For conservatives like me, who think that most of our problems are essentially moral and religious, the current moment in our culture is a significant one. I am also a conservative who, though no longer a Catholic, retain enormous sympathy for the Roman Catholic Church, and see in it and its teachings the only substantial basis for a conservative retrenchment and renewal of our culture and civilization. Though the United States is not a confessional state, nor has this ever been anything but a Protestant country, I believe that the moral and spiritual health of this country and the civilization of which it is a part depends on the flourishing of the Roman church. I say that as a social fact, irrespective of my personal opinions about Rome’s theology, or the character of its bishops. The late Father Richard John Neuhaus once wrote:

In 1987, while I was still a Lutheran, I published a book titled The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World. There I argued that the Catholic Church is the leading and indispensable community in advancing the Christian movement in world history. In evangelization, in furthering the Christian intellectual tradition, in the quest for Christian unity, in advocating the culture of life, and in every other aspect of the Christian mission, this was, I contended, the Catholic Moment.

I agreed with that as a Catholic, and I agree with that as an Orthodox Christian. In that same First Things essay, Father Neuhaus went on to talk about what decades of dissent had done to the Catholic community in the US:

The great question, a question that has ramifications that go far beyond assent to Catholic teaching, is the relationship between freedom and obedience — or, more precisely, between freedom and truth. The question includes ecclesial obedience to the truth, as Catholics believe the truth is made known. We are bound by the truth, and when we are bound by the truth, we are bound to be free. The relationship between truth and freedom is as true for non-Catholics or, indeed, for non-Christians as it is true for Catholics, as is magnificently argued by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth).

What went wrong with aspects of liberal Catholicism has its roots in what went wrong long before the 1960s. What went wrong was the submission to an Enlightenment or rationalist tradition — found also in a romanticism that too often mirrored what it intended to counter — of the autonomous self. Still today there is a liberal Catholic reflex, shared by secular liberalism, against the very ideas of authority, obedience, and the truth that binds. The Catholic insight about human freedom, an insight that we dare to say has universal applicability, is that we are bound to be free. The truth, in order to be understood, must be loved, and love binds. And so also with the apostolic community that embodies and articulates the truth.

Coming to terms with the question of obedience means coming to terms with the one who said, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The modern regime of secular liberalism adopted the slogan “The truth will make you free,” but pitted it against the one who is the truth. More radically, it pitted truth and freedom against any authoritative statement of truth, and against authority itself. The liberal ideal was that of the autonomous, untethered, unencumbered self. The consequence of that impossible ideal is conformism to the delusion of autonomy or, as the history of the last century so tragically demonstrates, blind submission to totalitarian doctrines that present themselves as surrogates for the truth that makes us free.

Fr. Neuhaus ended that essay by reaffirming his belief that we are still in a Catholic Moment. I wonder what he would say today, seeing what’s going on with the US government and the HHS ruling, and observing that most American Catholics polled take the side of the state over their own bishops, and indeed oppose what their own church teaches about same-sex unions. The usual thing conservative Catholics point to is that among Catholics who actually attend mass regularly, there is far more agreement with the Church’s authoritative teaching. But that’s cold comfort. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for all intents and purposes, American Catholicism is functionally Protestant — and not even Evangelical Protestant, given that on key moral issues, Evangelicals agree with Catholic teaching more than Catholics do.

It’s a long, complicated story as to why the Roman Catholic Church in this country has lost so much influence, especially over its own people. Conservatives like to blame it all on the Catholic left, but that’s neither fair nor accurate, in my view. I’d say church liberals bear most of the blame, but it cannot be denied that many of us on the right played our part. A Catholic moral theologian friend — who identifies as a Democrat, by the way — e-mailed this morning saying how gratifying it is to talk about the Church’s teaching on contraception, and to see how engaged lay Catholics are by it. As he sees it, they have never had the opportunity to hear the teaching explained to them in ways they could understand, and accept. I find this easy to believe. Non-Catholics who have this idea that the Catholic Church is obsessed with abortion and contraception are out of their minds. It’s very rarely talked about in churches. I bet 999 out of 1,000 Catholics you stopped on the street couldn’t explain to you what Humanae Vitae is. They have rejected what they never had the honest opportunity to affirm.

Anyway, I won’t go down the rabbit hole of woulda-coulda-shoulda (though commenters, have at it if you like). And maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I hope some of you can tell me that I’m wrong. The future looks dark to me, though. I will just here register my despair over the passing of the Catholic Moment, and of the influence of the Catholic Church in this post-Christian culture. It is something all small-o orthodox Christians will sooner or later regret.

An interesting question: to what extent has the death of the Catholic Moment been a murder, and to what extent has it been a suicide?

Tim Carney says that the HHS controversy helps Rick Santorum’s candidacy. Excerpt:

If this were an isolated incident, it might not mean much. But the contraception mandate is part of a pattern of Democrats using government to force religious conservatives to act against their will.

Obama took a firm stand in the budget fights of 2010 and 2011 for federal funding of Planned Parenthood, which amounted to forcing taxpayers to subsidize the nation’s largest abortion provider. As a candidate, Obama promised to sign the “Freedom of Choice Act,” which could force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions. The Obama administration has also tried to gut a legal principle known as the “ministerial exemption,” allowing religions to set their own standards for whom they employ as clergy and what conditions they place on their clergy.

The liberal news media reserve the label “culture warrior” for religious conservatives like Santorum who inveigh against societal decline and try to curb abortion. But it’s pretty clear that Obama and his fellow liberals are “culture warriors,” too, and that it’s the activists on the Left who are on the offense these days — with government as their weapon.

So, we’ve got a culture war now, and for the Right it’s not a war of choice, but of self-defense. [Emphasis mine — RD] Romney, avowedly pro-choice in past campaigns, hasn’t quite been a good soldier in this struggle. Santorum is not only a seasoned culture warrior, the issues also play to his strengths.

If the economy keeps improving, Carney argues, culture war issues become more salient. Though I generally agree with his social views, I have ignored Santorum because of his hyperhawkish foreign policy. I think a number of conservatives will take a second look at him given what we’ve learned about how the Obama administration regards religious liberty, and what the likelihood of same-sex marriage’s constitutionalization portends for religious liberty. Whatever Rick Santorum’s faults, on these issues, the man is a rock.

Take a look at the recent NYT/CBS poll. It’s astonishing how much deeper and stronger the support among Republicans is for Santorum than for Romney. Read down into the poll. Romney and Santorum both have a 50 percent favorable rating, but Romney’s unfavorables are more than twice Santorum’s. Santorum is ahead of Romney by three points in the overall national poll. And in a head to head matchup against Obama, both Republicans would lose, but Romney beats Santorum’s showing by only one percentage point — a virtual tie. To be sure, that same poll shows that voters are overwhelmingly focused on the economy, not social issues. But if GOP primary voters have a sense that the economy is improving, and polls show that Santorum has an equal chance of beating Obama, then the two practical rationales for voting Romney go out the window.

If the Right is engaged in a culture war of self-defense — and it is — then conservative voters may well ask themselves which of these two top candidates is likely to be a better fighter. That question is not hard to answer.

UPDATE: Daniel says Santorum’s past performance shows that he is kryptonite to independents.

UPDATE.2: Daniel further opines that Santorum’s better numbers reflect that he is not as well known as Romney. And he draws attention to the fascinating response in that poll in which Santorum rates far, far higher than Romney on who will do the most to help the middle class.

Political theorist Patrick Deneen, who is a practicing Catholic, contends that by framing the HHS controversy as a matter of religious liberty, the Catholic Church and its allies concede too much. Excerpts from his philosophically rich post:

Liberalism holds that the State must be indifferent to the personal choices of individuals; Catholicism holds certain choices not only to be inherently wrong (even if they do not result in the immediate and evident harm of others), but, over time and cumulatively, socially destructive.

The last area of concern is perhaps even more difficult to grasp in an intuitive fashion than the first three. The last claims that the widespread adoption of birth control will eventually entail government coercion in support of its use. The Church understood – long before this tendency became evident – that liberalism was finally incapable of “indifference” toward the choices of individuals, particularly when those choices involved the limitation of individual autonomy, and particularly when any such limitation occurred in the context not of organizations that stressed individual choice, but rather asserted the preeminence of conceptions of the Good that commended practices of self-limitation. In short, liberalism would finally reveal its “partiality” toward autonomy by forcing institutions with an opposing worldview to conform to liberalism’s assumptions. Liberalism would seek actively to “liberate” individuals from oppressive structures, even at the point of requiring such liberalism at the point of a legal mandate and even a gun.

More:

But, the real debate is not over religious freedom, in fact: it is over the very nature of humanity and the way in which we order our polities and societies. Catholicism is one of the few remaining voices of principle and depth that can articulate an forceful and learned alternative to today’s dominant liberal worldview. That it truncates those arguments for the sake of prudential engagement in a contemporary skirmish should not shroud the nature of the deeper conflict. That conflict will continue apace, and Catholics do themselves no favors if they do not understand the true nature of the battle, and the fact that current arguments aid and abet their opponent.

To clarify, Patrick says that Catholics and others arguing this issue from a religious liberty standpoint — as they must, given the nature of the public square in which they present their argument — are going to lose because they have conceded from the beginning the premises of liberalism. I think I see what he’s getting at, but surely there is no viable option here for protecting the Church’s liberties within a liberal political culture. Unless I’m misreading Deneen, he’s telling Catholics not to be fooled as to what’s really happening here: that the liberal state will ultimately make it impossible to be authentically Catholic.

Again, I am reminded of something an American archbishop said in the presence of a friend of mine: that his successor would be preoccupied with defending the Church from legal attacks emerging from the constitutionalization of same-sex marriage, and that his successor’s successor would have to go to jail for the same reason. It’s coming.

Signs that religious liberty is not as important to the American people as it should be. First, the united front liberal and conservative Catholics presented against the Obama HHS rule has crumbled as the Catholic left accepts the concordat with the administration. Second, the NYT/CBS national poll found that two out of three Americans support the HHS rule, even for religious employers. Plus, two out of three Americans favor some form of legal recognition of same-sex relationships, either marriage (40 percent) or civil unions (23 percent).

And for Catholics in the poll? They agree with the majority on the HHS rule, against their bishops’ position, and they support gay marriage or civil unions in higher numbers than the overall majority.

See the full poll results here.  Interestingly, slightly more than one in five of those polled identified as a liberal. About one-third called themselves conservative. The rest, moderate.

Here’s what I see in these results. The Catholic bishops and their allies have not made an effective case to the public that the HHS issue is at bottom about religious liberty. Rightly or wrongly, most Americans — including most Catholic Americans — are willing to see Church institutions compelled by the government to pay for something it regards as “intrinsically evil.”  Free or subsidized birth control pills mean more to most Americans than religious liberty. Think about that.

This has ominous implications for religious liberty in the face of the tectonic shifts in opinion regarding same-sex unions. It’s clear that one way or another, and sooner rather than later, same-sex unions are going to be the law of the land, by popular will, if not by court fiat. If the Supreme Court upholds the recent Ninth Circuit opinion, it will obviate the legal difference between civil unions and marriage. States will have either one or the other. Over the next few years, we’ll see more states voting in same-sex marriage, with only the South and perhaps some Midwestern states holding out. Eventually — I’m guessing within five to seven years — the Supreme Court will decide once and for all whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. If the decision is yes, this will have tremendous repercussions for religious liberty in America. Such as:

Specifically, in a society that redefines marriage to include same-sex unions, those who continue to believe marriage is a relationship between a man and a woman can expect to face three types of burdens. First, institutions that support the traditional understanding of marriage may be denied access to several types of government benefits, and individuals who work in the public sector may face censorship, disciplinary action, and even loss of employment. Second, those who support the traditional understanding of marriage will be subject to even greater civil liability under nondiscrimination laws that prohibit private discrimination based on sexual orientation, marital status, and gender.  Third, the existence of nondiscrimination laws, combined with state administrative policies, can invite private forms of discrimination against religious individuals who believe that marriage involves a man and a woman and foster a climate of contempt for the public expression of their views.

What does that mean concretely? This NPR story gives an example. Excerpt:

As states have legalized same-sex partnerships, the rights of gay couples have consistently trumped the rights of religious groups. Marc Stern, general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, says that does not mean that a pastor can be sued for preaching against same-sex marriage. But, he says, that may be just about the only religious activity that will be protected.

“What if a church offers marriage counseling? Will they be able to say ‘No, we’re not going to help gay couples get along because it violates our religious principles to do so? What about summer camps? Will they be able to insist that gay couples not serve as staff because they’re a bad example?” Stern asks.

Stern says if the early cases are any guide, the outlook is grim for religious groups.

A few cases: Yeshiva University was ordered to allow same-sex couples in its married dormitory. A Christian school has been sued for expelling two allegedly lesbian students. [Note: the plaintiffs ultimately lost. — RD] Catholic Charities abandoned its adoption service in Massachusetts after it was told to place children with same-sex couples. The same happened with a private company operating in California.

A psychologist in Mississippi who refused to counsel a lesbian couple lost her case, and legal experts believe that a doctor who refused to provide IVF services to a lesbian woman is about to lose his pending case before the California Supreme Court.

The thing to keep in mind is that once same-sex marriage is constitutionalized, religious institutions that refuse to compromise on their traditional beliefs about homosexuality will be at risk of losing their tax exempt status, as the New Jersey Methodist church did in the NPR story, for refusing to allow a lesbian wedding in its pavilion. So many churches and religious institutions — e.g., schools, charities — operate at such a tight margin that to lose their favorable tax status could mean the difference between survival and extinction.

Here’s the thing: judging by this poll, most Americans probably won’t care.

Evidence that we are a vain and decadent people who deserve divine judgment:

Cats who used to put up with plain tuna or mackerel can now savor white-tablecloth dishes like wild salmon and whipped egg soufflé with garden greens, part of Fancy Feast’s Elegant Medleys line, or Outback Grill, an Australian-themed entree from Weruva, with native fish like barramundi and trevally.

Their canine cousins might be sniffing lustily as the pop-top opens on French Country Café, a beguiling mixture of duck, brown rice, carrots, Golden Delicious apples and peas offered by Merrick, a small family-owned company in Amarillo, Tex., or sending their taste buds to Hawaii with Kauai Luau, chicken with brown rice, sweet potato, prawns, egg, garlic and kale in a lobster consommé. The beach feast is one of the Tiki Dog flavors from Petropics, another small company.

In most American homes, menus reflect belt-tightening. Mealtimes have lost some of their luster at the high table. Down on the kitchen floor, however, the picture is rosy.

“It is now considered socially acceptable to treat pets as members of the family and to express that by spending lavishly on them, especially when it comes to food,” said David Lummis, the senior pet-industry analyst for Packaged Facts, a market research company.

Hell, some of that stuff sounds like something I might buy and smear on a cracker. Get this:

Pet owners, invariably called “pet parents” by the makers of super-premium pet foods, do not mind reaching in their wallets and paying extra, even in recessionary times.

“Pet parents”? “Pet parents”! Pet parents. More pet parents.

For the record, I have observed my dog eating his own poop. Roscoe ain’t the jet set.

The Archdiocese of Denver has been doing a “Theology on Tap” program in which they hold gatherings in bars to talk about theological questions. The idea is to meet people in unorthodox places to talk about the Gospel and everyday life. I’ve been to meetings like this in other cities, and they’re great.

Well, a bar in Denver has ended its agreement with the Archdiocese after a local auxiliary bishop gave a Theology on Tap talk about religious liberty and the HHS decision. From the story:

Shortly after the talk, however, organizers were told to find a different location for the program because of its “controversial” content and the fact that that some of the bar staff said they would refuse to work the event again.

“It’s ironic that the talk itself pertains so well to what happened,” said Chris Stefanick, director of the archdiocese’s office for youth, young adults and campus ministry who helps run the event.

Have you heard about an on-camera interview from last year with Rick Santorum, in which he talked about his opposition to contraception? An excerpt from the transcript:

One of the things I will talk about that no President has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea. Many in the Christian faith have said, “Well, that’s okay. Contraception’s okay.”

It’s not okay because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.

I respect Rick Santorum’s fidelity to Catholic teaching, and his courage in defending a position that is very unpopular. But this was a mistake. Americans don’t turn to their presidents for advice on how to conduct their sex lives, especially at this level of intimacy. Of course it’s not true at all that there are no public implications from private sexual conduct, but drawing the line on contraception is going to strike most Americans as simply a weird position for a presidential candidate to take.

Conor Friedersdorf wisely counsels him to shut up. Though I am more sympathetic to the anti-contraception position than I imagine Conor is, he is undoubtedly correct that if only as a prudential matter, this is not likely to be a fertile field of evangelization for candidate Santorum. It muddies the water on the HHS controversy as well. If it’s only about the licitness of contraception, then social and religious conservatives definitely lose. If it’s about religious liberty — as I believe it to be — then there’s a very good chance we can prevail.

David Gibson passes along this interview with Craig Bartholomew, a Christian philosopher who claims that American Christians have forgotten that in order to thrive spiritually, we have to be rooted in a place. Excerpt:

Is the renewed interest in spiritual formation, the spiritual disciplines, or liturgical practices related to our knowing there’s a crisis of place?

Absolutely. And there are so many ways you can point this out. In the book, I note that if you want to take place seriously, you have to slow down. You have to learn to be still and attentive. Because slowness, waiting, and stillness are fundamental to the practice of Christian spirituality.

As an academic, it is easier for me to read about spirituality but spirituality is about practice—habitual practice is the formative part. The father of monasticism, Benedict, said that placial stability is important. To grow really deeply into Christ, you need to stay in one place.

What spiritual disciplines would serve to keep a Christian community more aware of and connected to their neighborhood?

Take time to stand and stare. We are in a situation where people do not see their house or their neighborhood because those are things we pass through. If you want to learn about your neighborhood, take a walk around it. Most suburban developments are not designed for walkers. We continue to build huge box houses—ironically a meter from one another but don’t facilitate community—people open the garage and go into the house where they are sealed off from the rest of the world.

Pay attention to your house as a home and ask how you can develop it to promote the flourishing of its occupants. For example, pay attention to the interior décor—where the TV is placed, the colors, the artwork, and so on. Have a good look at your garden. Is it full of pesticide with the immaculate lawn, or is it a place of tranquility for humans, plants, and animals, with porous borders that enclose and yet open out onto your neighborhood?

The challenge of placemaking today should not be underestimated. We are at war against ourselves as my friend, engineer Bill Vanderburg, points out in his recent book (Our War on Ourselves: Rethinking Science, Technology, and Economic Growth). The very things we aspire to—the big suburban plots, the double garage, the two cars—the goals of middle-class life are easily the very things that get in the way of human flourishing.

One big thing I’m learning as I work on this book about my late sister and the place she lived, and where I grew up (but left), is the strengths and weaknesses of our very different approaches to the idea of Place. Ruthie was wholly committed to this place, a commitment that emerged from her entire way of looking at the world. I’ve come to see her mind as Confucian, in the sense that she had a very strong belief that the world was structured a certain way, and that duty compels us to make choices narrowly constricted by our prescribed loyalties. This was the source of her profound stability — but also a weakness, because the depth of her commitment was such that she couldn’t imagine things being any other way.

I, on the other hand, have always been highly restless, and not just in terms of moving house, in the standard American middle class way. I’ve been philosophically and religiously restless too, driven by an almost insatiable curiosity. This, I think, has been a source of strength in many ways, but also of weakness. I don’t think Ruthie’s way was the right way in every respect, but anyone who has followed my work, at least since “Crunchy Cons,” will know that I have deeply longed for more of what came naturally to her.

Of course for most of us it isn’t a question of Either/Or — either Rod’s way or Ruthie’s way. In the book, you’ll meet Abby, one of Ruthie’s closest friends, who has a restless curiosity a lot like my own, but who is also rooted in this place, where she grew up and where she works as a school administrator. One thing my sister did not appreciate, I believe, is how much easier it was for her to choose to stay in this place because of her teaching vocation. In our town, the major employers are the nuclear power plant and the school system. If you don’t work at either place, then you have significant challenges in putting roots down here. It can be done, but it’s harder. I’m hearing from others in town that the cost of land around here has risen so far, so fast, that it’s becoming even more difficult for younger generations to return to the place they called home.

All of which is to say that there are material reasons that compel us to be restless, even when we might prefer to stay in place somewhere. I completely endorse what Prof. Bartholomew is saying, and would only add that the Christian critique of rootlessness cannot avoid entailing a critique of an economic system and way of life that is premised on the fungibility of labor and capital. That is, capitalism as it is practiced in our country demands employees who have no commitment to place. The “creative destruction” lauded by capitalism’s cheerleaders includes the destruction of one’s roots, and even of the possibility of setting down roots. If Christians want people to be able to create environments in which they and their families can flourish, we need to address these fundamental issues with our economic model.

Fortunately, as I’m finding, technology makes it possible for people like me to move back to our home places, or to stay in place. David Gibson, who sent me the link, works as a journalist from his home. Here in my town, I’ve met a financial manager who lives here and connects to his office far away. The ability of my family to stay here in the long run depends entirely on my ability to work online. I think this is going to be more and more the case across the country. I would support a federal program to extend broadband service as thoroughly as possible throughout the country, on the same principle as the government once supported rural electrification.

UPDATE: From an interesting essay about home and homesickness, by Jessa Crispin:

Homesickness is not just about missing your people and a more familiar home. It can be a desperate need to stop thinking about every tiny little goddamn thing. It’s a complex algebra, substituting for every variable. I remember doing quite well with my move to Berlin for the first two weeks. And then I had to buy fabric softener. I was faced with an aisle filled with completely unfamiliar fabric softeners, and I had no default brand to fall back on. Two weeks of making decisions like this, decisions that had been unconscious for so long but now had to be reconsidered and reweighed because you’re establishing the unconscious patterns that will last for years to come and what if you get it wrong, had left me exhausted and fragile. I left without fabric softener and went back to my apartment and cried.

That makes sense to me! When I moved to New York City, it took a lot out of me, having to learn a new way of doing things. But it was a fun challenge too. I was 31 years old. I was 43 when we moved to Philadelphia from Dallas, and though it was in most respects an easy move — it was nowhere near as challenging as moving to NYC — having to learn new places and new ways was no longer fun, but draining. Age has made me far less flexible.

On the overall question of place, I was thinking just now about how relative all of this is, and has to be. My sister missed the mark by thinking of commitment to place as an absolute good, instead of a relative good. In my last job, I had to put my writing career on hiatus, which turned out to have been one of the most emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically difficult things I’ve ever done. I learned from that experience that writing is such an essential part of my identity, and how I find meaning in life, that to not be able to write is very, very hard to live with. I could do it if I had to, but at tremendous cost to my own sense of self. It was a useful thing to learn about myself. If I could not support myself as a writer here, or in any other place, but could do that somewhere else, then I would, under most conditions, move. It might sound strange, but writing means so much to me that if I were unable to write in a particular place, I would be like a gay person who had to remain closeted in his particular place. Perhaps one could exist decently enough, but one couldn’t really thrive.

Now, it could be the case that the writer is not so attached to writing, and is so attached to staying in a particular place, that he’s willing to make that sacrifice. It could also be true for the closeted gay person living in a particular place (in fact, I know that has been the case for some people I know). It’s all a matter of trading off. I don’t think my sister could have been happy in most other places. She loved this place, her home, in her marrow. You could have paid her ten times her salary here to move away, and she would have refused, because this place was her life. You could pay me 10 times what I make now to give up writing, and I wouldn’t do it, because writing is my life, and to move away from it would make me “homesick” in a way I would find intolerable. This I know from recent experience.

Ross Douthat has a neat analysis of why Rick Santorum poses such a particular threat to Mitt Romney. Excerpt:

But Santorum’s advantage is that he can get to Romney’s right and to his left at once. On the one hand, Santorum isn’t responsible for a health care bill that looks an awful lot like “Obamacare” and he doesn’t have a long list of social-issue flip-flops in his past. This makes his candidacy a plausible rallying point for the voters who previously turned Bachmann and Cain and the pre-debate Rick Perry into conservative flavors of the month.

At the same time, though, Santorum’s persona, his record and his platform all have a populist tinge that plays well in states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where swing voters tend to be socially conservative but economically middle-of-the-road. (Hence the Michigan poll that showed himleading among independents and Democrats who plan to vote in that state’s open primary.)

This means that Santorum can play the same anti-Bain, anti-rich-guy, blue-collar card that Gingrich tried to play in New Hampshire and South Carolina – but subtly, implicitly, in ways that don’t make him sound like he belongs in Occupy Wall Street instead of the Republican primary.

Ross suggests that Romney needs to find a way to frame Santorum as “the consummate Bush-era Republican,” which in most ways Santorum certainly is. I don’t see how Romney pulls this off, though. Can you think of a single thing Mitt Romney stands for today that separates him from George W. Bush’s policies? I know it’s risky business to try to pin Mitt Romney’s beliefs down, but in 2007, Big Think asked candidate Romney to reflect on Bush’s legacy. Here’s what he said; emphases are mine:

Well there will be things that are great accomplishments . . . I think we will recognize that he kept us safe these last few years, and that was not easy to do. He fought for the Patriot Act. He made sure that when Al Qaeda was calling, we were listening. He made sure that terrorists that were caught, we interrogated to find out what they knew so we could protect our country. He kept us safe. That’s the first responsibility of a president. Secondly, he went after the guys that went after us. No more in this world do you say, “Hey, we can go after America and nothing happens.” He made sure people realize there are consequences for attacking us. They attacked us at the U.S.S. Cole. They attacked us in Saudi Arabia. They attacked us in our . . . in African embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. And actually they attacked our Marines in Lebanon. We didn’t respond. And finally when George Bush was president and they attacked us on 9/11, we did respond in a major and aggressive way, and they know there are consequences for attacking us. His commitment to education and “No Child Left Behind”, I also support. And his effort to help people get prescription drugs I think was a good effort, although I think we should’ve reformed Medicare as part of the process because the Medicare Part D alone, I’m afraid, added a huge new entitlement that I think will not be a positive part of his legacy. There are other elements that were not as successful. I wish we would have been able to see the reform of entitlements. That just didn’t happen. He tried, that was unsuccessful. And of course the conflict in Iraq was not superbly managed. Following the collapse of Saddam Hussein, we just did not have the right level of troop strength. We did not have the rules of engagement or the . . . the plans and preparations in place to . . . to have Iraq become stable in the timeframe it should have become stable. So there will be pluses and minuses; but overall we’ll know that this is a president who did what he thought was right for America at every turn.

(In case you were wondering, the TARP bailout is not addressed here because this was recorded on November 26, 2007, before the 2008 crash.)

Let’s unpack this. Romney supported the Patriot Act. Romney supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and says the only thing that was wrong with attacking Iraq is that it wasn’t managed well. He supported No Child Left Behind. He supported the budget-busting Medicare Part D entitlement, though with reservations. And he believed that Bush’s good intentions absolve him.

Well, that was five years ago. What does Romney believe now? Go to the issues page on MittRomney.com and see for yourself. I dare you to find anything there that differs substantially from anything George W. Bush believed. Iraq isn’t on the list, but he’s following the Bush script for Afghanistan. He says nothing about education policy, but reportedly still supports the unpopular No Child Left Behind program. There’s nothing about banking regulations, which indicates that Romney doesn’t see a thing in need of reform there, a la Bush. And Romney supports TARP.

True, Romney opposed the auto industry bailout (which is hurting him in Michigan, predictably), though he blames Obama for it, not Bush, whose administration first provided bailout money to Detroit. Still, that’s a clear difference he has with the Bush legacy, though given how well the auto bailout has worked, I’m not sure that helps him much. Besides, his continued support for TARP means he doesn’t oppose bailouts in theory.

In sum, there is no credible way for Romney to paint Santorum as the consummate Bush-era Republican without condemning himself. If he tries to position himself as an “outsider,” given his lack of Washington experience (versus Santorum’s), all Santorum has to do is point out that the entire Washington GOP establishment backs Mitt — so who’s the real outsider? Yadda yadda.

The bigger problem here is that the Republican Party has not yet come to terms with the failures of the Bush presidency. Whether the nominee is Santorum or Romney, the GOP will be offering to voters a third Bush term. Exciting, huh?