This week, Rick Santorum held a town hall meeting on a retired aircraft carrier. It was definitely a more dramatic venue than the last time I saw him, in a nursing home auditorium in New Hampshire.
As the candidate made small talk with supporters in the hangar bay of the U.S.S. Yorktown, his staff was frantically trying to fold away some of the empty chairs to make the audience look larger. They shooed the attendees — who appeared to be mainly a few families with home-schooled children and one woman with a very busy red-white-and-blue hat — into the middle “so we can have you guys in the camera shot.”
Although the meeting area was cold and smelled vaguely fishy, everyone in the little audience seemed upbeat, even the woman who expressed concern that the federal government was planning to round up local Tea Party members and put them in a FEMA concentration camp “that has a razor-wire fence around it.”
“I’m not familiar with that at all,” said Santorum, who was looking slightly less chipper than his fans. (The Federal Emergency Management Agency says there is no plan to round up the Tea Party. The agency doesn’t have any concentration camps. Just in case you were worried.)
Now why couldn't Santorum say something like that?
I'm not familiar with that at all.
What?!? Maybe he's not "familiar with that at all" because it's crazy! Why couldn't Santorum, a former United States senator and candidate for president, just say something like, "Ma'am, where the heck did you get an idea like that? This is the United States of America. No one is being put into a concentration camp now or any time soon. Got that? So don't listen to those jackasses at Fox! If you don't like President Obama or his policies, fine. Let's talk about that -- not some paranoid delusion of yours."
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