Spotlight on Santorum

He became a frontrunner too late to face much criticism before the Republicans’ Iowa caucus. But Rick Santorum is now under fire for his stance on a number of issues, writes Marcus Stern

RICK SANTORUM’S last-minute surge in the Iowa caucus brought him neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney in the first contest of the 2012 race to select a Republican presidential candidate. But it came too late to attract the harsh scrutiny usually visited on frontrunners.

Only in recent days have questions emerged about his stand on abortion, his votes in Congress, and his endorsements of Romney over John McCain in 2008, and senator Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004.

If rival candidates decide to go negative on Santorum — as they have on Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul — they have plenty of material with which to work.

Santorum is beloved among “values voters” for his stand on abortion, gay marriage and other social issues. But his record is rich in polarising policy positions and questionable associations that support the charge of “Washington insider”.

“The spotlight is blinding, and if you squint or stumble even slightly, it gets even more intense,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant now at the University of Southern California.

“Santorum hasn’t faced it yet, but it’s about to hit him in a huge way.”

Santorum says he’s ready. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been in tough races,” he said on Monday in Iowa. “I’ve had the national media crawling up anywhere they could crawl... It’s not going to be fun.”

Texas governor Rick Perry fired an opening salvo last weekend, charging that Santorum, 53, was a big spender in Congress who voted to raise the debt ceiling and approved such wasteful projects as Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere, a teapot museum in North Carolina and an indoor rain forest in Iowa.

Santorum, a lawyer with working class roots, was 32 when he was first elected to Congress in 1990 from a western Pennsylvania district. He served two terms in the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate, where he served two Senate terms from 1995-2007, before losing his seat in a landslide.

As a senator, Santorum played a key role in an effort by Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the political loyalties, of Washington’s lobbying firms and trade associations, which had previously been bipartisan.

Dubbed “the K Street Project” for the Washington street that housed most of these groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage lobbying firms to “hire people who agree with your worldview, not hire for access”.

But the project came to encompass the entire climate of cozy co-operation between Republicans and lobbyists. When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, majority leader Tom Delay and others organised regular meetings with lobbyists that reviewed K Street job openings with an eye to filling them with party loyalists, who would in turn steer support and donations to the members.

By 2001, Santorum was holding one-hour breakfast meetings with lobbyists on alternating Tuesdays at 8.30am. In 2004 he denied being involved with Norquist’s effort to staff K Street. But Santorum reportedly convened Senate Republicans to discuss the appointment of Democrat Dan Glickman as head of the Motion Picture Association.

“Yeah, we had a meeting, and yeah, we talked about making sure that we have fair representation on K Street. I admit that I pay attention to who is hiring, and I think it’s important for leadership to pay attention,” he told the Roll Call newspaper at the time.

In 2006, as the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to jail unfolded, Santorum said he was ending the breakfasts in his conference room. However, staff confirmed they resumed almost immediately, on the same day and at the same time, at a location off the Capitol grounds.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, named Santorum among the three most corrupt senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee”.

The blowback from the K Street Project contributed to Santorum’s crushing 18-percentage-point defeat in his 2006 re-election bid. His image as a conservative firebrand who made polarising comments about abortion, gay people and single mothers played a role as well, as did Santorum’s full-throated support of the war in Iraq.

A few weeks after he left Congress, although his law license had expired, Santorum landed a job in the Washington office of Pittsburgh-based law firm Eckert Seamans. Lawyers there had given Santorum 45 political contributions totalling $24,400 (€19,000) while he was in Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

As senator, Santorum “was a friend of the firm”, said Timothy Ryan, Eckert Seamans’ chief executive. Santorum helped make introductions and did other “relationship work”, such as providing Eckert Seamans’ clients with business and strategy counselling.

Since then, thanks to his political contacts, Santorum has cobbled together a comfortable living as a political pundit, policy advocate and corporate consultant. His 2010 financial disclosure form shows the self-described “grandson of a coal miner” earned at least $900,000 that year.

A Catholic with seven children, Santorum has taken positions on many social issues that may not play well with moderate voters and others that may trouble the conservative base.

He has vowed to reinstate the don’t ask don’t tell policy on gay people in the military and annul all gay marriages, which are legal in New Hampshire, the site of the next Republican primary. He has said he is “not a believer in birth control” and believes that states should be allowed to outlaw it altogether.

He opposes legal abortion, yet supported a bill that allows it in the case of rape or incest or danger to the mother, saying last week that this was a calculated compromise to move toward the goal of ending abortion.

Similarly, he endorsed fellow Pennsylvanian, pro-choice senator Arlen Specter, over anti-abortion primary challenger Pat Toomey in 2004. That move became even more offensive to conservatives when a victorious Specter went on to switch parties and cast a crucial vote for President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Santorum has said his was a “political decision” based on his calculations of how to best influence upcoming Supreme Court appointments.

Santorum presents family values as the cornerstone of his political convictions. But here, too, his behaviour might alienate as many voters as it attracts.

In 1996, after his wife, Karen, gave birth to a child who lived just two hours, the Santorums brought the dead baby Gabriel home to meet the other children, which Karen subsequently described in a book.

Santorum’s Google problem

THOSE who take to the internet to learn more about Rick Santorum are about to discover his Google problem. It comes courtesy of sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who in 2003, following comments Santorum made about gay people, asked his readers to help come up with a disgusting sexual reference to be named after the then Pennsylvania senator.

What they came up with was this, which is now the top Google response for Santorum, and is posted at the website spreadingsantorum.com: “Santorum 1. The frothy mix of lube and faecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex. 2. Senator Rick Santorum.”

Readers of Savage’s column, Savage Love, have spent years clicking on the site to move it to the top of Google’s results for a search of Santorum’s name. Some commentators joke that Santorum may only be running for president in the hopes that new stories about him will lead to more flattering Google results.

Santorum was unknown to many national voters before he finished a close second to Mitt Romney in Iowa, which suddenly and dramatically raised his national profile, and he was the second-highest search term on Google this week.

Savage began his campaign to besmirch Santorum’s name after the Republican told a reporter that he had “a problem with homosexual acts”.

“In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s (marriage) 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 —”

The reporter then interjected: “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator, it’s sort of freaking me out.”