Parsing Santorum's sweaters

By Steve Frank

When the good Republicans of Iowa rewarded the sheer doggedness of Rick Santorum's 99-county campaign last week, the Republican presidential campaign took an oddly personal turn for me. The ensuing "week of the sweater vest" in national politics connected me - or at least the contents of my closet - to one of the GOP candidates for the first time.

We will soon find out whether Santorum's Iowa momentum will pay dividends in New Hampshire, South Carolina, and beyond. It's not clear that he has the message, organization, and fund-raising ability to make that happen. But even if he falters, Jon Huntsman fails to catch fire, and Mitt Romney starts to pull away from the pack, it's worth pausing to consider Santorum's sweater vests and their relationship with what we want in a president.

Until the media took notice, Santorum seems to have given little thought to his wardrobe - unlike Romney, whose Iowa fashion statement, his now-famous jeans, bespoke studied calculation. I don't know if Romney could tell you where his jeans were purchased or, for that matter, by whom. But Santorum, we learned, stocks up on his sweater vests when they go on sale at Joseph A. Bank - which is what made me take notice, because that's where I buy mine. The sweaters, it seemed, were "authentic."

Unfortunately, authenticity, especially when measured by how a candidate's biography reflects his or her values, is an overrated commodity in politics. While it would be nice if Santorum's down-to-earth fashion sense and family history - he is the grandson of a Pennsylvania coal miner - made him an authentic champion of ordinary Americans, there's really no meaningful conclusion to be drawn from those facts.

Consider that Thomas Jefferson, a slaveholding aristocrat, inscribed the natural rights of man in the Declaration of Independence and championed, against the elitists of his day, the people's ability to govern themselves. Or that among modern presidents, the greatest champion of those at the bottom, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had a patrician pedigree and liked to vacation on Vincent Astor's yacht.

In any case, candidates' biographies are forever being spun. Those who voted for Abraham Lincoln could be forgiven for thinking he was only a humble "rail splitter" born in a log cabin, when in fact he was also a longtime politician and one of the most successful corporate lawyers in Illinois.

So where should voters turn for guidance? We can try to find the candidate whose policy positions are closest to our own, a task made easier by the Internet. But that wonky solution has its limits, too.

Let's say you're trying to choose between Santorum and Romney in today's New Hampshire primary, and your top issue is jobs. You visit each of their websites and find that the "Santorum Solution" for what ails the economy consists of 12 proposals, most involving tax cuts, while Romney's "Believe in America" plan for jobs and growth is a grab bag of 59 proposals, including a repeal of "Obamacare" and a balanced-budget amendment.

None of this makes the choice much clearer. Candidates campaign in generalities, and what's true of Santorum and Romney is true of the rest: Their positions are seldom backed up by specific programmatic commitments, and when they are, they frequently rehash old proposals.

And yet, when it mattered most, Americans have chosen wisely. With luck, we will again.

I mentioned two of our nation's greatest presidents, Lincoln and FDR. They came from very different backgrounds and belonged to different parties, but they shared the most important aspects of presidential greatness: Each was serene in the face of crisis. Each was willing to learn. (FDR entered office intent on balancing the federal budget; Lincoln had no immediate plan to free the slaves.) And each showed confidence that things could improve.

What voters should seek in a president is the same optimism and willingness to change that we hope will serve us well when the chips are down. The Republican campaign thus far has done a good job of winnowing out candidates who lack what the office requires. That's remarkable given how easy it is to be distracted by things of little consequence, like sweater vests.