As many others have already observed, Santorum fared poorly in last night’s debate. Reading through the transcript, I came across the statement that sums up a lot of what is wrong with Santorum’s record:

I supported No Child Left Behind. I supported it. It was the principal priority of President Bush to try to take on a failing education system and try to impose some sort of testing regime that would be able to quantify how well we’re doing with respect to education. I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake [bold mine-DL].

Unfortunately for Santorum, his record includes quite a few of these mistakes that he made for the sake of “the team” and “the leader.” It would be one thing if he could claim that these were tactical compromises for the sake of advancing a larger agenda, but he can’t. His biggest mistakes were votes for the massive expansion of the role of government and an enormous increase in the government’s unfunded liabilities, and these render his claims to being a limited government fiscal conservative meaningless. Santorum could offer the defense that most of his colleagues were doing the same thing, but that would just confirm that he was indistinguishable from the Bush-era GOP when it was at its worst with respect to domestic policy.

Santorum’s discovery of the importance of local control in education is remarkably convenient, and he is now so desperate to distance himself from his NCLB vote that he says that he doesn’t even want state governments involved in education, which might be theoretically appealing but would be completely unworkable across large parts of the country. Besides, there’s no reason to credit Santorum’s sudden conversion to localism. Everything else he believes reveals him to be a supporter of centralization and national uniformity when it comes to anything he considers important. The truth is that voting for NCLB was perfectly consistent with Santorum’s actual assumptions about the proper role of the federal government.