DD Guttenplan: How Rick Santorum's 1860 Comparison Might Be Right

DD Guttenplan is London correspondent for the Nation, and the author of the newly-published American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone.

For Republicans, the Apocalypse is always just around the corner. So when Rick Santorum told his supporters that this was "the most important election since the election of 1860", it was easy to scoff. For one thing, Santorum's remarks came just as the scale of his loss in the Illinois primary was becoming clear, and were made in a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, allowing one pundit to remark:

"Like another insurgent army in the decisive battle of the civil war outside town nearly 149 years ago, Rick Santorum did not break through the lines Tuesday."

Others labelled the defeat "his Gettysburg": the battle that, in retrospect, marked the high water mark of Confederate fortune. And, of course, any contemporary politician who invites comparisons with Abraham Lincoln, whose two-minute speech on 19 November 1863 dedicating a battlefield cemetery is probably the most celebrated piece of oratory in American history, is riding for a fall.

And yet … and as a card-carrying socialist, dues-paying union member, registered Democrat etc, it pains me to write these words, Rick Santorum may have a point. Though perhaps not the point he intended.

Let's set the wayback machine to the spring of 1860...