Is Santorum speaking his mind to deaf ears?

The final senatorial debate between Sammy Glick and Perry Como – excuse me, Rick Santorum and Bob Casey Jr. – was conducted early last evening, which means that TV viewers in Pennsylvania can now return to their regular programming, no doubt needing no further reminders that they will be compelled to choose on Nov. 8 between the hyper and the soporific.

I’ll spare you a reenactment of the various charges and countercharges; nor will I dwell on the dueling attack lines (Casey says that Santorum is a stay-the-course, rubber-stamping toady for President Bush; Santorum says that Casey is an empty suit with an empty mind, cruising on his father’s name). Most people are probably tuning out that stuff already. All that will really matter, on election day, is whether the Republican incumbent will be judged by most voters to be out of sync with the prevailing statewide mood.

And I suspect that this will happen.

It’s true that the Democratic challenger, whenever given the choice between sounding decisive and vaporous, continues to opt for the latter; last night, for instance, when Casey was twice asked to spell out the conditions under which he would endorse military action against a recalcitrant North Korea, he said there’s “no line I can identify” and “we can’t sit here tonight and draw a line on this.”

But this Senate race - which the national Democrats must win, if they have any chance of taking back the Senate chamber - is not about Casey, notwithstanding Santorum’s increasingly frenetic efforts to make it so. At this point, Santorum looks like he’s trying to drive a nail into a vat of Jell-o. His exertions are almost palpable, and probably in vain, because this race is ultimately about the number three Senate Republican, in an election year that has shaped up to be a referendum on the governing Republican party. The man knows how to hustle, in Glick fashion, but it’s debatable whether he can hustle successfully in such an inhospitable climate.

Santorum’s ongoing problem, evidenced again last night, is that he can’t help saying exactly what he really thinks – despite the fact that his commendably unvarnished candor is probably turning off the suburban Republican moderates whose votes he desperately needs in order to survive. Assuming they haven’t tuned him out already.

Take Iraq, for example. Most Pennsylvanians, echoing most fellow citizens elsewhere, by this point have judged the war to be a failure, either in terms of its underlying mission or for its incompetent execution, or both; nor do they believe that the Iraq war has made Americans safer at home. But Santorum is still insisting that the voters have got it all wrong; as he put it last night:

“The fact that we have been out there, aggressively going after (the Iraq terrorists), has kept this country safe for five years. It’s one of the things seemingly overlooked every now and then, with respect to our success. We have not been attacked in five years. That’s because we’ve been taking it to them.”

Moreover, he contended that if the war on terror is ultimately lost, he is prepared to blame it on Americans at home, for failing to lose their nerve. (We will lose, he said, “if Americans don’t understand what we’re facing.”) This argument might well strike many Pennsylvania voters as a bit of an insult. In other words, why blame the folks at home, without saying nary a word during the debate about the increasingly well-documented mistakes committed in Iraq by the administration that he has long supported – such as (among other things) sending too few troops to this so-called central front in the war on terror, and failing to provide sufficient body armor, and failing to anticipate the possibility of an anti-American insurgency?

Many war analysts, as well as many voters, have long believed that Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld deserves some of the blame for those mistakes. John McCain has said that he has “no confidence” in Rumsfeld, and some moderate Republicans, as well as Senate Democratic hawk Joe Lieberman, have called for his resignation. Bob Casey, the cautious centrist, has echoed that call. But last night, Santorum – again risking the perception that he refuses to hold the administration accountable for errors – staunchly defended Rumsfeld, with this puzzling line:

“Don Rumsfeld doesn’t make policy, he follows policy.”

In other words, Santorum was saying that Rumsfeld should not be held accountable for anything, because he’s not really in charge of anything. No doubt this would be news to Rumsfeld, because the fact is that Santorum’s argument was not accurate.

It has long been established, in reports and books and congressional studies, that Rumsfeld essentially controlled the war planning; he reportedly micromanaged the invasion plans “down to the last tank.” As a self-described military reformer, he’s the person who contended that a smaller, quicker strike force could get the job done. And when Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, argued that winter that we would need at least several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, he was shown the door on an accelerate schedule – and everybody in the Pentagon knew where that decision was made.

Nor is it clear that, on Iraq, Santorum can win over swing voters and moderate Republicans by portraying himself as an independent politician who occasionally disagrees with Bush. Especially when his disagreements are grounded in the argument that Bush isn't hawkish enough.

Last night, for instance, Santorum again insisted that we define the enemy as “Islamo-fascists.” When it was pointed out to him that even Bush has stopped using that terminology – because his aides persuaded him that it turns off moderate Muslims and therefore does more harm than good – Santorum implied that Bush has made the wrong call: “I’m sure that we offended a lot of Germans and Japanese and Italians when we called a spade a spade in World War II.”

For the most part, however, Santorum is stuck with the fact (which Casey recites almost as a mantra) that he has long been one of the Bush team's most faithful soldiers. This is a troublesome label, especially when a top gun on the Bush team says something that might not sit well with most Pennsylvania voters. Witness Dick Cheney, for example. Today, while talking with Rush Limbaugh, Cheney said this about the current government in Iraq (where October is shaping up to be the third worst month of the war for U.S. military deaths): "If you look at the general overall situation, they're doing remarkably well."

But since moderates and independents might not be persuadable on Iraq, one can sense that Santorum is stacking his sandbags around the immigration issue, as catnip for his conservative base. That, in the end, might be where he makes his final stand – seeking to maximize conservative turnout by putting heavy stress on his call for strong border security. The problem here, however, is that anti-immigration sentiment is not nearly as strong in Pennsylvania as it is elsewhere (in part because the state reportedly ranks 31st in the percentage of foreign-born residents). One statewide poll shows that only around eight percent of Pennsylvania voters rank immigration as their top issue concern, and most of them are probably with Santorum already.

So it would not appear that the debates shifted the dynamic in Santorum’s favor. He risks being swept into early retirement ( at least from elective office) by the prevailing national mood, and that’s noteworthy, given the fact that he rode a pro-Republican mood into the Senate 12 years ago. If he loses on Nov. 7, it could be written that, sometimes in politics, you live by the wave, you die by the wave.