Rick Santorum, 3 men and the MSM

At the col­lege con­ven­tion yes­ter­day, Rick San­to­rum took a lot of ques­tions from a lib­eral crowd of Col­lege stu­dents, bu the ques­tion that a lot of peo­ple were wait­ing for was one on Gay Mar­riage. ABC’s Shushan­nah Wal­she has this piece up:

San­to­rum answered that for “230 years mar­riage has been between one man and woman. So if you want to change the law … you have to make the pos­i­tive argu­ment about why.”

At that point, sev­eral mem­bers of the audi­ence started try­ing to engage the candidate.

San­to­rum said, “We’re not shout­ing out here,” before ask­ing the stu­dents to raise their hands.

They include a video of about 4 min­utes exclud­ing the base ques­tion and is cut exclud­ing his base speech and jumps right to the Gay Mar­riage ques­tion asked in the mid­dle of the event

Well not the whole ques­tion they start in the mid­dle of the ques­tion and cuts at a key point when the audi­ence applauds the sug­ges­tion that mar­riage means what­ever peo­ple says it means. A bit decep­tive, but a bet­ter job than Think progress uses even a smaller cut from CNN

and states that San­to­rum is “on the defensive”.

This is the media image that is desired, but unfor­tu­nately for them, Stacy McCain and I were there. I shot the entire exchange, and when you watch it, Two things are clear:

1. San­to­rum is on the offen­sive NOT the defensive.

2. The stu­dents unable to cope with his arguments.

Let’s begin with the full unedited video and see what we actu­ally have from the start.

Take a look at the inter­ac­tion here. San­to­rum uses logic and rea­son start­ing that as peo­ple try­ing to change the law, the pos­i­tive case to be made is theirs to make for the change:

“Don’t you have to make the pos­i­tive argu­ment to make the change?” He uses the exam­ple of propos­ing to build a bridge, the neces­sity to pro­vide the pub­lic pur­pose is a fun­da­men­tal ques­tion and puts the case in the intel­lec­tual rather than the emo­tional case. The hos­tile crowd is put on the defen­sive, San­to­rum is not going to back down and once the argu­ment is over logic and rea­son the ball is now in his court?

When the stu­dent answers the med­ical visit busi­ness San­to­rum responds with the fact that hos­pi­tal vis­i­ta­tion can be han­dled with a legal writ­ten con­tract and that this was ALWAYS true.

He then asks for another rea­son and a young lady answers:

“How about the argu­ment that all men are cre­ated equal and the right to hap­pi­ness?” San­to­rum pounces:

“Are we say­ing every­one has the right to marry?”

The crowd claps and agrees with loud shouts, San­to­rum continues

“So any­one can marry any­one else?” when the crowd approves, he asks “So any­one can marry sev­eral people?”

At once the crowd starts to object, fil­i­buster and inter­rupt, or as ABC calls it “engag­ing” San­to­rum calls for order and con­tin­ues to demand an answer: “If every per­son has a right to be happy, so if you aren’t happy unless you are mar­ried to five other peo­ple then that’s OK.”

Again mem­bers of the crowd, con­fronted with the need to rea­son, decides to fil­i­buster again, he will have none of it. The young lady quickly ads…“As long as you don’t harm other peo­ple.“

It’s the same argu­ment that Chris used dur­ing our debate on the sub­ject at the cen­ter of mass pod­cast and San­to­rum asks the ques­tion: “Who deter­mines what harms some­one else?” and the “every­body can under­stand it” comes out.

These kids are appar­ently too young to remem­ber the days when “every­body could under­stand” that homo­sex­u­al­ity was wrong. They unknow­ingly make the ICK fac­tor argu­ment. But they are look­ing not for a dis­cus­sion but a sound bite.

Finally the young lady says that her per­son opin­ion on 3 is “yeah, go for it.” and San­to­rum deliv­ers the coup de grâce.

“If she reflects the val­ues of every­one else…Marriage really means what­ever you want it to mean.”the col­lege crowd applauds not real­iz­ing what they’ve just done but ABC appar­ently did since they cut the video right before the applause here.

San­to­rum then makes is clos­ing argu­ment, dis­agree­ing with what NH did but con­ced­ing that they did it the “right way” via leg­isla­tive action and urges that if you want to make the case for or against, make the case in the pub­lic square, and makes his own case for the unique sta­tus of marriage.

It was very illus­tra­tive. First rather than pan­der­ing San­to­rum chal­lenges them on an intel­lec­tual level in a way that appar­ently they have not been before on this issue. The stu­dents who on other ques­tion would take and give become unable to make their case with­out shouts and inter­rup­tions. (These are col­lege students?)

Like many young peo­ple they don’t under­stand that there are hun­dreds of years of rea­son, logic and intel­lect behind the San­to­rum argu­ment and their response proves them, despite the edu­ca­tion they are pay­ing for, are not intel­lec­tu­ally armed to make their case. They are used to a sound bite wars and in the arena of ideas, at least for this idea, come unarmed.

The final dag­ger through the heart came much later. At the very end of the day as San­to­rum is leav­ing groups of col­lege kids as he is going to his car pep­per him with ques­tions when as he enters the car he gives a response to a ques­tion (that although I was film­ing I couldn’t’ hear and the cam­era didn’t pick up) say­ing: “The fed­eral gov­ern­ment doesn’t do that.” Here is the video:

When he gets in I shut off the cam­era and boy to I regret that, because the reac­tion of these kids is the story. The kids start whoop­ing. They hi-​five and cheer each other as the car leave brag­ging that this will end up on Huff Po. Think progress will likely be recruit­ing here.

Run that through your head a sec­ond, their engage­ment with the can­di­date was not to learn, to make a case for what they believe, they were look­ing for a sound bite to spin and it was that moment rather than the chance to actu­ally engage a for­mer sen­a­tor and can­di­date for pres­i­dent that made all the dif­fer­ence to them.

Ladies and gen­tle­men I present you with the future Main­stream media!

If you want to know why cit­i­zen media is impor­tant, this is it.

Update: If the MSM really wanted the big quote from that appear­ance, it came before this

Update 2: he took a sim­i­lar ques­tion in Wind­ham, here is my the video (missed the start of the ques­tion run­ning down the aisle after dump­ing my mem­ory card)

Update 4: One last thing, although there was con­fronta­tion on Gay Mar­riage there crowd was not con­fronta­tional on other issues and there were very good exchanges oth­er­wise. I’m think­ing that ques­tion might not have been rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the entire con­ven­tion. As for the con­ven­tion itself, I’d never heard of it but Mike Far­rell who was kind enough to tell me about it:

It seems a worth­while event and I look for­ward to cov­er­ing it in 4 years again

Update 5: Kudos to MSNBC for show­ing the whole video

Visit msnbc​.com for break­ing news, world news, and news about the economy

Update 6: Stacy McCain calls the MSM out:

Per­mit me to say that this head­line is a lie:

Rick San­to­rum focuses on gay marriage

Rick San­to­rum is not “focus­ing on gay mar­riage.” He is being asked — asked repeat­edly by reporters and by peo­ple at town-​hall meet­ings — about his oppo­si­tion to gay mar­riage, and he is explain­ing his oppo­si­tion. He is not obsessed with the issue, but nei­ther is he never going to back down from what he believes.

It is the media that is focused on Gay Mar­riage because they don’t dare talk about the record of Barack Obama, not if they wont to see him re-​elected.