As you have most likely heard Rick Santorum packed in his run for the
Republican Party’s presidential nomination on Tuesday. Although Santorum
may have been tempted to drop the campaign to spend time with his ill
daughter, who spent time in hospital over the weekend, his timing was
nonetheless beneficial in other ways.
Pennsylvania, his home
state, would have voted on 24 April for its preferred Republican
candidate and if Santorum had lost, which polls indicate was the
probable result, his political future would have been pretty limp.
Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, who now presents the
breakfast show on pinko cable news channel MSNBC, said last week that if
he was nomination-favourite Mitt Romney, he would “salt the earth” in
Pennsylvania. Ie: carpet bomb the state with negative adverts and finish
Santorum’s political career. Romney must have been listening, as he
promptly went and purchased $1.9m worth of advertising space.
And
Romney wasn’t messing about. The advert quotes Politico calling
Santorum’s 17-point Senate loss in 2006 “historically embarrassing”,
mentions he lost his home county (in Pittsburgh) by 30 points in the
same vote, quotes a reporter saying he lost every single voter
demographic, and then ends by saying “we fired him as Senator, why
promote him to President?” Ouch. Santorum led in Pennsylvania throughout
the primary race, until Romney won two competitive states and
Washington, DC a week ago, and took a poll lead of around five
percentage points.
Santorum can survive losing Pennsylvania once.
There is no way he could have continued a career in federal politics if
he had lost it twice. And since Republicans tend to give the
presidential nomination to the bloke who lost the previous primary, it
is in Santorum’s best interest to make sure he doesn’t lose Pennsylvania
this time around.
However, Santorum is not quite the Mister
Popular in Pennsylvania that one would expect of someone who served in
the House of Representatives for four years and won two terms in the
Senate. In fact I can think of few more divisive politicians in the US
at all.
Santorum is a severely conservative man, particularly
when it comes to social conventions. Santorum has voiced vociferous
rejection of gay marriage, abortion and contraception (although, to be
fair, he maintained he would not push for his personal beliefs on
contraception to become policy). While many politicians have
conservative views on social issues and are happy to tell them to you,
not many make as big a stink about them as Santorum. Comparisons with
same-sex marriage and marrying an animal, and telling CNN that rape
victims who become pregnant should “accept the gift that God has given
to you” instead of being offered a pregnancy termination, belong in the
comment sections of news sites, not presidential politics. His
well-known social views are but the fairly sizeable tip of the iceberg.
During
his Senate re-election campaign against Democrat Bob Casey Junior in
2006 (the aforementioned 17-point loss), Santorum was forced to answer
why he would be representing Pennsylvania, as he only spent around one
month per year in his home in the state.
His family spent the rest of the year in a larger home in Virginia,
around four hours away. While this on its own raises eyebrows, the
Pennsylvania taxpayer footed a $100 000 bill in a cyber charter school
for the education of some of the Santorum children between 2001 and
2004, which included computers and an Internet connection. Because
Santorum had a role in federal government, the education tab was picked
up by Pennsylvania, but as Santorum lived in Pennsylvania for a mere 8%
of the calendar year, the cost wasn’t really all that justifiable. Add
to this the fact that Santorum had previously (and correctly) criticised
a rival for not living in his voting district.
Lobbyists are
enough to hurt any elected official’s credibility, and Santorum’s
involvement with them did him no favours whatsoever. According to Reuters,
in 2001 during his senatorial reign, Santorum was holding meetings with
lobbyists every second Tuesday. His income for 2010, detailed on his
tax returns released to the public, included payments from lobbying
firms, an energy company and a hospital conglomerate that was sued by
the federal government. Santorum sat on the board of the hospital
conglomerate from 2007 as it was being investigated by the federal
government for “illegal compensation to doctors in order to induce them
to refer patients to hospitals within the group”, and for invoicing for
treatments that were not provided. While none of this happened while he
was a senator, he became an official lobbyist or employee for
organisations which benefited from his voting record while in office.
Santorum
also managed to tank within his own party when he backed the moderate
Republican Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Senate election in 2004,
instead of the far more conservative Pat Toomey (who has since succeeded
Specter). Santorum attempted to defend the decision because Specter was
on the Senate committee on the judiciary, meaning he had a say in the
appointment of Supreme Court judges. This endorsement was a spectacular
failure, as Specter’s presence on the committee could not prevent the
swearing on of liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in May
2010. To make matters worse for Santorum’s reputation, Specter also
changed parties and announced he was a Democrat in 2009.
So
while Santorum may look for home-grown support should he launch a
presidential bid in 2016 or 2020, I am not sure he should be banking on a
solid win in Pennsylvania, where there remains a lot of lingering
resentment.
- News24