For Santorum, Even After New Hampshire

National Review Online

I first heard of Rick Santorum in the early fall of 1994. I happened to be at Longwood Gardens, in Delaware, for a weekend. I turned on a TV and heard this very scrappy, aggressive ad for Santorum’s Senate campaign in neighboring Pennsylvania. The signature line was: “Vote Santorum. Join the fight.” How could you not love that? It made me happy to know that he was joining our fight, and inviting others to come, too. It is really, really important that the Republican nominee — or a Republican president — always be conscious of the fact that everything he or she wants to do, wants to say, wants to convince the nation to understand and follow, will require a fight. A big, bloody, nasty fight, in which the other side will never give up, or cease questioning your motives, your sanity, your intelligence, and your grasp of “reality.” I feel very confident about him, because he is a scrapper by birth and training. He knows that politics is war by other means. While he learned to work with Democrats in the Senate, he harbors few illusions about them...