Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
SANTORUM became ‘cultural warrior’ on child’s death.
WASHINGTON — As a teenager growing up in Butler, Pa., Rick Santorum spent Sunday mornings as an altar boy, taking wheelchair-bound veterans to Roman Catholic Mass. In the ninth grade, he announced his intention to hold elective office.
“I’m going to be governor of Pennsylvania,” he declared, according to his brother Dan.
Years later, as a married man and a member of Congress, Santorum wove these two strands of his life — his faith and his political aspirations — into one. In 1996, his wife, Karen, delivered a child when she was just 20 weeks pregnant. The baby, a boy they named Gabriel, died after two hours.
“That’s when I noticed a marked difference in Rick,” said Robert Traynham, who spent 10 years as a Santorum aide. “He became much more philosophical, much more deeply religious. You could tell he was walking with his faith.”
That experience helped deepen Santorum’s opposition to abortion. In Washington, he prodded Congress to outlaw partial-birth abortion, broke with a Republican president, George W. Bush, over embryonic stem-cell research and pushed for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage, insisting that it is “right for children to have moms and dads.”
Those views helped put Santorum within a whisker of beating Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses Tuesday night. Santorum has spent months waging a low-budget, shoe-leather-intensive quest for the Republican nomination. He visited all 99 counties in Iowa and moved his wife and seven children (including a disabled 3-year-old daughter) there for three weeks before the Ames Straw Poll last summer.
“People have asked me how I’ve done this, sitting back at the polls and not getting a whole lot of attention paid to us,” Santorum told supporters in Iowa on Tuesday night. “How did you keep going out to Iowa, in 99 counties, and 381 town-hall meetings and speeches?”
“Well,” he went on, “every morning when I was getting up in the morning to take on that challenge, I’ve required a strength from another particular friendship, one that is sacred. I’ve survived the challenges so far by the daily grace that comes from God.”
Santorum, 53, once offhandedly invoked bestiality in arguing that states should have the right to regulate homosexual acts. “That is not to pick on homosexuality,” he said. “It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog.” That prompted critics to create a website promoting a vulgar definition of his name. He is now feuding with Google because the site comes up first on a search for him.
On the campaign trail, he makes the case that traditional marriage is one prescription for the nation’s economic ills. During a swing through South Carolina last fall, he dropped in on a Christian radio station, where the host of the drive-time talk show, Tony Beam, asked Santorum how social issues would play in an election dominated by the economy.
Santorum did not miss a beat, launching into a long discourse on how single-parent homes spawn poverty and government intervention. “Government gets bigger,” he argued, “when families get weaker.”
Richard John Santorum grew up in working- class Pennsylvania, the son of an Italian immigrant father who eventually became a clinical psychologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Butler. Santorum’s mother was the chief nurse there, and the Santorums — Rick is the middle child of three — lived in a small three- bedroom, one-bathroom brick house on the hospital grounds.
Social issues were not high on Santorum’s agenda when he first ran for Congress in 1990, said G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College who has followed Santorum for 30 years. That year, Santorum narrowly defeated the Democratic incumbent, Doug Walgren, by painting Walgren as an absentee congressman who spent too much time in Washington — a charge that would later cost Santorum his Senate seat in 2006.
He arrived in Washington in 1991 and promptly made a name for himself (along with John Boehner, now the speaker of the House) as a member of the “Gang of Seven,” who helped expose scandal in the banking practices of the House. All seven were freshmen, all had won in a difficult year for Republicans, and they felt emboldened.
Santorum promoted school vouchers and changing the welfare system, blending his Roman Catholicism with a small-government philosophy that foreshadowed what Bush would later call his “compassionate conservative” agenda. (Santorum called it the “community renewal agenda.”) In 1996, he was instrumental in passing the welfare overhaul that President Bill Clinton signed into law. He was already at work on the partialbirth abortion bill when his son died; it did not pass until 2003.
In 1994, he ran for the Senate, ousting Harris Wofford, a Democrat. In 2000, after winning a second term, he became chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.