Summary
The Washington Post said that Rick Santorum “was a tea party kind of guy before there was a tea party.” He served four years as a congressman and 12 years as a senator from Pennsylvania before losing by 18% to Democrat Bob Casey in 2006. He began his presidential campaign in 2011 and ended it in June 2012.
Santorum began his political career volunteering for Sen. John Heinz. Santorum criticized his first congressional opponent for living outside the district for most of the year, yet while campaigning in 2006, Santorum said he spent only “maybe a month a year” at his home in Pennsylvania.
Critics then complained that taxpayers were paying most of the tuition for five of Santorum's children to attend an online “cyber school” available only to Pennsylvania residents.. After the school district challenged Santorum's residency and billed him for tuition, he withdrew the children from the school and began home schooling them at his Virginia residence.
Since leaving the Senate Santorum has worked as a consultant with industry interest groups, private-practice lawyer, Fox News contributor and has served on the board of directors of Universal Health Services, a hospital management company.
Santorum supported Mitt Romney in 2008, feeling that John McCain was too moderate. He later came out in support of McCain citing McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate as a step in the right direction.
Calling himself a “champion of traditional American values,” Santorum’s presidential campaign shifted from economic issues, reducing the size of government, and a “return to our country’s founding principles” to a focus on socially conservative issues such as abortion, birth control, and same-sex marriage.
Santorum believes that a strong economy is based on strong families, where the purpose of marriage between a man and a woman is to procreate. During his presidential campaign he pledged to expose “the dangers of contraception” and said that states should be allowed to ban birth control. He earlier claimed that “radical feminism” had made it “socially affirming to work outside the home” at the expense of child care.
He regards higher education as “indoctrination mills” which harm the country because the majority of students “who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.”
Santorum called intelligent design “a legitimate scientific theory that should be taught in science classes.”
Santorum views climate change “junk science.” He believes that global warming is a “beautifully concocted scheme” by the political left and “an excuse for more government control of your life.”
He opposes universal health coverage and questions that “people die in America because of lack of health insurance.” He advocates shifting Medicare to a premium-support model and converting Medicaid to block grants. He disavowed his 2003 support for the unfunded Medicare prescription drug benefit.
Santorum supports enhanced interrogation and in 2011 said that McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Viet Nam, did not understand how the process works.
He does not believe in an absolute separation of church and state, feeling that it is “antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”
He said that no group has done a better job of promoting American freedom than the National Rifle Association.
In 2005 Santorum introduced legislation designed to prohibit the National Weather Service from releasing weather data to the public without charge if private companies could perform the same service and charge for it. This was possibly motivated by donations of over $10,000 by Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather employees to Santorum’s campaign and PAC. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cited the bill as one of the reasons for listing Santorum as one of its “most corrupt politicians.”
Santorum earned BA, MBA and law degrees. As an attorney in private practice early in his career, he successfully lobbied on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation to deregulate professional wrestling, arguing that it should be exempt from federal anabolic steroid regulations because it was entertainment and not sport. He wrote It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good and Rick Santorum. He is married and has seven children.
Quotes
“The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.”
“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to.”
“And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.”
(Speaking to students in Sioux Center, Iowa – Source)
“Well, that's a separate issue. I mean, the issue here is marriage. And to me, the building block — and I think, to most people in America, number one, it's common sense that a marriage is between a man and a woman. I mean, every civilization in the history of man has recognized a unique bond. Why? Because — principally because of children. I mean, it's — it is the reason for marriage. It's not to affirm the love of two people. I mean, that's not what marriage is about. I mean, if that were the case, then lots of different people and lots of different combinations could be, quote, 'married.' Marriage is not about affirming somebody's love for somebody else. It's about uniting together to be open to children, to further civilization in our society.”
(On Fox News Sunday – Source)
“I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely … The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country… 62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it.”
(Feb. 23, 2012, National Journal, and Feb. 23, 2012, Glenn Beck TV – Source)
“The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don't have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.”
(WSEZ interview, 2011-03-29, answering a caller's question, quoted in Shahid, Aliyah, "Rick Santorum, GOP presidential hopeful, blames Social Security problems on abortion", Daily News, retrieved on 2011-04-15 – Source)
“Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that's OK, I mean y'know, contraception is OK.’ It's not OK. It’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage. They're supposed to be for purposes that are yes, conjugal … but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen.”
(Volsky, Igor [19 October 2011], "Rick Santorum Pledges To Defund Contraception: ‘It’s Not Okay, It’s A License To Do Things’", Think Progress, retrieved on 2012-01-19 – Source)
“I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.”
(This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC, 26 February 2012 – Source)
Santorum's staunch social conservatism... will probably cast a more enduring shadow. In his campaign, those issues consistently eclipsed his economic message and left him overly dependent on the votes of one faction, evangelical Christians. ...
He stoked his socially conservative base with a stream of vehement pronouncements — pledging to expose “the dangers of contraception”; insisting that states should be allowed to ban birth control (while declaring that he himself would vote against such a ban); accusing President Obama of practicing a “phony theology”; and asserting that John F. Kennedy's famous speech on the separation of church and state made him “throw up.” Santorum's unrelenting ardor shifted the race's focus from the economic issues that Romney preferred to cultural confrontations, a movement reinforced by a series of concurrent events that included the GOP backlash against Obama's rule requiring religiously based employers to fund contraception in health insurance and Rush Limbaugh's denunciation of a young woman supporting Obama as a “slut.”
(April 13, 2011, Ron Brownstein, “Santorum's Legacy: A Focus on Social Issues in the General Election,” the Atlantic– Source)
How high are the stakes in this election, according to Rick? Losing means the very end of American liberty:
“I believe that if we are unsuccessful in this election that we will have failed in that duty and it will have horrendous consequences. … It will be the end of the great experiment in the order of liberty and freedom.”
Obama’s re-election, Santorum indicated, will represent the final triumph of the parasitical lucky duckies who don’t pay taxes and depend on government for a living:
“We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority. Freedom in an election process is not something people will care about. They’ll care about whether they get their piece.”
But the scary fact is that his [Santorum’s] intraparty opponents would prefer to go after him for representing, as Mitt’s surrogate Sen. Roy Blunt said in April 2012, “the liberal wing of the Republican Party.” If that’s the case, the “conservative wing” must have taken a long flight from reality.
(Feb. 15, 2012, Ed Kilgore, “Santorum’s Rhetorical Surge,” Washington Monthly – Source)
In riling up liberal Democrats and turning millions of American women against the G.O.P., Santorum substantially increased the chances of President Obama being reëlected. If he wasn’t so obviously a true believer, I would suspect that he was secretly in the pay of the Democratic National Committee.
(April 11, 2012, John Cassidy, “Remembering Rick Santorum: Obama’s Secret Weapon, The New Yorker – Source)
Former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum says no group has done a better job of promoting American freedom than the National Rifle Association.
(April 13, 2012, Associated Press, “Rick Santorum says NRA is crucial in battle for freedom, urges support for Mitt Romney,” Washington Post – Source)
Santorum’s presence in the race pushed to the fore polarizing social issues, such as abortion, access to birth control and gays in the military, that many in the party preferred not to delve into as the GOP prepared to court independent voters in the general election campaign against President Barack Obama. Although he accused the media of unfairly focusing on that part of his broader campaign, Santorum was unapologetic about taking on such issues.
(April 11, 2012, Associated Press, “Santorum’s tenacious shoestring campaign became voice for GOP’s most conservative voters,” Washington Post – Source)