Hewitt Blog

HH: We begin with presidential candidate and former United States Senate from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. Senator, welcome back, it’s always a pleasure to have you. 

RS: Well, thank you, Hugh. It’s great doing our weekly call. I enjoy doing it.

HH: I do, and you know, I’ve told people that one of the reasons I think you have really connected with the Republican electorate is that you have been accessible not just to this show, but basically in any platform, any time, any question, Rick Santorum. You think that’s part of your surge?

RS: Well, you know, I’ve always believed that you as a public official running for public office have to be accountable to the people that you’re asking the vote for. And that means town hall meetings. We’ve done well over 800 of them. I just did one a few minutes ago in Tioga, North Dakota. I’m going to be doing one in a few minutes in Fargo, and in some cases, a handful of people, and in the last few weeks, it’s been more like a few thousand people. Even the occupiers, you know, come to some of these meetings and have their screaming matches. So that’s just what I think is part of the process of running for president. And these sort of sanitized events where you’ve got structured crowds and nobody asks questions, I just think turns people off.

Certain policies may help avoid a future of growing income inequality and social decline. One is to stop the emigration of California’s best talent. The state should meet the demand for college-educated workers by making itself attractive to the highly educated, not by trying to dragoon all students into college. California cannot hope to retain the entrepreneurs it still has and to attract others unless it radically revamps its business climate and lowers its taxes (a course made more difficult, though, by the demands on government social services imposed by the growing Hispanic population). Congress could help California stay globally competitive by letting foreign-born Ph.D. students in science and technology automatically obtain green cards to work in the U.S. after completing their degrees.

California should also create a robust vocational-education system. The fashionable prejudice against vocational education will end up bankrupting the school and college systems by forcing students into academically oriented classrooms that hold no interest for them and for which they are not qualified. Further, the blue-collar skilled trades are desperate for workers and pay much better than many a service-sector job (see “Wanted: Blue-Collar Workers,†Autumn 2011). Only 55 percent of Hispanic male students graduated from California high schools in 2007, reports the California Dropout Research Project; many of the dropouts would undoubtedly have welcomed the opportunity to learn a trade. At the same time, California must stop decimating what remains of its manufacturing sector with business-killing regulations (see “The Long Stall,†Autumn 2011).