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" &amp;quot;This president does not take responsibility for anything. He blames other people,&amp;quot; Santorum said of Obama, whom he called &amp;quot;dangerous&amp;quot; on foreign policy. POLK CITY, Iowa \u2014 So Dennis Wendle and Don Boone were hanging out together at home down around Liberty, Missouri (no kidding), and they decided that they were tired of living in a state that counted for so very little in the presidential nominating process, especially when compared to The Crucial Iowa Caucuses. So they packed themselves up for the drive north and, yesterday, they found themselves at a table in the Riesling Sun Cafe in downtown Polk City, which was jumping for nine in the morning, and waiting for the imminent arrival of Rick Santorum, whose campaign was said to be jumping as well, perhaps even as high as second place in TCIC. Dennis and Don were pretty much trapped over their breakfast, what with the fact that patrons of the Riesling Sun were outnumbered about 50-1 by journalists, camerapeople, and TV news haircuts from many lands. (Frank Luntz was haunting the ice-cream counter, possibly attempting to lie pistachio into thinking itself to be chocolate.) Don spoke, in succession, to Canadian TV, Japanese TV, German TV, and a local station from Boston. &amp;quot;Hey,&amp;quot; Dennis said to me, showing some admirable entrepreneurial drive. &amp;quot;For fifty bucks, you can stand on my chair.&amp;quot; Dennis is a retired TWA mechanic, and Don worked for Kansas City Power and Light for over 20 years, and also was an official in an IBEW local. They are shopping around for someone to get behind during this election year. They are not optimistic. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s big money and it&amp;#039;s big business, and it doesn&amp;#039;t reflect the views of working-class people like us,&amp;quot; Dennis said. &amp;quot;Corporations are not people. See what I mean? The people&amp;#039;s wishes. I don&amp;#039;t even follow Santorum, but I&amp;#039;ll bet, here&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;re gonna talk about. We&amp;#039;re gonna talk about the moral issues. We&amp;#039;re gonna talk about abortion. We&amp;#039;re gonna talk about all those things that are pretty much settled. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a trick in the horse industry that we learned before we had sedatives that, if you grab a horse by the lip, and squeeze it, he forgets about anything else. It&amp;#039;s called &amp;#039;twitching.&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s what they do to us. They twitch us with all that other stuff and pass over the important issues. Not gonna talk about jobs, either, because they&amp;#039;re not here, and they know where they went, but they&amp;#039;re not gonna do anything to bring them back.&amp;quot; (I began to warm to Dennis because he seemed like he might be sympathetic to this blog&amp;#039;s first theory of the economy: Fk The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money.) Meanwhile, Don Boone was finishing up with German TV. &amp;quot;Now, you&amp;#039;ve gone to the extreme where the average salary of the working-class income has gone notably down, and the average CEO in the United States is making in the neighborhood of 400 times the average,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Seems to be where we&amp;#039;re going. Part of that is to be placed in the lap of labor. They&amp;#039;ve forgotten... some of the leadership has not had the vision that labor should have had. So they fell away from educating and working with the people. You&amp;#039;re probably on the doorstep, if you do not see labor regenerate, you&amp;#039;re going to see the traditional politicians roll back everything for working-class is going to be done away with \u2014 Taft-Hartley labor law, Davis-Bacon. It&amp;#039;s over.&amp;quot; In other words, there was some fine class-based populist anger here in this odd place jammed to its gunwales with multilingual stand-ups, and jostling camera crews, and the occasional print guy trying not to get shoved up onto the grill. Rick Santorum arrived five minutes early and he got to twitching this crowd straight off. He truly is the race&amp;#039;s most polished demagogue. Newt Gingrich has lost more than a step in that regard. Michele Bachmann was promising there for a while, but never mastered the essential skill of making her loopier beliefs sound remotely plausible. Rick Perry is too language-impaired to be much good at it, and Willard Romney, while possessing the appropriately soulless disregard for the truth, is still learning the basic performance techniques, although he&amp;#039;s learning fast. (Yesterday, he told a crowd in Council Bluffs that this election is about nothing less that &amp;quot;the soul of America&amp;quot; and that Barack Obama&amp;#039;s alleged &amp;quot;entitlement society&amp;quot; would &amp;quot;poison the very spirit of America.&amp;quot; Oh, Willard. You&amp;#039;re so... butch.) Only in Santorum do all the elements of a true demagogue seem to exist in happy natural harmony. There&amp;#039;s the phony proletarian bonhomie, about his Italian immigrant grandfather, and his father, the coal-miner. (No mention, of course, of his role in helping Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay turn the lobbying process into their own private bank account in the 1990&amp;#039;s.) According to Santorum, this administration&amp;#039;s energy policies are driven by the fact that &amp;quot;this administration hates carbon. It hates oil production, and it hates the thousands of bluecollar Americans who work in those industries,&amp;quot; and all this because the administration forced regulations on some coal-fired plants, and the owner of those plants decided to close them rather than comply. The regulations were prompted by the fact that the evidence indicated that the unregulated emissions from these plants were causing lung diseases and cancer among thousands of Americans of assorted collar colors. &amp;quot;This was not based on science of any kind!&amp;quot; Santorum declared. His entire jobs plan, if you listen to him, involves lowering corporate taxes and deregulating whatever&amp;#039;s left to deregulate. There&amp;#039;s the occasional use of the travelling media press corps as a punching bag. (&amp;quot;Yesterday, I was talking to David Gregory on Meet The Press,&amp;quot; Santorum confided to a hundred-odd cameras, &amp;quot;and he asked me if I would be disappointed if I didn&amp;#039;t win. And I told him, &amp;#039;Hey, not long ago, your reporter was asking me if I was going to drop out.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;) And, eventually, there&amp;#039;s the tinpot weepy piety about how this president has been absolutely terrible to those lovely Republicans who are only trying to help. &amp;quot;This has been the most partisan president of my lifetime,&amp;quot; Santorum said. &amp;quot;This is a president who deliberately demonizes people who oppose him by name. This president does not take responsibility for anything. He blames other people. I hope that when I am elected president of the United States to never say the name of Barack Obama again. The idea of creating divisiveness for political advantage is beneath the dignity of the office of President of the United States. I won&amp;#039;t do it, and this president shouldn&amp;#039;t do it. This president goes out of his way to skewer people personally.&amp;quot; Santorum declined to give any specific examples in this regard, but he did later go on to call President Obama &amp;quot;the most dangerous president on foreign policy since Jimmy Carter,&amp;quot; thereby continuing a Republican tradition that began with the Reagan campaign of 1980 of blaming everything on Jimmy Carter. However, you have to be on mushrooms to believe a word of this caricature of Barack Obama as a hyper-partisan wolverine. (Ask his base.) Santorum read it off without a hitch. This is instinctive prevarication of the highest order. And, sooner or later, we all get around to the Ivy League again. Rick Santorum has no use for the Ivy League, or the economists produced therein. (He also expressed doubts about the Republican reliance on economists from the &amp;quot;Australian school.&amp;quot; Likely he meant the &amp;quot;Austrian school,&amp;quot; but he doubtlessly wasn&amp;#039;t entirely sincere on that criticism, either, since he insisted later that he would &amp;quot;incentivize with supply-side principles.) Barack Obama, of course, would like to have government &amp;quot;tell you how to run your business, run your farm, run your life! &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not going to have a bunch of academics who went to those Ivy League institutions,&amp;quot; he explained. &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t you just go to Main Street America for advice from the people who know how to build businesses successfully?&amp;quot;  By this time, my lip was starting to hurt, and I began to regret bitterly the fact that Maggie&amp;#039;s Landmark Inn on the other side of the Polk City town square didn&amp;#039;t open until three. Santorum left and the world cleared out of the Riesling Sun Cafe. Dennis Wendle remained unimpressed, &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; Dennis said, &amp;quot;that guy&amp;#039;s an idiot.&amp;quot;  --Stay tuned to The Politics Blog all week for more from Iowa... "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12236/rick-santorum-iowa-6631492/>