former congressional candidate and rick santorium is a fox news contributor. welcome to both of you. since krystal has the crystal ball i ll let you do the forecasting first. the people spoke and said we are tired of the gridlock in washington. all of a sudden there is compromise and accomplishments during the lame-duck session. is this a for shadowing of what to come or a fluke? i am actually very surprisingly optimistic. what happened basically is in 2006 and 08 we kicked out all the moderate republicans. in 2010 we kicked down the moderate democrats. i was thinking it was going to be ugly. we had an early christmas miracle and the bi-partisan deficit budget commission, they signed off on it. when you have people who have principles, who are interested in something more than just
what came out of the bi-partisan deficit budget commission was very smart. both sides have to give up a little something of what they want in order to come together on this. i m hopeful we will be able to make these moves forward. arthel: as we all know everything is not h u.n. key-dorey in the president s party. do you think the congress will do the work of the people and move forward or will this be more of a political posturing looking forward to 2012. if you look at the successes in the lame-duck session they weren t on the economy. the president even said himself, now i m going to pivot to focus on the economy again. what he was able to accomplish were things on national security, and don t ask don t tell, which was paying off a political constituency. the problems the president has is he thinks we need big government control of things, big spending programs, higher taxes, and there simply is no