Kampanj: Vem är Rick Santorum?

PORTRÄTT | Vem är Rick Santorum? Alla googlar honom nu frenetiskt efter hans imponerande andraplacering i Iowa.

Här är två bra artiklar. Den äldre (2005) från Philadelphia City Paper är en av de få längre personporträtten som finns för tillfället. Men fler lär det bli. Artikeln från tidskriften The Atlantic är skriven häromdagen.

Även om Santorum otvivelaktigt är en kristen socialkonservativ politiker visar tidningsartikeln att han tidigare har kunnat vara pragmatisk om så behövts.

Mike Newall, Philadelphia City Paper, skrev 2005:

”Democrats scratch their heads and can’t figure out why he keeps winning,” says political analyst Terry Madonna. ”They don’t understand how someone so conservative and brash can win in Pennsylvania, a centrist, light-blue state where moderates prevail.”

But, says Madonna, what you see with Santorum is not always what you get.

”Too much attention has been spent on Santorum as the cultural ideologue and not enough on his pragmatism and political opportunism,” Madonna has written. ”Inside this raging bull of a conservative is a pragmatist for whom getting re-elected always trumps ideology.”

The facts support Madonna.

According to the National Journal, the mostly highly regarded scorekeeper on Senate voting patterns, Santorum had the least conservative voting record among the Republican leadership in 2004. In fact, 32 other Republican congressmen have more conservative voting records than Santorum.

Plus, Santorum is a prince of pork, having pulled millions upon millions of dollars of federal money back into Pennsylvania, which among other things have helped spur redevelopment in Chester. Santorum also has a successful track record bringing funding and assistance to faith-based anti-poverty partnerships in Philadelphia.

Molly Ball skriver i The Atlantic:

He’s Always Worked This Hard. In Iowa, Santorum has become known for his dogged retail campaigning — he’s logged more than 350 campaign events in all of the state’s 99 counties. It was a similar story in 1990, when Santorum got his start in politics at the age of 32 by unexpectedly knocking off a seven-term incumbent congressman in a strongly Democratic district in the Pittsburgh suburbs. He knocked on thousands of doors and bludgeoned his opponent for spending too much time out of the district. His win was considered so improbable, he says, that the National Republican Congressional Committee didn’t know his name on Election Night. Thrown into an even less GOP-friendly district by redistricting in 1992, he repeated the feat, and in 1994 he knocked off an incumbent Democratic senator.

[…]

Why You’ve Never Heard of Him. Santorum hasn’t held office for over five years, having lost his 2006 bid for re-election to a third Senate term. His 18-point losing margin was the biggest loss ever by an incumbent Pennsylvania Republican senator — an inconvenient footnote to Santorum’s electability argument, which he tries to explain away by claiming 2006 was a historically bad year for the GOP nationally. Ironically for a politician who’d first won office by criticizing his rival’s absences, Santorum was damaged in that race by questions about his residency — the Pittsburgh-area home he claimed as his was occupied by renters, while his children were enrolled in a Pennsylvania-based online high school from their home in Northern Virginia. As Santorum turned to apocalyptic fear-mongering about the threat of radical Islamism, his Democratic opponent, Robert Casey Jr., replied, ”No one believes terrorists are going to be more likely to attack us because I defeat Rick Santorum. Does even he believe that?”