by Maisie Allison
Matt Lewis notes that Santorum is benefiting from the "serendipitous rise" of the culture wars:
Romney might have been the candidate to defeat Barack Obama on the economy, but with the unemployment rate falling – and the government appearing to overreach on "values" issues – voters may sense that Rick Santorum is better-positioned to draw a sharper contrast with Obama.
Michael Brendan Dougherty likewise claims that the election is no longer about the economy:
[T]he last three weeks prove that what gets Americans really fired up is the culture war. Yesterday we saw the 9th Circuit Court overrule the popular referendum in California that banned gay marriage. Rick Santorum, who defined his career in the Senate as the point man for conservatives in the culture war is suddenly surging in the GOP nomination contest. The nation and its media had a week-long freakout over a minuscule $700,000 grant from the Komen Foundation to Planned Parenthood. And now the Obama Administration and the Catholic Church are in open conflict over whether religious institutions should be dragged into the bedroom to pay for their employees' contraceptives of choice. No one is saying that jobs are the only issue that matter anymore.
Douthat, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of the culture war without downplaying the role of the economy:
From election to election, politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse — which is as it should be. But the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the debates over human life and human rights, public morals and religious freedom – culture war debates, that is, in all their many forms.
The Dish 