This seems to raise an implicit question about the vast
pundit-industrial complex, both the conservative and liberal kinds alike: Do they speak from conviction or from reading public sentiment?
Further, given that Santorum didn’t rate with many in the chattering class before the Iowa vote, it’s worth asking whether voters are paying much attention to them in the first place.
Stumping in New Hampshire on Thursday, Rick Santorum addressed potential voters at the Queens Rotary Club meeting in Hooksett, N.H. (Jan. 5)
GOP PRIMARY TRACKER: See which candidates are visiting the early states and where they focusing their time and resources.
“So many people in the media assumed that he wasn’t competitive, including me,” concedes Barnes, who is also a Fox News pundit. “What it says is, there’s a lot of guessing, or [commentators] are going entirely by what they see in the polls. . . . There’s so much polling now, and writers about politics become poll-driven. But polls, especially in primaries, can be soft. People change their minds. Politics isn’t a science, and we learn that all the time.”
A few conservative scribblers took Santorum seriously. The American Spectator’s Quin Hillyer, for one, was into Santorum before being into Santorum was cool. In early November, when Santorum was still pulling single digits in national polls, Hillyer wrote that Santorum could be “the sharpest, most accomplished, most campaign-savvy, and most full-
spectrum conservative in a quarter-century of presidential contests . . . working harder than anybody, making at least as much intellectual sense as anybody, never blowing a debate, and never failing to stand on principle.”
Ahead of the curve, sure, but Hillyer wrote something similarly praiseworthy of Santorum before that — in July 2010, when Santorum was considering running. “It’s a good thing for Rick Santorum that conventional wisdom, especially in politics, is usually preternaturally stupid,” he wrote at the time.
Hillyer, in an interview, said he sized up Santorum’s prospects not on polls, campaign contributions, TV ads or volunteer counts — the usual pundit metrics — but on “fundamentals” such as the number of visits to Iowa and Santorum’s dogged meet-and-greet politicking.
“It still astonishes me what the punditocracy, including conservative pundits, repeatedly misses and has missed for decades,” said Hillyer, taking a bit of a victory lap. “The basic question is, who’s working the hardest, who’s making one-to-one contact, who’s on the ground the most? The second question is, what’s the candidate’s history? If you know anything about Rick Santorum, you know that he has consistently outperformed other Republicans in the same circumstances.
He added, “People get so focused on the money and the glitz and the chatter in the New York-Washington corridor that they don’t know what real people are doing. I’m not saying [pundits] don’t have good insights or that they aren’t influential. But there are other things going on that should be obvious that people consistently miss.”
Well, if he’s so smart, surely Hillyer can say what will happen next. And sure enough, he doesn’t back down: Santorum will win the nomination, he says, if . . .
“If [Newt] Gingrich or [Rick] Perry gets out of the race before South Carolina [which holds its primary Jan. 21], then I flat out predict Santorum will be the nominee.”
You can take that to the bank. Or, given the way these things often go, maybe not.
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