Rick Santorum’s campaign sent an e-mail from the candidate to supporters with the subject “When Men Were Free” on Wednesday, warning that “our government everyday and in every way is ordering us around, trampling our freedoms, curtailing our religious liberty and building a dependency on big government.”
Santorum concludes by writing:”Let us take up this fight together with renewed vigor, so that future generations do not say about America, ‘When men were free.'”
That last line is a reference to a famous speech from Ronald Reagan in the 1960s opposing the creation of Medicare, warning that “behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as well have known it in this country, until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism. If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
But the “when men were free” line is a bit jarring coming from a candidate with a well documented habit of alienating female voters with his conservative positions and rhetoric.
