Romney pandered to locals in the normal way: he said nice things about Puerto Rico, and pledged to help Puerto Rico become a state if the referendum for statehood passes this coming November.
Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander not to the locals, but to the middle-aged angry white men in the Tea Party back on the mainland. Though Santorum has endorsed statehood for Puerto Rico without preconditions in the past, he no longer supports statehood for Puerto Rico unless they speak English. He said:
Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law. And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language.There's no such law. In fact, Puerto Ricans already enjoy American citizenship. They have to pay most federal taxes—they're enrolled in Social Security and Medicare—but they don't have to pay federal income tax. Many American companies have subsidiaries in Puerto Rico, and since it's a U.S. territory and workers are American citizens, they are eligible for security clearances. High-tech military contractors like Honeywell are therefore sending high-paying jobs to Puerto Rico to take advantage of the lower salaries and cost of living.
There are two basic kinds of pander: saying nice pleasant things to endear oneself to your listeners (Mitt's), and saying mean and incendiary things to incite vitriol (Rick's). Santorum's defenders claim he's just telling it like it is, and Romney is mealy-mouthed. But because there's no English language requirement for statehood, Santorum is either woefully ignorant of the law and therefore not fit to be president, or he's willfully lying about it to get votes. Since Santorum previously supported Puerto-Rican statehood, he's obviously lying now.
But he's just playing out the new "Southern strategy" that many Tea Party and anti-immigrant groups adopted the last few years. It is this core group of Republicans that Santorum went to Puerto Rico to pander to, solidifying his position as the one true Anti-Romney. In contrast to Romney's placid acceptance of Puerto-Rican self-determination, Santorum is pledging to inflict pain and humiliation on Puerto Rico before letting them into the club.
As it turned out, Romney got more than 50% and therefore won all 20 delegates. (Santorum apparently got only 8%.) This was expected, as pretty much the entire Republican establishment, including the governor of Puerto Rico, had endorsed Romney. Santorum almost certainly knew this, and knew going to Puerto Rico could not possibly win him a single Puerto-Rican delegate. The entire exercise was therefore cynically executed to maximally manipulate anti-Latino sentiment among the Republican base.
The thing is, it's not clear whether Puerto Rico really wants to become a state. When they voted on this in 1998, "none of the above" beat out statehood 50.5 to 46.6%. It's also not clear that Republicans would allow it to happen: with all the anti-Latino vitriol they've spewed in the last several years, they're probably afraid it would mean adding two Democratic senators and three or four Democratic representatives.
But Puerto Rico's current status seems wrong: they're essentially in the same boat the American colonies were in before the Revolution. They're subjects of some big country across the sea, but they don't get to vote for president or Congress. In other words, they are suffering from taxation without representation. That should get them some sympathy from the Tea Party.
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