So I'm watching Hardball and Matthews has John Heilemann and Mark Halperin on to talk about the Santorum surge and whether the defeated Pennsylvania senator would be a better or worse general election opponent against the president.
H & H are going on about regional strengths and gender breakdowns and whatnot, pretty boilerplate punditry, but one thing bothers me: Heilemann keeps going back to this declaration that, "Santorum has blue-collar cred."
Rick Santorum has what? How, exactly?
Yeah, yeah, compared to Mitt Romney, sure. Santorum's got maybe 1% of Romney's net worth, but that 1% still puts him in the 1%, as it were.
He grew up solid middle class, with a clinical psychologist for a father and a nurse for a mother (both lifelong VA employees, by the way; Rick has lived off of the tax payers since his first breath). His "blue-collar, Pennsylvania" upbringing was spent in Butler County, a 98% white and reasonably well-off exurb of Pittsburg.
He started off in the county's excellent public schools and finished at Carmel High School, a private, Catholic high school outside of Chicago. From there he did undergrad at Penn State, got an MBA at U/Pittsburgh and a JD at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law.
Four years as a lawyer (largely as a lobbyist arguing to allow World Wrestling Federation fighters to be exempt for steroid laws) were the sum total of his private sector experience before being elected to the House, then the Senate.
There's a lot more to Santorum's biography, but that's the gist: a soft hands boy from a secure background who never made a living making sawdust, bending nails, shouldering bushels, driving trucks, shivering on top of a pole or shoveling stuff most lobbyists and senators never have to see.
Oh, sure, his grandfather mined coal. So what? My grandfather built telephone systems. After the hurricane of '38, he rebuilt entire towns' exchanges up and down New England. He was a member of Telephone Pioneers of America his entire adult life.
You know what that makes me? A grandson of a Pioneer, not one myself (even though I can skin a pole, grab a copper pair and give you a working CAT 3 or 5 jack in your house in less than a half-hour; I'll eat my fucking punchdown tool if Rick Santorum can ride down the cage and blast out a ton of coal).
I've made my living in all the ways mentioned in a preceding paragraph--carpenter, farmer, driver, telecom tech and shoveler of unmentionables. And I don't even think I have "blue-collar cred." To claim such would be terribly pretentious of me.
Santorum is NOT blue-collar. He's the extremely fortunate product of a comfortable, middle-class family who made their solid living working for the United States Government and enjoying all the tax-funded rewards that offered.
He may have some virtues not discernible to me as a political opponent of his, but "blue-collar cred" isn't one of them. And for him to try and appropriate the respect due honest working-class men and women is, in my view, an insult to actual working people.
Yeah, he wears a sweater vest. You can get one just like it if you give his campaign a hundred bucks.
But I wouldn't advise trying to flag traffic or finish concrete in it.