He's about as viable as someone like Haley Barbour.
Used to being an underdog, Santorum bets the house on '12 Iowa caucuses
By Shane D’Aprile
- 01/18/11 06:04 AM ET
This is the first in a series of profiles on Republicans who may run for president in 2012.
Rick Santorum is used to being an underdog.
In the spring of 1990, Santorum received a fax from his pollster that had a simple message: The upstart conservative didn’t stand a chance of capturing a seat in Congress that year.
The Pennsylvania Republican, who was weighing a challenge to an entrenched incumbent in a Democratic district, was so cash-strapped that pollster Neil Newhouse agreed only to charge him for the cost of the calls.
The results of the poll were so bad that Newhouse didn’t even phone Santorum to relay the news. He faxed the report that showed him with just 6 percent name ID six months out from Election Day.
“He basically said, ‘Rick, I can put anybody’s name on a survey and get 7 or 8 percent,’ ” Santorum recalled. “ ‘That makes you two or three points below nobody.’ ”
That’s not that far a cry from where Santorum stands among the field of potential 2012 presidential hopefuls. He faces a crop of candidates who are better-known and likely to have deep fundraising pockets, and who will command much more press attention.
“It’s been the same in every single race I’ve ever run,” said a smiling Santorum, noting with satisfaction that he won his House race two decades ago in what turned out to be one of the biggest upsets of the cycle. “People underestimate me. Can’t say it’s ever bothered me, though.”
Newhouse eventually ended up as Santorum’s pollster, but in 2012 he’s just another doubter. The veteran strategist has already signed on with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
In a GOP field that, along with Romney, could include former Govs. Sarah Palin (Alaska) and Mike Huckabee (Arkansas) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), the former senator would undoubtedly struggle for elbow room.
But while Santorum can’t come close to challenging the name recognition of that group, he’s already taking his message and in-your-face style to the campaign trail.
Santorum has long been an overachiever. Four years after being elected to the House, he launched a successful bid for the Senate, being sworn in to the upper chamber at the age of 36.
During the 2008 GOP presidential primary, Santorum attracted headlines for saying he would support anyone but Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He subsequently backed McCain in the general election and acknowledged that some Republicans told him he should have kept his mouth shut.
At the time, Santorum wrote in an op-ed, “I’ve never been very good at that.”
As for Romney — the candidate he endorsed in the 2008 primary — Santorum doesn’t mince his words.
“I think it’s hard to see a path for him, given the ObamaCare issue,” he said, pointing out similarities between the Massachusetts healthcare plan touted by Romney and the one that was signed into law last year. “It’s just hard for me to see how he gets past that [in a Republican primary].”
Santorum was once among his party’s rising stars, ascending to the No. 3 position in the Republican Senate leadership.
He insists that before he planned his first trip to Iowa for a speech at Dubuque University in 2009, running for president had barely crossed his mind. His claim is believable, considering Santorum was less than three years removed from an 18-point trouncing at the hands of Democrat Bob Casey Jr., which decisively shattered his prominence in the party.
The reception in Iowa was more than Santorum had hoped for, and since then, he’s traveled to the state more times than any other rumored 2012 hopeful.
“I haven’t been discouraged since,” he said.
Any opening for Santorum would have to come from the evangelical conservative wing of the party’s base, particularly in Iowa. A staunch opponent of abortion and gay marriage, if Santorum can find a path to mobilizing and coalescing social conservatives in 2012, he could find a built-in base of support.
Much of that effort, though, is dependent on whether Huckabee, Palin or even Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) jumps in — all candidacies that would complicate Santorum’s calculus.
Still, Santorum’s message is not that of a one- or two-issue candidate. His time in Congress gives him a firm grasp on a range of matters. During an appearance on Greta Van Susteren’s show on Fox last year, Santorum highlighted the role he played in the passage of welfare reform.
The 52-year-old recoils at the size of the deficit, derisively talks down President Obama’s economic policies and proclaims not a single provision of the healthcare law is worth saving. What riles him most is the president’s worldview, and it’s largely why he’s a good bet to throw his hat in the 2012 ring.
“One of the concerns I have with Obama is that he’s lost focus on who America is,” Santorum said. “Talking about the working class and the middle class: Since when do we have classes in America? There has been this huge moral argument going on here and we’ve just ignored it. We’ve accepted it, and we shouldn’t.”
On economic policy: “Obama’s engaged in a culture war. He’s pitting the rich against the poor.”
On healthcare: “What the president has done — and this is the typical left: ‘We know better, we’ll structure the marketplace, we’ll run it and it’ll be better than if people do it in the private sector.’ It’s a lie. It doesn’t work.”
On immigration: “If you want to come here to work and then send your money back home, I don’t want you. If you want to come here and impose sharia law, stay home. If you want to come here to be an American, then I want you.”
For Santorum, those types of statements are not just red meat for the base — although they work just fine for those purposes, too. He simply believes the country is headed down a disastrous path. That ethos, coupled with his conservative credentials, has Santorum optimistic that Republican primary voters will listen to what he has to say.
As to the thornier question of whether he could actually capture the nomination in 2012, Santorum sounds encouraged enough to want to find out.
“Everything I’ve learned about presidential politics is that you have to do better than they think you’re gonna do,” he said. “If you beat expectations, you go to the next place on the game board. I can tell you, I wouldn’t still be doing this if I wasn’t encouraged by the reception we’ve been getting.”
Next week: Tim Pawlenty
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/138389-santorum-bets-the-house-on-the-12-iowa-caucuses
George Will's take:
Social Conservatives Want Someone Like Santorum in 2012Friday, 04 Feb 2011
By George Will
In 1994, when Rick Santorum was a second-term Pennsylvania congressman seeking a U.S. Senate seat, a columnist asked him how he was going to win. "Guns," he replied serenely. Pennsylvania's legions of deer hunters do not use assault weapons, which President Bill Clinton was trying to ban, but the hunters suspected that this, like Clinton's wife's healthcare plan, reflected a pattern of assaults on liberty.
Santorum, then 36, won by 87,210 votes — 87,210 hunters? — out of 3,384,172 cast, becoming the first conservative elected senator from Pennsylvania since 1952. "Never," he says today, "underestimate the power of the social issues."
He probably will test that power — and the theory, which he rejects, that economic anxieties have marginalized those issues — by seeking the Republicans' 2012 presidential nomination.
Santorum had one of the Senate's most conservative voting records and was floor manager of the most important legislation of the 1990s, the 1996 welfare reform, which Clinton vetoed twice before signing. In 2000, Santorum won a second term with 52 percent, and was elected third-ranking Republican leader in the Senate. In 2006, a miserable year for Republicans, he lost 59-41.
How can he, having lost his last election, run for president? Isn't he a spent political force? Well, was Richard Nixon defunct after losing the California gubernatorial race in 1962?
Santorum has made nine trips to New Hampshire, where he has hired a chairman of his state political action committee and a state director, and is returning soon. He has been that many times to two other early delegate-selection states, Iowa and South Carolina, and has other trips to those states scheduled.
Seven reasons why he has not committed to running are his children, ranging in ages from 19 to 2. The Santorums take parenting very seriously: All but their youngest child have been partially home-schooled. The youngest, Bella, is severely disabled with Trisomy 18, a condition caused by a chromosomal defect that prevents more than 90 percent of its victims from reaching their first birthdays.
About his presidential run, he says, "My wife is sane, therefore she doesn't want me to do this." But both she and he are passionately right-to-life, and dedicated to trying to reform today's abortion culture that is increasingly comfortable with treating inconvenient lives, including those like Bella's, as disposable.
Santorum appears four to six times a week on the Fox News and Fox Business channels, which are watched — particularly the former — by much of the Republican nominating electorate. And for three hours every Friday he hosts William Bennett's nationally syndicated radio program, which also has a mostly conservative audience.
Santorum does not ignore economic issues, but as a relentless ethicist, he recasts those as moral issues: "What is European socialism but modern-day monarchy that 'takes care' of the people?" He is, of course, correct that America's debt crisis is, at bottom, symptomatic of a failure of self-control, a fundamental moral failing.
The first event of the nominating process, Iowa's Republican caucuses, are, Santorum says, a bifurcated event. One part concerns born-again and evangelical Christians, who are 60 percent of caucus participants. The other part involves everyone else. This is why Mike Huckabee won Iowa in 2008, and why in 1988 Pat Robertson finished a strong second to Bob Dole and ahead of George H.W. Bush.
Three people who might have competed, or still might compete, with Santorum for voters intense about social issues include Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, who has decided against running. And Huckabee, who is doing well as a Fox News contributor. And Sarah Palin, another Fox luminary, would have the most to lose financially from running. Santorum thinks "the left is trying to goad her into it," hoping she would be weak among the independent voters who decide most elections.
Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, a state contiguous with Iowa, is running hard and has published a book with a strong religious theme, but Santorum doubts that Pawlenty has the passion requisite for connecting with "values voters." That is a Santorum theory.
Here is another: If unemployment is still above 9 percent in 2012, almost any Republican can win, and if there is a convincing recovery the party had better nominate someone who can energize its base.
That is only a theory, but this is a fact: Social conservatives are much of that base, are feeling neglected, and are looking for someone like Santorum.
http://www.newsmax.com/GeorgeWill/GeorgeWill-Santorum-2012-race/2011/02/04/id/385019
