GOP Dropout Rick Santorum Damns Marco Rubio with Faint Praise

Marco Rubio may have moved up in the pecking order of potential Republican candidates from wannabe to not inconceivable, but he has been damned with faint praise by recently dropped-out candidate Rick Santorum.

Appearing on the MSNBC’s  Morning Joe talk show to talk about his withdrawal from the race, Santorum, having announced his endorsement of the now third-seeded Rubio, was  cornered by gadfly  trouble makers Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. After Santorum touted Rubio as a “born leader” in his endorsement, Joe and Mika asked him to name Rubio’s top accomplishment in the Senate?

Santorum, who cultivates a reputation for honesty, was stuck on the horns of a dilemma.  Having just endorsed Rubio, he had to backtrack on his endorsement because he couldn’t think of any accomplishments.  When Santorum replied that he guessed it was hard to say there were any Rubio accomplishments because there was so much gridlock in Washington,

Scarborough wasn’t about to let Santorum off the hook that easy, asking whether the former Pennsylvania senator whether he could name even any of Rubio‘s accomplishments, whether or not they were accomplished in the Senate. After beating around the bush (no pun intended, but this is Jeb Bush’s opinion about Rubio,) Santorum explained that Rubio has been too busy running for president to do anything else, conveniently forgetting that Rubio ascended to the Senate in 2011, five years ago, which is a long time not to have done anything.

Finally, after tiring of the hazing by Scarborough and Brzezinski, Santorum finally admitted that,  “The bottom line is there isn’t a lot of accomplishments, Joe, and I just don’t think it’s a fair question to say.”

We wanted Scarborough to ask why that wasn’t a fair question to ask, but he never  did, preferring to let the tongue-tied Santorum off the hook.  After all, it was rather like shooting fish in a barrel, a common practice in South Florida

Santorum shouldn’t take his faux pas to heart.  He’s not alone in the “damned with faint praise” dog house.  In 1960, during a presidential press conference, outgoing president Dwight David Eisenhower, was asked to give an example of  Vice President Richard Nixon’s -then in a neck and neck race for the presidency against John F. Kennedy – contributions to the Eisenhower administration.  Eisenhower’s famous response had a chilling effect on Nixon’s campaign efforts.

Eisenhower said, “No, but  if you give me a week, I might think of one.”  He never did.

He did apologize, however, in 1966, long after Kennedy had swept the electoral vote in the 1960 campaign, winning by 303 electoral votes against Nixon’s anemic 219 votes.  According to the Eisenhower National Historic Site (yep, there really is one),  Ike reportedly told Nixon that he wanted to kick himself “every time some ‘jackass’  brought up that god damn ‘give me a week’  business.”

Of course, Eisenhower never did like Nixon all that much, and even tried to force him off the ticket in 1952 when Nixon was accused of financial improprieties.  That attempt failed, which led the way to Nixon’s presidency, the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the beginnings of the government’s spying on the American people, the White House Enemies List, Watergate, and the spectacle of a disgraced president being hounded from office by a couple of cub reporters on the Washington Post. Nixon had to wait eight years to get his turn in the Oval Office, but that’s not even the end of the story.

There were further ramifications from Eisenhower’s off-the-cuff joke, if it really was a joke.  The ramification was that conservative Republicans were outraged that their candidate should lose the  election by a mere 84 electoral vote when he had lost the popular vote by a mere 1112,827 cast ballots.  That was the genesis of the Republican party’s ongoing effort to Gerrymander congressional districts to create a permanent Republican majority in the electoral college. The result is the one-sided Republican ownership of the House of Representatives and their increasing dominance in the Senate, and the dysfunctionality of the current Congress.