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Santorum and upstart allies now GOP old guard
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Bradley C. Bower, Associated Press
Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., speaks to the Pennsylvania Press Club Monday in Harrisburg.Rick Santorum was strolling past a display of highly brightly polished tractors at the Butler Farm Show this summer when he came across an old friend.
Rep. Phil English, R-Erie, and the two-term senator exchanged political intelligence, handicapping his chances in the November election -- just as they had 16 years earlier when Mr. English bunked in his college buddy's attic, helping to manage Mr. Santorum's campaign for Congress.
They were insurgents then, Republicans taking on the region's, and their party's, political establishments in a race in which few outside observers thought Mr. Santorum had a chance. Now, they are the establishment, with all the political power, and vulnerability, conferred by the change in status.
This establishment will meet what is expected to be its sternest test in Pennsylvania this November as Mr. Santorum faces Democratic state Treasurer Bob Casey.
Mr. Santorum's rise, and that of his GOP allies, are a part of a broad national story of the transformation of American politics -- the ascendance of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
But to a startling extent, the Western Pennsylvania chapter of that saga is more personal story, one in which a relatively small band of partisans, familiar to one another from the first steps of their political careers, nurtured and fed on the changing voting patterns of the region and the state.
Over the years, Mr. Santorum has evolved from a brash outsider who challenged the mores of Congress to an insider at the pinnacle of power. Phil English is one of a band of allies who rose in parallel.
As his friend headed off to work the crowd, Mr. English recalled that he and Mr. Santorum, 48, of Penn Hills, had gotten to know one another in the college Young Republicans at Penn State. When Mr. Santorum took a leave from his law firm job to challenge U.S. Rep. Doug Walgren of Mt. Lebanon, he asked his friend to help organize the campaign. By then, Mr. English had served a four-year term as controller of the city of Erie and had made an unsuccessful run for state treasurer.
At the same time, Melissa Hart, another veteran of the state Young Republicans, was taking on a Democratic state senator in a district that was largely within the congressional district targeted by Mr. Santorum.
In startling, overlapping upsets, both would win. Mr. English would go on to become Ms. Hart's chief of staff in the state Senate. Then, in 1994, he won his seat in Congress, taking the place of Tom Ridge, who was elected governor.
Six years later, in 2000, Ms. Hart would join her former aide in Washington, after upsetting a favored opponent in an adjoining district. The GOP march on the Western Pennsylvania congressional delegation continued two years later as then-state Sen. Tim Murphy, of Upper St. Clair, won an yet another seat in Congress, in a newly reconstituted 18th District.
Mr. Murphy, a psychologist and author, first met Mr. Santorum and his wife, Karen, when they sang together in the choir of St. Thomas More Roman Catholic Church in Bethel Park.
In Western Pennsylvania, then, all of Republican politics is seemingly governed by the rule of one degree of separation from Rick Santorum.
"I think we really thought we had a chance to do something special. ... I think we thought we were beginning something different out here," Mr. Santorum said of himself, Ms Hart and Mr. English.
"I always tell the people of the 18th District," he said at another point, "that the Republican revolution of 1994 had one of its seeds back in that race in 1990.''
But also in 1990, another sign that a new conservative force was ready to challenge the state's GOP establishment came in the form of Peg Luksik, a staunchly anti-abortion candidate, nearly wrested the governor's nomination from the pro-choice Barbara Hafer.
Pro-life volunteers, going door-to-door, lent an under-the-radar strength to the candidacies of both Mr. Santorum and Ms. Hart. Mr. Santorum describes the race as the a catalyst for the process of socially conservative Democrats shaking off their traditions and registrations to vote for Republicans in a once reliably Democratic region.
The other side of that coin involves the other side of the state. There, Mr. Santorum confronts a band of populous counties surrounding Philadelphia where the political demographics are nearly the opposite of those in his home region. Once Republican strongholds and still Republican by registration, those counties have been increasingly hospitable to Democrats.
Mr. Santorum managed to win the suburban swath surrounding Philadelphia in his last race, in 2000, even as President Bush was losing there to Al Gore. But public polling so far suggests that he will be severely challenged to do so again. Seeking to soften his image with Republican women, Mr. Santorum campaigned in suburban Philadelphia last week with prominent GOP women, including Sen. Elizabeth Dole and former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari of New York.
In a Pittsburgh appearance and later in the east, they argued against what Mr. Santorum regards as an unfair caricature -- that he is an unreasonable, right-wing ideologue.
Trouble by the book
But more specifically they were there to address what Ms. Molinari called "the elephant in the room" -- Mr. Santorum's praised and reviled book, "It Takes a Family."
In the book, Mr. Santorum reinforced his ties to his conservative base but raised hurdles to his chance of winning over more moderate voters with passages that were criticized -- unfairly in his view -- as being dismissive of the values of working women and families.
In it, Mr. Santorum argues that, "in far too many families with young children, both parents are working when, if they really took an honest look at the budget, they might confess that both of them don't really need to work, or at least may not need to work as much as they do."
Later, he states, "Many women have told me, and surveys have shown, that they find it easier, more 'professionally" gratifying, and certainly, more socially affirming, to work outside the home than to give up their careers to take care of this children.
"Respect for stay-at-home mothers, has been poisoned by a toxic combination of the village elders' war on the traditional family and radical feminism's misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect."
Mr. Santorum has repeatedly complained that his Democratic critics have taken passages from the book out of context. That's debatable in the sense that "taken out of context" implies a distortion of their meaning. The passages above, for example, mean what their plain language suggests.
But Mr. Santorum is certainly correct that they, and the issues they raise, are just part of more wide-ranging work.
And defenders, such as Ms. Molinari, endorse the critique of family and work that has stirred such criticism.
"You know, it's not just a message to women," she said, "It's a message to family, I consider myself a feminist and I welcome that message.
"Most people who actually read the book don't say, 'Rick Santorum is a radical, that this is full of crazy ideas.' "
Mr. Santorum's opponent, for one, does. One of Mr. Casey's favorite campaign mantras is to recite selected points from "It Takes a family," followed by the refrain: "Nobody believes that."
Among its other, less widely noted passages, the book seeks to present a rounder, more fleshed-out rationale for the oft-repeated slogan, "compassionate conservatism." At other points in its text, Mr. Santorum confronts not just issues such as his interpretations of liberalism and "radical feminism," but his own party. He argues that too many Republican lawmakers have not been sufficiently concerned, for example, with urban poverty.
Recounting how he became the ranking GOP member of the human resources panel of the House Ways and Means Committee, the panel with jurisdiction over welfare programs, he says "How I got to be ranking member ... does say a lot, I'm afraid, about how Republicans used to view welfare -- and too many still do ... none of my Republican colleagues saw this committee as particularly important to them or their constituents."
Among Mr. Santorum's chief priorities when he first came to the House was the chamber itself, as he and the group of firebrands known as the Gang of Seven, pressed for reforms in the cozy practices of the House bank and post office. Now, he finds himself the target of Democratic charges over the ties between lawmakers and lobbyists.
He has strenuously distanced himself from what became known as "the K Street project," an effort by conservative activists including Grover Norquist to place Republican loyalists in influential positions in the lobbying ranks. But, as GOP conference chair, he did host weekly meetings of lobbyists where, according to widespread reports at the time, lobbying personnel as well as policy issues were regularly discussed.
Those meetings, like the 2002 Pennsylvania redistricting plan that he was influential in shaping, reflect an ex-staffer's interest in the nuts and bolts of politics. But Mr. Santorum, from his first days in office, has immersed himself in the intricacies and controversies of policy issues.
His book recounts his involvement in what is perhaps his most noteworthy legislative achievement: the welfare reform law signed a decade ago by President Clinton. He has also, at some political peril, argued for the need to transform Social Security with personal accounts for younger workers.
Democratic opponents, including Mr. Casey, argue that this approach is an effort to gut the system. Mr. Santorum counters that the system is on its way to bankruptcy without significant changes.
Mr. Santorum faced heavy criticism in his first Senate election over videotaped remarks in which he called for an increase in the retirement age as a key step to shoring up the system. He disavows that approach now, maintaining that, 12 years ago, he thought of Social Security as "a zero sum game," in which solvency could only be achieved through some retrenchment in benefits.
Now, he contends a system of personal or private accounts could shore up the system without affecting the benefits of older workers. He concedes, however, that the political momentum for the kinds of changes that he and President Bush advocate has eroded and predicts that nothing is likely to happen on the Social Security front until after the next presidential election.
Collecting on welfare reform
While compiling one of the more conservative voting records in the Senate, he has been willing to stray from conservative orthodoxy on Pennsylvania-specific issues such as steel quotas. While a critic of big government, as a candidate he is happy to point to the pork he has brought home in the form of grants and federal aid for Pennsylvania projects. He boasts of the fact that he's never voted for a tax increase, but offers a more muted defense of the continued growth of government spending under a Republican-controlled administration.
"If you look at the growth of government in the United States versus every other western democracy, we are growing at much slower rates and we are growing at a slower rate than we would under Democratic control," he said in a recent interview. "So, yes, government has grown by more than I would have liked to see it grow, but we are doing better than the alternative. That's not a hurrah; that's not a huge win, but it's marginally better."
A champion of conservative social policy in general, Mr. Santorum also has been a leader in efforts to ban the procedure known as partial birth abortion. For most of his career in Washington, Mr. Santorum focused on domestic issues -- abortion policy, House reform, welfare reform and Social Security, but, more recently, and particularly in the last year, he has been more vocal on foreign policy.
President Bush has recently substituted "war on Islamic fascism," for "war on terror." That's a term Mr. Santorum has been using for more than a year as he has become increasingly outspoken on the need to confront Iran and other sources of what he see as threats to the United States.
Mr. Santorum has proposed legislation calling for regime change in Iran, language that led the Bush administration to oppose it. He says, however, that, he's not ready to call for military action against Iran, even as he warns that it's imperative that Tehran does not develop a nuclear weapon. Politically, that issue, along with opposition to illegal immigration, has formed a central part of this campaign.
The benefits and costs of Mr. Santorum's 16-year rise in political status were highlighted in the 2004 election. After former Mr. Ridge left his Harrisburg office to join the Bush administration in 2001, Mr. Santorum emerged as the top Republican in the state, clearly more influential within the party than his senior partner, Sen. Arlen Specter.
Mr. Santorum chaired President Bush's 2004 campaign in Pennsylvania. The army of volunteers it attracted are a potent grass roots force. They remain a significant potential asset for Mr. Santorum in this election.
But, in the spring of 2004, Mr. Santorum also stuck by his Senate partner in the face of a challenge by the more conservative former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey.
Mr. Toomey has endorsed Mr. Santorum, but some of his conservative followers are still angry about the race. It is an irony of this race that a figure who did as much as anyone to nurture the conservative wing of the state GOP has had to work to mend his ties with some conservatives over the past two years. The Santorum campaign is counting on Mr. Specter to bolster his appeal to Republican moderates in the Southeast, but, given the intraparty wounds of 2004, their embrace is a balancing act for Mr. Santorum.
Should Mr. Santorum win his re-election battle, his come-from-behind victory in a closely watched race will burnish his credentials to move up in the Senate leadership and would be sure to make him a contender for a spot on his party's national ticket in 2008 or beyond. But even a loss, coupled with the possibility of other GOP carnage in the state, could lead 2006 to be remembered as the high-water mark of a powerful tide in the state's political history.
First Published September 3, 2006 12:00 am
