Slavens Says

It’s not easy being Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), the least impressive of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates. He barely managed to win the Iowa caucuses after devoting all of his time and money to the state, took a disappointing fifth place in the New Hampshire primary, and is now fighting Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) for third place in the national polls as well as South Carolina, where voters will vote in the crucial “first in the South” primary tomorrow (Jan. 21). Now that Gov. Jon Huntsman (R-UT) and Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) have dropped out of the race, fourth place equals last place, which happens to be Santorum’s current position in that state’s latest polls. Without a third-place finish, his struggling campaign is toast.

If Santorum’s desperation wasn’t already evident, he demonstrated it last night during the CNN debate in Charleston by taking a swipe at Paul on, of all issues, abortion.

Paul has plenty of controversial positions for mainstream Republicans like Santorum to hammer during debates and on the campaign trail, like his support for ending the federal drug war and halting military interventions overseas. But abortion? Paul is a devout Christian who personally delivered more than 4,000 babies during his career as an obstetrician, introduced the life-defining Sanctity of Life Act, and advocates “effectively repealing” Roe v. Wade by taking abortion out of the federal courts.

It’s difficult to imagine a stronger pro-life position than Paul’s, so Santorum’s attack struck observers as bizarre and risky, considering the ease with which it can be refuted.

“Congressman Paul has a National Right to Life voting record of fifty percent,” Santorum claimed, earning an incredulous look from Paul. “So to go out and say you’re someone who stands up for the right to life — you repeatedly vote against bills on a federal level to promote the right to life…”

Paul wasn’t having it. “I follow what my understanding is of the Constitution,” he patiently explained, noting that violent acts like murder and burglary are handled by the states. “So don’t try to say that I’m less pro-life because I want to be particular about the way we do it…If we would allow the states to write their laws, take away the [federal] jurisdiction by a majority vote in the Congress, you repeal Roe v. Wade overnight instead of waiting year after year to change the court system.”

With that, the crowd cheered wildly, the network cut to a break, and — presumably — Santorum’s face colored in embarrassment.

It’s unclear whether Santorum was confused about Paul’s current National Right to Life (NRLC) rating, or was alluding to an old figure. According to a scorecard on the organization’s website, Paul has a current rating of 100%, and was rated 100% and 80% in the two previous sessions of Congress. Only in 2005-2006 was he rated 55%, and only then for voting against the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act (probably because of its questionable constitutionality based on a loose interpretation of the commerce clause). In earlier sessions, his ratings ranged from 72% to 95% — hardly an indicator of a weak position on abortion. By contrast, Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) actual rating, contrary to Santorum’s claim, is 0%.

Assuming that the former senator meant to cite the six-year-old 55% figure from the combined sessions of the 109th Congress, his attack was based on a disagreement about one federal law. That’s it.

Of course, an NRLC rating isn’t the fairest way to judge any candidate’s position on abortion, as it simply indicates how often the candidate voted for NRLC-backed legislation during a particular session. The organization favors an all-or-nothing, top-down, federal-level approach to abortion, which is one of the reasons that pro-life conservatives have been losing ground on the issue for decades.

Paul’s constitutional approach, on the other hand, would sidestep the federal courts and enable conservative states to restrict or ban abortion. Under his federal Sanctity of Life Act, which would define life as beginning at conception, the rights of unborn children would be recognized and defended in all fifty states. Admittedly, abortion would probably remain legal in a handful of extremely liberal states, but how many hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved elsewhere? And, for pro-life conservatives, wouldn’t it be preferable for abortion to be legal in only, say, one-fifth of the states, as opposed to being legal in all of them for the foreseeable future?

Perhaps Santorum felt he was being clever by mischaracterizing Paul’s brilliant pro-life solution to abortion on a national stage two days before a primary in a socially conservative state. Or perhaps he just had a brain fart. Either way, he learned a valuable political lesson: Never attack an opponent on one of his strongest issues.

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