Decision 2012: Republican candidates establish themselves
By Jay Rinaldi
There are four candidates left in the race for the Republican nomination for the presidential election of 2012. The nominating campaign will end at the Republican National Convention in late August with only one candidate remaining to face the Democratic candidate, incumbent President Barack Obama. The remaining candidates include former senator Rick Santorum, former governor Mitt Romney, Representative Ron Paul, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
According to the New York Times, Santorum is an ambitious representative from Pennsylvania who burst onto the national political scene in the early 90s when he won a seat in the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 18th district. Santorum then served Pennsylvania in the U.S. Senate from 1995 up until his defeat in the 2006 midterm elections. He is mostly known for his unwavering conservative beliefs; he is anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and an advocate of family values. On the economic issues, Santorum has repeatedly brought up the issue of American manufacturing. Recent statistics show that manufacturing in the United States is increasing. However, the United States has lost millions of manufacturing jobs to overseas markets in the last decade. Santorum wants to restore America to a country that makes products within its borders. He proposes to eliminate taxes completely for manufacturers to accomplish this, and cut the corporate tax rate in half. On foreign policy, Santorum sees rogue countries like Iran as being a major threat to United States security. Santorum has gained some attention for his hardline stance that Iran, by any means necessary, should not be let to acquire nuclear capabilities. This may have been the impetus for President Obama to mention his “nothing’s off the table” stance towards Iran in his third State of the Union Address in response.
Mitt Romney, after governing a liberal state like Massachusetts, has been trying to prove his conservative credentials to Republican voters. The first item in Mitt Romney’s baggage is his religious affiliation. He is a Mormon, at odds with many Republican’s Christian beliefs; this has not been an issue in the primaries, and it is still a question of whether it will materialize as one. Second, Romney was pro-choice when governing Massachusetts but has been pro-life since. His opponents, because of changes in his views like this, have characterized him as a flip-flopper. But if we hold him to his word, here are his stances now.
He is a proponent of the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that ruled corporations and unions have the constitutional liberty to spend as much independent money as they wish for political purposes. Romney was against the controversial federal government bailout of the American automotive industry enacted by the Obama and Bush Administrations. He wrongfully claimed that a bailout of the automotive industry would be akin to “kissing it goodbye.” General Motors, among the automotive industries to be bailed out, is now the largest automaker in the world.
Among the many things conservatives want to have are stark contrasts to President Obama. One of these oppositions is to health care reform . All Republican candidates are against the health care reform bill passed by the Obama Administration, especially Romney. However, critics of Romney, point to the similar health care legislation Romney passed when he was governor of Massachusetts, which also mandated citizens to purchase private health insurance. On foreign policy, Romney declared that if he were president he would not allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon; he has foreign policy advisors that were also advisors in the Bush Administration, an administration that was influential in cultivating the “Bush Doctrine,” informed by a neoconservative ideological view of foreign policy.
Ron Paul, as he has noted himself, is the only political candidate who has been consistently amassing support since the Iowa caucuses. He points to this as reason to stay in the race. On the issues, Paul is a fervent critic of the Federal Reserve. He believes a central banking system like the Reserve to be antithetical to the Constitution and detrimental to an economy. Paul actually is not a Republican, but aligns himself with libertarians. He only declared himself as a Republican to get into the Republican debates, evidence that he uses to expose the two-party bias in American politics. He self-describes his foreign policy outlook as “non-interventionism,” which means that the United States should stay out of the internal affairs and conflicts of other nations if it is not directly threatening America’s security. Unlike each of his Republican opponents, Paul is against using military action towards Iran, likening it to “another Iraq coming, it’s war propaganda going on,” Paul said in the Republican debate sponsored by Fox News on December 15th. On economic issues, he believes that the United States should change its monetary system and resort back to the gold standard, restrain from giving bailouts to corporations and banks as was done in 2008, and let the markets correct improper economic activity; also known as creative destruction. Paul’s economic beliefs are informed by Austrian Economics, which, as Slate writer Matthew Yglesias summed up as the belief that “practically every economic policy pursued by the federal government and Federal Reserve is a mistake that distorts markets.” In effect, Austrian Economics is a form of economic libertarianism. He left most people confused when he said “we’re all Austrians now” in a speech he delivered on the night of the Iowa Caucuses: not many Americans are familiar with Austrian anything.
Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House for four years during the Clinton Administration. He was leader in what the media termed the “Republican Revolution,” which led Gingrich to become Speaker after the Republican Party came out victorious in the 1994 midterm elections, gaining control of both the House and the Senate. Like Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich is against the federal mandate that requires health insurers to cover the cost of birth control, and even more steadfastly against requiring religious institutions to prescribe and cover birth control as well. Both Gingrich and Santorum support “personhood” initiatives that would legally declare fertilized eggs to be persons, according to The New York Times. Romney is also on the record as saying that requiring religious institutions to cover birth control is a “direct attack on religious liberty and would not stand in a Romney presidency.”
On the economy, Gingrich would have the capital gains tax eliminated, citing that it would lead to more investment and higher rates of economic growth. On foreign policy, Newt Gingrich is a realist who believes that both the Bush and Obama Administrations have been too weak in its dealings with “rogue” states that have or are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, such as North Korea and Iran.
As of now, Romney has won two primaries, Santorum one (Iowa Caucus), and Gingrich one. In the last primary, Florida, Romney won the state by the greatest point margin yet. Florida is considered to be the most representative of the nation; giving Romney restored credibility as the GOP frontrunner.