I wouldn’t say its been a well kept secret, but Santorum’s previous level of obscurity for  the GOP nomination prevented his legacy of earmarks from getting its due mention.  Senator Santorum’s career in Congress was during the heyday of big government conservatism.

I once wrote a spending bill thiiis big.

With GOP colleagues like Tom Delay and Dennis Hastert, Rick Santorum was very much apart of that infamous class. For Delay, he was then ,just as he is now, an outspoken supporter of earmarks. When the new GOP class promised to curb earmark spending, Delay was quick to voice his opposition.

“I am not one of those guys. The purse strings belong to the House of Representatives, and earmarks are one of the ways to keep the executive-branch honest,” DeLay said. “Why would you give up your responsibility and your authority to the executive branch?”

As for Dennis Hastert, the former longest serving speaker in Republican history left a long legacy of earmarks and questionable deals (but not illegal from Congress’s exemption to insider trading laws) that netted both him and his associates major profits. The story goes that Hastert owned some land that was of minimal worth, so he used appropriated funds stuffed inside a transportation bill that funded a highway project near the property. The new access road caused the value to increase. Hastert then later sold the property for a substantial profit, clearing $2 million. That seems easier than bending down to pick up a quarter on a sidewalk.

These were the dark days of “compassionate” conservatism, where wild discretionary spending was available for anyone in Congress with a pen. For Rick Santorum, he used his pen towards the sum of at least $1 billion in pork-barrel projects.

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One of the most popular and most talked about movies of 1993 was Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, Barbara Hershey, and Robert Duval.

Douglas played William “D-FENS” Foster, an engineer at a defense contractor who has a really bad day.  Some described the movie as “an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.” Foster became an iconic anti-hero, symbolizing the people who (stealing Bill Clinton’s line)worked hard and played by the rules, yet found themselves at the bottom of the heap in the post-Cold War era of 1993.

Foster’s wife (Hershey) has left him.  He’s moved in with his mother. Making matters worse, Hershey’s obtained a court order barring Foster from visiting their young daughter, whom he loves more than life itself.

On the little girl’s birthday, everything falls apart.  Foster gets laid off from the defense contractor job.  The police remind him he’s not to go near his wife or daughter.  And in one memorable scene, a fast food chain’s rules interfere when Foster just wants breakfas:

When I read about Jetblue flight attendant, Steven Slater, Falling Down comes to mind.

And it’s not just me.

According to a new Wall Street Journal/MSNBC Poll, two-thirds of Americans believe the worst is yet to come for the economy.  Democrat pollster Peter Hart sees Steven Slater as metaphor for voter sentiment.

Mr. Hart said the 2010 contest is being pulled by the sentiment associated with the JetBlue flight attendant who fled his plane via the emergency chute after an altercation with a passenger. Calling it the “JetBlue election,” Mr. Hart said: “Everyone’s hurling invective and they’re all taking the emergency exit.”

Like William Foster, Steven Slater seems to symbolize—in exaggerated form—the mood of the American people.  We’re fed up with bureaucracy and petty rules, “minute and uniform,” as Tocqueville put it,  “. . . through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”

Steven Slater broke through, alright.

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A year ago, in a blogpost entitled The Great Awakening, I argued that conservatives “should be grateful to Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Rahm Emanuel.” After all, I wrote, they had unmasked “the Democratic Party as a conspiracy on the part of a would-be aristocracy of do-gooders hostile to the very idea of self-government in the United States,” and they had done so by making “the tyrannical propensities inherent within the progressive impulse visible to anyone who cares to take notice.” This is a theme to which I have returned repeatedly in a series of posts – some of them linked here, others archived here and here, and the most recent found here – arguing that, with the proper leadership, the Republican Party could seize this occasion and effect a political realignment.

The heart of the matter is simple. What Franklin Delano Roosevelt falsely claimed in 1936 is now demonstrably true: “A small group” of individuals – lead by our current President, his Chief of Staff, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Majority Leader in the United States Senate – really is intent on concentrating “into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” If they wish to effect a realignment, all that the Republicans have to do is to complete the task of unmasking begun by Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and Emanuel and make it clear that they really do intend to repeal Obamacare, to balance the federal budget without enacting permanent tax increases, to roll back the scope and size of the administrative state, and to restore within these United States limited, constitutional government.

They face two great obstacles. First, as I argued last year in my book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, the administrative state has been growing for almost a century now, and it has become entrenched. Moreover, its growth has been fueled not only by the ambitions of a self-styled progressive elite proclaiming its expertise and its desire to manage our lives for us. It has also been supported by the political psychology to which – the baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Alexis de Tocqueville contended – commercial, liberal, democratic societies, such as our own, generally give rise. Put simply, men in liberal democracies tend to fall prey to what these thinkers call inquiétude, and under the influence of this uneasiness – this vague, unfocused fear lacking a defined object – they are apt, especially in times of economic distress, to be willing to trade independence for a promise of security. The Americans whom Tocqueville met in the early 1830s had the resources, institutional and moral, with which to resist this propensity. But we can no longer boast that, in the United States, local self-government is vigorous, private associations do much of what was allocated to government in Europe, the Christian religion provides us with a moral anchor, and marital fidelity and family solidarity afford us a haven from the upheavals that typify life in a dynamic, commercial society.

Second, no one really trusts the Republicans in Congress.

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