elections, have a winning message for an electorate that no longer exits.”

  The minority share of the vote in 2012 was 28 percent, more than twice what it was when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992.8 If the minority share of the vote reaches 30 percent of the total in 2016, as expected, and if the Democratic candidate carries 80 percent of that vote, the Democrat will need only 37 percent of the white vote to win.9

  I don’t like electoral calculations based on race, and I’m happy to leave racial politics to the other side. The American Dream should be color-blind, and so should our politics. The fact remains, however, that unless the Republican Party broadens its appeal to minorities, its prospects are grim.

  Still, the Republicans didn’t lose the presidential election of 2012 only because blacks and Hispanics and Asians voted against them. As many as six million blue collar voters stayed home from the polls, and there’s good reason to believe that a large majority of them would have voted Republican if they had voted.10 Those voters—many of them in the rural and small-town Rust Belt—didn’t hear anything in the Republican message to inspire their confidence in our party to make their lives better. If anything, they detected a note of contempt.

  The demographer Joel Kotkin, a refreshingly clear-eyed observer of American politics though by no means a conservative, offers the best advice to the Republican Party I’ve heard: remember Lincoln. Kotkin scolds us for having “confused being the party of plutocrats with being the party of prosperity,” and I think he’s closer to the truth than we’d like to admit. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, came from the ranks of working Americans and pursued an economic agenda that had their interests at heart. Whether it was expanding the country’s railroads or passing the Homestead Act, his policies “helped people achieve their aspirations.”11

  If we really become the party of opportunity for working Americans, we’ll go a long way toward solving the problem of minority voters’ estrangement from us. The elites of the Democratic Party, I’m sorry to say, have raised the politics of racial and ethnic division to an art form. The way for Republicans to win the votes of minorities is not to out-pander the Democrats but simply to appeal to them as working Americans who want to take part in the American Dream—a dream that shouldn’t be the exclusive property of Ivy Leaguers and investment bankers.

  Restoring the American Dream does not mean going back in time. Conservatives are often criticized for their romanticized view of the good old days prior to the culture shock that was the 1960s. Having said that, let’s make no mistake about it—the greatest threat to the average American’s achieving his dream today is a dysfunctional culture. To heal our nation, we must promote the ideals upon which American culture has thrived for over two centuries—ideals based on timeless truths. Our challenge is to redeem and recommit to the timeless truths that set America on a course to greatness and to formulate policies consistent with those truths in a world that has changed dramatically since World War II.

  This book is all about what we as a party and a movement can do to help the blue collar conservatives, working Americans trying to set things right for their families, their communities, and their country.

  CHAPTER ONE

 
BLUE COLLAR CONSERVATIVES REALLY DID BUILD IT

  There was a time not long ago when Americans without college degrees could expect to earn a decent and steady income in exchange for hard work. This income and job stability provided a foundation for families and communities that, with their churches, Little Leagues, Boy Scout troops, and a hundred other civic organizations, fostered the strong values and the work ethic that underpinned American life. Millions of Americans came of age in these communities and took those values with them as they started their own families and thanked God for his blessings. With good incomes, Americans could afford new cars, kitchen appliances, and trips to Disneyland. Demand for such new goods kept others working and employment strong. With stable marriages, children enjoyed the gift of security and neighborhoods where values were taught at home and in church and enforced by parents.

  This is how I grew up. My grandparents came here from Italy in 1930, fleeing fascism and settling in a coal town in the hills outside of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That’s where they found freedom and the opportunity to earn decent pay for hard work in the mines. They found a gritty but overall wholesome place to raise their kids and taught them that in America there was no limit to what they could become. I know the American Dream was real because my grandparents lived it.

  Their son Aldo, my father, was seven when his family left Italy for America. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in the South Pacific in World War II, and when he came home from the war, he earned advanced degrees in clinical psychology. He worked for the Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) counseling World War II, Korea, and Vietnam vets for almost forty years. At his first post, in Martinsburg, West Virginia, he met and married my mother, Catherine, an administrative nurse. I was born in 1958, the second of three children. Unlike most mothers at that time, my mother continued to work as a nurse. It was a great setup because the hospital where she worked was a stone’s throw from our house. My siblings and I spent our childhoods living in various rented World War II–era buildings, including the post jail that had been converted into apartments. When I was seven, we returned to western Pennsylvania and settled in Butler, among the mines and steel furnaces that were the economic bedrock of that part of the country.