Santorum’s blinking problem
Insurgent Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum might have a blinking problem, according to an analysis by a research associate at the University of Minnesota.
Eric Ostermeier, a political scientist who writes the non-partisan Smart Politics blog, said that Santorum blinked at more than twice the rate of the rest of the Republican field during Saturday night’s ABC News presidential debate in Manchester.
’While research may not be settled regarding whether people who lie blink more often than those who tell the truth, potential voters are no doubt more at ease with a candidate who looks them straight in the eyes and does not pepper their speech with repetitive non-verbal tics,” Ostermeier wrote.
Smart Politics counted 2,284 on-camera blinks when candidates were speaking at the ABC debate, and Santorum accounted for 35 percent of them.
Santorum, who spoke for 12 minutes and 55 seconds in Saturday’s debate, blinked 793 times while delivering verbal remarks, or 61.4 times per minute — much higher than the average person’s rate of approximately 20-25 times per minute. The rest of the GOP field blinked 1,491 times, or just 27.8 times per minute of speech.
Santorum eclipsed the 100-blink mark during three of his responses and also frequently displayed a non-verbal tic of looking down and to his right while delivering answers to the moderator or responding to statements made by other candidates.
It’s ironic that someone with such ideological and religious blinkers on blinks so much. If it is true that blinking indicates lying, I find it encouraging that on some level Santorum knows that his ideological propoganda does not square with reality I think this article has really nailed something that has been bugging me about Santorum — I never get a sense of integrity from him, he gives me the impression of an eight year old boasting about the dinasour in his back yard. Definitely not presidential material.