As the underdog in the 2012 Presidential election Rick Santorum touted his consistent record as a definitive difference between him and the other candidates. But now as he uses his traditional campaign tactics of painting others as outsiders while steering all debate towards divisive social issues, while simultaneously claiming to be a friend of the working man to become the frontrunner, the record he once touted is becoming his main opponent.
Just as 2006, his record has been used against him to show the hypocrisy of his “conserative crusade.” The big spending and easily corruptible Santorum has a history of portraying himself as a Washington outsider while being the ultimate beltway insider. As a longshot candidate he persuaded the voters to look at his record. So now, as he moves from outsider to frontrunner in the Republican Primary, let us look back at his record of being a party man who has mastered fear based campaigning, and how when the debate comes around to his record, such as his 2006 Senate campaign, his reality falls quite short from the character he has created for himself on the campaign trail.
He claims to be against lobbyists, but his private sector record as a lawyer is highlighted by his stint as a lobbyist on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation in the late 80’s where he successfully argued that the WWF should be exempt from anabolic steroid regulations because it was entertainment and not a sport. He claims he wasn’t involved with the “K Street Project”, but he organized the meetings that led to the project, even calling them the “K Street Meetings.” He claims to be a different kind of candidate, but he is running the same campaign he always has, claiming a certain record and building a wall of divisive social issues between it and observers. The messaging of his Presidential candidacy is eerily similar to his first run for U.S. Congress
1990 House of Representatives Campaign
The young Pittsburgh lawyer, and former John Heinz III staffer quickly made the move to public service playing the fear card in economically ravished mill towns in southwestern Pennsylvania. In 1990, at the age of 32, he ran for U.S. Congress and defeated the 7 term democratic incumbent Doug Walgren by painting him as an outsider who spent too much time in Washington while playing on the underlying social conservatism of the predominantly white working class region. He made himself the outsider’s choice and took strong stances on social issues which appealed to working men and women who were still left ravished by the Regan administrations policies.
In the House of Representatives, Santorum become known both as a fierce critic of government excess and a cultural warrior for the extreme right. As a member of the “Gang of Seven”, which included current Speaker of the House John Boehner, he shed light on abuses by the Democrat majority House that lead to many incumbents defeat despite Clinton winning the Presidency in 1992.
1994 Pennsylvania Senate Race
He used his new-found clout and reputation as a culture warrior to get the Republican nod in the 1994 PA Senate Race. Matched against the extremely qualified incumbent Harris Wofford who had been an advisor to President Kennedy, worked with Martin Luther King, Jr, and helped found the Peace Corps, Santorum ran the same exact campaign as 1990.
With Wofford’s connection to the failed health care bill and the unpopular NAFTA, Santorum’s message acted as a juxtaposition to what many rural Pennsylvanians were seeing as the Democratic Party’s growing liberalism under President Clinton. Santorum used this opportunity to divert the debate from records to social issues. According to a review of the race from Franklin and Marshall College:
Rarely in Pennsylvania politics had such a clear ideological line been drawn. Wofford charged Santorum with supporting for the Republican Contract with America, which he said would take the nation back to the Reagan-Bush policies that landed Pennsylvania in economic distress, causing job losses, unemployment and a stagnant economy. Santorum struck back calling Wofford a champion of big government liberalism. Santorum cited Wofford’s sponsorship of a government-run, single-payer health care system, with a substantial bureaucracy that would institutionalize the nation’s healthcare system.
Santorum received strong and enthusiastic support from the Christian Coalition, the gun lobby and sportsmen’s associations. He called for smaller, leaner government, lower taxes and less regulation, and tapped into public dissatisfaction and disaffection with government.
With an endorsement from than Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who at the time was immensely popular in the centrist state, Santorum rode the 1994 Republican takeover wave. Upon entering Senate he was quick to vilify his colleagues which led to scorn from the chambers resident statesman Robert Byrd. According to the Christian Science Monitor.
In a widely cited floor speech on civility, then Sen. Robert Byrd (D) of West Virginia blasted Santorum, without ever naming him, for references to President Clinton as “that guy” and to senators as “liars.”
“Such statements are harsh and severe, to say the least,” said Senator Byrd, viewed at the time as the guardian of Senate tradition. “And when made by a senator who has not yet held the office of senator a full year, they are really quite astonishing.” Byrd called it “the poison that has settled in upon this chamber” – a term picked up by leaders on both sides of the aisle.
After being the Senate’s key fear monger and Chairman of the Republican Party Task Force on Welfare Reform during the late nineties, he was awrded for his dirty work and rose to power in the party under President Bush by being a yes man. He played to Bush’s evangelical base who loved his radical idealism and religious fervor. The extreme political environment that swept America during the ‘Decade of Fear’ created a perfect theatre for Santorum’s absurd brand of hatespeak. In a 2003 interview about liberalism in the Catholic church, which he now claims did not happen, Santorum equivocated sex between two consenting gay adults to “man-on-dog” sex. From the associated press transcript of the interview:
We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose. Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn’t exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created, it was created in Griswold — Griswold was the contraceptive case — and abortion. And now we’re just extending it out…
…In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.
These where the words of a small town southern mayor in the 50’s, not a post-millenial U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. He had gone too far and lost support of the working class families that once made up his base. He was a vocal supporter of both the Iraq War and War on Terror, constantly trying to persuade the fog of war towards Iran, looking to make them a boogeyman to aid his 2006 re-election. He took severe anti-muslim stances in the time after 9/11 showing he had not lost his penchant for playing on working class white people’s innermost fears. However his welcome in the Keystone State had worn out.
2006 Pennsylvania Senate Race
In 2006 he ran against a pro-life Democrat in Bob Casey, Jr, a shrewd political move by PA Dems that forced him to run on his record rather than returning to his strategy of scaring the conservative base. With unchecked Republican power shaping the lowly decade he could no longer run as the outsider on national issues. His position as mouthpiece of the evangelical right made him an outsider in his home state, and made him appear weak on state level issues. Casey used Santorum’s record of faithfully voting along party lines and sound clips of his extreme stances on social issues to feed Pennsylvanians growing resentment against the incumbent.
In a brilliant twist of irony Casey got to paint Santorum as an outsider who had been in Washington too long during the campaign. This was helped by a scandal in which Santorum was claiming his residence in the Penn Hills suburb of Pittsburgh although living with his family in Virginia. That scandal is still haunting him along the campaign trail. From Bloomberg:
Santorum’s 2006 loss came after he was accused by Democrats of being hypocritical for moving his family to suburban Virginia, yet still claiming a property tax deduction and tuition reimbursement in Pennsylvania. The school district where his Penn Hills home was located paid $55,000 to reimburse the online education of his children through the state’s Cyber Charter School program, according to the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette. The state repaid the district in a legal settlement after a Democratic school board member challenged the reimbursement.
It was an issue that resonated with voters and echoed charges Santorum, 53, raised when he won his initial race for the U.S. House in 1990 by attacking his opponent for having moved to Virginia and lost touch with Pennsylvanians.
Hypocritical became the word most associated throughout that campaign election as his record came to the forefront. Matched against a conservative Democrat that was pro-union, Santorum could not employ his usual campaign tactics. His starch stances seemed downright evil and megalomaniacal compared to Casey’s mild-mannered style.
Worse for Santorum was that upon further inspection, his record seemed downright questionable. In his goal to be viewed as a conservative icon Santorum had masked the fact that his record should really be viewed as, “do what I say, not what I do.”
Among the staunch stances picked apart by Casey and the voters in his 2006 campaign disaster was his backwards stance on education. Santorum was a champion of President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy, which now is viewed as a failure by a large percentage of both parties as states are lining up to get waivers out of the broken system. Not only did he support the bill he added what is now known as the “Santorum Amendment” which promoted the teaching of intelligent design in schools. Santorum has recently said that he morally was against “No Child Left Behind”, but went along with it to appease President Bush.
I have to admit, I voted for that. It was against the principles I believed in, but, you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake. You know, politics is a team sport, folks and sometimes you’ve got to rally together and do something.
The 2006 election acted as a semi-referedum on the policies of the Bush Administration and Santorum’s devout service to the President was not seen as positive amongst the voting public who were tiring of the President’s failures. Santorum lost the race by a whopping 18 percent.
2012 Presidential Election
The 2012 Presidential election of Rick Santorum is a repeat of every election he has ever ran. He messaged himself as the outsider with a solid record, hit up his religious base, and when it came time for people to look at his record he turned the debate into one about gay marriage, abortion, religious freedom, and birth control. However this is the Presidential race and there are not enough divisive social issues to build a wall big enough to hide the failure that is Santorum’s record.
New research into his extensive use of earmarks for what politicians of both parties have labeled as “pork-barrell” projects came to further prove Santorum’s hypocrisy. The supposed fiscal conservative was in fact not. In fact he was corrupt.
As his record is reviewed again under a Presidential scope, many observers like Michael Luo and Mike McIntire of the New York Times, have found that when a list of those earmarks are placed next to a list of campaign donors surprising similarities arise. From their article:
A review of some of his earmarks, viewed alongside his political donations, suggests that the river of federal money Mr. Santorum helped direct to Pennsylvania paid off handsomely in the form of campaign cash.
Earmarks, long a hallmark of a pay-to-play culture in Washington, have become largely taboo among lawmakers of both parties, but that element of Mr. Santorum’s record has mostly gone unexplored, in part because transparency rules governing earmarks did not go into effect until after he left office.
In just one piece of legislation, the defense appropriations bill for the 2006 fiscal year, Mr. Santorum helped secure $124 million in federal financing for 54 earmarks, according to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. In that year’s election cycle, Mr. Santorum’s Senate campaign committee and his “leadership PAC” took in more than $200,000 in contributions from people associated with the companies that benefited or their lobbyists, an analysis of campaign finance records by The New York Times shows.
In reality his record, without spin, only appeals to the Bush faithful and their numbers are dwindling as many succumbed to their anger and joined the Tea Party movement, perhaps driven mad by the fact that for eight years they blindly claimed allegiance to a leader whose policies are now regarded by both parties as flawed at best.
If he does somehow use his strategy to come away with the GOP nod the 2012 Presidential Election is likely to resemble Pennsylvania’s 2006 Senate race. The American public are not interested in the antics of the Bush era and are looking for real solutions to real problems quickly. Rick Santorum has told voters to look at his record if they want to know what he would do as President. However, looking at his record it becomes clear that the United States cannot rally behind the regressive, divisive and hypocritical policies of Rick Santorum if it hopes to move forward in the next four years.
For a review of Rick Santorum’s record, from VoteSmart.org, click here.
