Blue Collar Conservatives
Recommitting to an America That Works
by Senator Rick Santorum (R, PA)


(Click for Amazon book review)

OnTheIssues.org BOOK REVIEW:

This book, written in 2014 in anticipation of Santorum's announcement of his presidential candidacy in 2015, is a vision and message--not the usual policy book that precedes a presidential announcement. That means Santorum outlines themes rather than specifics--so we'll outline a couple of the themes below: Europe is bad; Obama is bad; even Republicans are sometimes bad; but faith is good.

We recommend reading our excerpts from this book, and our themes as outlined here, but we DON'T recommend actually reading this book, Santorum organizes the whole book under one more "theme": a fictional family named "The Harrisons." The problem with "The Harrisons" is that they are TOO realistic: they are supposed to be a "composite" archetype of blue-collar conservatives, from real examples. "The Harrisons" permeate the book, illustrating every policy problem and Santorum's solution -- sometimes for multiple pages at a time (pp. 143-6 details how "the Harrisons" lost their jobs when their town's manufacturing plant shut down). Then Santorum adds a fictional town too, called "Fishtown," the lower-class town to contrast the upper class fictional "Belmont". Sometimes "the Harrisons" get mixed in with "Fishtown," like on p. 89 where Santorum writes about educational prospects, and lends new meaning to the rhetorical sin of "mixed metaphor."

A reader who recalls "the Harrisons" introduction (buried in Chapter Two on p. 29) and the "Fishtown" introduction (buried yet deeper in Chapter Four on p. 64) will realize they are fictional--but a casual reader might forget that, or might have skipped the introductions. And for those who DIDN'T forget, "the Harrisons" and "Fishtown" lend an air of fiction to EVERY aspect of this book: readers must remind themselves "oh, this part is fiction," and that often spills over to the parts that are supposed to be non-fiction (for example, Santorum writes about a REAL family in medical trouble in a REAL town, on p. 109; the reader has to carefully check if they are fictional!). In other words, like with Reagan's fictional alter-ego "Dutch", the fictional aspects diminish the non-fictional aspects.

I quickly learned to skip over the fictional parts of the book, to focus on the non-fictional world, which Santorum does write about for the majority of the book. Santorum hopes the fictional family and town reinforce his themes, but in fact the reader must struggle to find the themes DESPITE the fiction. Here are the themes that we struggled and found:

You can expect to hear those themes in Santorum's candidacy -- having themes, rather than just policies, actually makes a candidate seem more organized, easier to understand, and more of… a leader. And better than most books, Santorum DEMONSTRATES that -- by organizing and explaining so many of his policies via these themes -- rather than simply ASSERTING it, as so many of his opponents do. We wish other candidates would get the message from Santorum: tell us your underlying themes, and tell us your policies based on those!

-- Jesse Gordon, editor-in-chief, OnTheIssues.org, June 2015

OnTheIssues.org excerpts:  (click on issues for details)

Budget & Economy     Rick Santorum: Great Recession knocked away last struts of American Dream.

Civil Rights     Howard Dean: America's greatest virtue is diversity.     Rick Santorum: Diversity is a challenge, not necessarily a virtue.

Corporations     Mitt Romney: OpEd:Venture capitalist history let Obama focus on class war.     Rick Santorum: People at the bottom get only a trickle from trickle-down.     Rick Santorum: Congressional attention curbed outrageous corporate abuses.     Rick Santorum: Reduce corporate tax to flat rate of 20%.

Crime     Rick Santorum: Three-strike laws put too many people in jail.

Education     Rick Santorum: Governments running our local schools is a bad idea.     Rick Santorum: Common Core is another version of mass-produced education.     Rick Santorum: Schools with collective bargaining are worse for students.     Rick Santorum: The Bible is at the heart of Western civilization.

Energy & Oil     Rick Santorum: Fracking gives us enough natural gas for 100 years.     Rick Santorum: Construct the Keystone pipeline: for jobs & energy.

Families & Children     Barack Obama: Everything else is unfulfilled if we fail at family.     Rick Santorum: Government policy facilitates breakdown of family.     Rick Santorum: Marriage at historical low; illegitimacy at historical high.     Rick Santorum: Double child tax credit to $6,000 per child.

Free Trade     Rick Santorum: Think about the people that free trade effects.

Health Care     Rick Santorum: ObamaCare is biggest threat facing the American Dream.     Rick Santorum: Change Medicaid to block-grant system.     Rick Santorum: Allow individuals to buy pre-tax insurance like companies do.

Jobs     Rick Santorum: Focus on jobholders as well as job creators.

Social Security     Rick Santorum: 401(k) approach would provide better benefits.     Rick Santorum: Increase eligibility age for Medicare & Social Security.

Technology     Rick Santorum: CEO of EchoLight Studios, making faith & family movies.

Welfare & Poverty     Democratic Party: OpEd: class warfare methods pit groups against each other.     Mitt Romney: People in homeless shelters are used to being ignored.     Rick Santorum: Parents generation never wanted nor spoke about state help.     Rick Santorum: Extreme individualists don't look out for our fellow man.     Rick Santorum: Tough love to end welfare as entitlement.

Click for quotations from other sources by: Barack Obama Democratic Party Howard Dean Mitt Romney Rick Santorum