Santorum Compares Himself To Mandela

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum this week compared himself to Nelson Mandela and likened the struggle against apartheid to Republican efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act.  Both, he said, are about opposing “injustice.”

But that doesn’t mean Santorum was on the same side as the late South African leader in opposing apartheid. He apparently praised Mandela’s struggle for freedom because everyone else is doing so this week, but apparently he had problems with Mandela’s goals.

“What he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer,” the former senator told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who called Mandela “a great man” but “a communist.” 

Santorum’s comparison of Obamacare to apartheid raises important questions:  Is he really that stupid?  Or is he just an unthinking, ambitious opportunist trying to take advantage of outpouring of emotion over the loss of a great man by trying to score some petty political points by taking a jab at another historic black president?

It also sounds like the once and future presidential hopeful has written off the African-American vote if, as expected, he goes for the GOP nomination again in 2016. 

Santorum made a strong run for the nomination last year, with the bulk of his support coming from the party’s most religious and social conservative followers.  In that campaign he said, “We always need a Jesus candidate,” and implied he was that figure.

Santorum talks like an super hawk on Israel, and that appeals to some hardliners, though probably more evangelicals than Jews, but the rest of his record turned away Jewish voters in droves the last time as it did in 2006 when in his losing bid for reelection to the Senate; he got only 22 percent of Jewish voters. There’s no reason to expect a different outcome in 2016.

He was the farthest to the right in a 2012 field that competed to see who could be the most extreme.  

He is uncompromisingly anti-abortion — including rape and incest — and has said Social Security is in trouble because so many abortions have kept people out of the workplace and not there to pay taxes.

He’s the man who said JFK’s 1960 speech endorsing separation of church and state “makes me throw up.” 

He has been called a homophobe and a bigot because of his opposition to same sex marriage, gays in the military and for saying even gay, consensual sex in private should be criminalized.

At times during the 2012 campaign is looked more like he was running for pope than president.