Santorum 'snob' comments on college an age-old appeal to anti-intellectuals

OPINION - Rick Santorum says President Barack Obama is a 'snob,' who is encouraging young people to go to college in order to remake them 'in his image'...

Rick Santorum says that President Barack Obama is a “snob,” who is encouraging young people to go to college in order to remake them “in his image.”

The comment has even caused consternation among some Republicans, who were scratching their heads this past weekend, wondering when the American dream of getting a college education, and the improved employment and income prospects that come with it, became a bad thing (short answer for some in the GOP: when Barack Obama started talking about it) — let alone a liberal thing.

The U.S. has been unique among its more class-based European forebears in not awarding college and advanced degrees to the children of the well-born. And Santorum’s implicit statement that some people just aren’t cut out for college and should be happy to “work with their hands” instead sounds more like the classist paternalism of the old British peerage system, rather than the Horatio Alger spirit of America.

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Besides, the actual experience of Americans has been that President Obama has championed a good education as a goal that every family should demand for their children, whether that means attending a four-year college or community college or vocational school. And the only conservatives to vocally find fault with Obama’s personal story of going from the son of a single mother who struggled financially, to a law degree from Harvard, have been “the birthers” and Donald Trump. Some conservatives have even praised Obama’s educational initiatives. In fact, education reform is one of the few policy areas where conservatives and the president have found broad agreement.

Meanwhile, Santorum’s depiction of Obama and Democrats as representing the elite turns out to not quite be based in reality.

According to exit polls dating back to 1976, it is the GOP and not the Democrats, who, by varying margins, have won college educated voters in every election from 1988 to 2008, though Democrats have been the victors when it comes to those with post-graduate degrees.

Republican presidential candidates have also consistently outperformed Democrats with voters who earn more than $100,000 a year. In fact, the groups that Democrats have won in every presidential race since Jimmy Carter was elected president are voters earning less than $50,000 a year. The only Democrats to win a majority of voters making $50,000 a year or more, since Dynasty and Dallas were on TV, were Bill Clinton, who won over voters making $50,000-74,999 by 2 points in 1996, and Barack Obama, who swept the election with voters from every income group except that one, in 2008.

Demographic surveys of the once-sizzling tea party movement showed that group was comprised mostly of higher income, older, and better educated white Americans.

In other words, Republicans are the party of older, higher income Americans. So designating the other party as representing the “elite” is problematic at best, including Mr. Santorum; the three-degree-holding former United States Senator (an elite club if ever there was one) — who himself championed a college degree for every Pennsylvanian when he represented the state.

And yet, Santorum’s campaign, for all its strangeness, has a method to its madness.

Polls on the eve of Michigan’s primary show that Santorum is competitive with Mitt Romney. And he holds polling leads over Romney in Ohio and Tennessee ahead of “super Tuesday” next week.  Santorum is taking advantage of Romney’s failure to connect with evangelical voters and also with those voters in whom the tea party sought to stoke a sense of grievance, against not economic “elites,” but cultural and intellectual ones. Santorum’s message to those voters can be summed up as follows: “Barack Obama thinks he’s better than you. You ought to show him and his snobby friends who’s boss.”

The “elite snobs” of Santorum’s imagination don’t like or respect the “real” America. They look down on those who have strong Christian beliefs, turn up their noses at people who work hard for what they have rather than seeking government “handouts,” and think that they — and the government — know better than regular Joes what they should feed their kids, how many guns they should own, and what they should teach their children about everything from sex to what causes the climate to change to the formation of the universe.

Santorum is appealing not to who Republicans are, but to who they perceive themselves be, as reflected back to them by the millionaire talk show hosts they listen to on Fox News and right wing talk radio. Those hosts, like Rush Limbaugh ($400 million contract with Clear Channel, and Sean Hannity (private jet only, please…) are masterful at stoking in their listeners a persistent sense of victimhood at the hands of “elite snobs,” liberal educators, know-it-all scientists, secularists, minorities, and of course, the faceless, ominous “government.”

This brand of politics is nothing new. It has been used over and over again; by Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan>

In many ways, Santorum’s campaign is channeling Sarah Palin in 2008, when she became John McCain’s vice presidential running-mate. Palin’s rallies attracted crowds of angry, fearful people who sometimes shouted defamatory, even violent things at the notion of Barack Obama (who was termed a secret Muslim, a black separatist, and in Palin’s parlance, someone who “pals around with terrorists”) in the White House.

Santorum isn’t whipping crowds into a Palinite frenzy. In fact, frenzied crowds, or even especially large ones, have been scarce during the GOP primary, where turnout has failed to match the intensity of 2008.

And of course, the Palin strategy ultimately failed, in that she and Mr. McCain were not elected.

But Santorum has clearly decided he will have better luck with that strategy than Palin and McCain did, and he’s playing the grievance card for all it’s worth.

Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @thereidreport

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