Peggy Noonan on Our Best Senator

Peggy Noonan has a terrific article in today's WSJ on our finest Senator -- Rick Santorum. She writes:

Rick Santorum's career (two Senate terms, before that two in the House) suggests he has thought a great deal about the balance, [between local and national issues] and concluded that in our time the national is the local. Federal power is everywhere; so are the national media..., And so he has spoken for, and stood for, the rights of the unborn, the needs of the poor, welfare reform when it was controversial, tax law to help the family; against forcing the nation to accept a redefining of marriage it does not desire, for religious freedom here and abroad, for the helpless in Africa and elsewhere. It is all, in its way, so personal. And so national. He has breached the gap with private action: He not only talks about reform of federal law toward the disadvantaged, he hires people in trouble and trains them in his offices.

....

Mr. Santorum has been at odds with the modernist impulse, or liberalism, or whatever it now and fairly should be called. Most of his own impulses--protect the unprotected, help the helpless, respect the common man--have not been conservative in the way conservative is roughly understood, or portrayed, in the national imagination. If this were the JFK era, his politics would not be called "right wing" but "progressive." He is, at heart, a Catholic social reformer. Bobby Kennedy would have loved him.

.....

Personally I'll shed no tear for the careerists of either party who win or lose, nor for the BlackBerryed gargoyles in the second row of the SUV who tell them how to think and where to stand. That means this election night will be, for me, a dry-eyed affair.

But if Rick Santorum goes down to the defeat all expect, I will feel it.... I know a national loss when I see one.

Read the whole thing here.

She's right. Rick Santorum is a national treasure and his defeat would be a great loss for the Republic as well as for the Commonwealth. I would disagree only with one point. Although Rick's compassionate conservatism is firmly located within his Catholic faith, the impulse is not itself specifically Catholic. There is at least one other major figure in Washington these days who has demonstrated qualities of compassion as great as Senator Santorum, and that is the President himself.

Neither Senator Rick nor Dubya fits comfortably within the ideological categories we have imposed on the political culture. Neither is strictly "conservative" nor "progressive." Both live by a value system that elevates them far above their contemporaries -- a deeply felt regard for the lives and sensibilities of the most vulnerable among us. They are both good men, decent men in the best sense of that term, and because of that they are being assailed by Lilliputians.

Both the Senator and the President call upon all of us to be better people than we normally are or would choose to be. For that many resent and hate them -- others are inspired to goodness.

Next Tuesday those of us lucky enough to live in Pennsylvania will have a clear choice before us. We can vote for the seamy slipperiness of politics as usual, or we can return a great man to the seat he currently holds in our greatest deliberative body. For me it's not a hard choice. Both "She Who Must Not be Named" and I will proudly cast our ballots for Rick Santorum -- the nation's finest senator. I would urge others to do the same.