By Emma Roller
When Rick Santorum called President Obama “a snob” for wanting more Americans to attend college, it caused quite a stir, leading some fellow Republicans to distance themselves from the remarks.
“There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them,” continued Mr. Santorum at a rally in Michigan on Saturday. “Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”
Fellow conservatives like Gov. Robert F. McDonnell of Virginia may have seen Mr. Santorum’s remarks as extreme, but anti-intellectual rhetoric has a long history in presidential campaigns.
Elvin T. Lim, an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency (Oxford University Press, 2008), says Republican candidates often use comments like Mr. Santorum’s to separate themselves from the pack and build trust with their base.
“It’s a last-ditch effort to make sure the base comes out for him,” he says. “It’s not surprising that we see that the most strident forms of anti-intellectualism in these closing days of the primary.”