TimManBlog

Rick Santorum — Blue Collar Campaigner

They just finished counting the votes in Colorado and confirmed that Senator Rick Santorum had won the state Romney carried with 60% of the vote in the 2008 primary.  The Colorado win completes a tri-fecta for Santorum; earlier he had won both Missouri and Minnesota with a strong showing. In Missouri Santorum won each and every county in the state.

How did this happen?

I can speak for what happened in Colorado. Over the last week I trekked between Colorado Springs and Denver to attend live events with Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Senator Santorum. The curious can read my accounts of those events at the links below:

Santorum — The Servant

Romney — The Executive

Gingrich — The Visionary

I actually went to a second Santorum campaign rally just to confirm to myself what I had seen after the first one.

Rick Santorum out-worked the two better known and better funded candidates. He does Blue Collar campaigning.

Newt and Mitt did campaign rallies and gave speeches filled with laundry lists and applause lines. Santorum spoke to people in a coherent thematic way. He explained to them that we are losing our Freedom and he explained how and why.

Audiences at the Newt and Mitt events cheered at every bullet point and punch line. Ba-dum-bump…Yay! The applause from the last one-liner barely ended before it was time to cheer at the next one.

Rick Santorum’s audiences listened to an orator. They listened with rapt attention. They wanted to hear and digest his message, and consider it the way a free people deliberates about important issues.

At Santorum’s events the crowd became so quiet and attentive that at times one could hear a baby crying far across the room or the dull hum of traffic on the street outside. That is what I saw and heard.

After their speeches Newt and Mitt would spend ten minutes shaking hands and posing for photos. Then they left.

Rick Santorum stayed to shake ALL the hands offered; the whole crowd left before the candidate went home. I saw that happen…twice.

That, that is Blue Collar campaigning.

Senator Rick Santorum at Denver University