You’ve probably heard all the good ones about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum by now. The one about his “Google problem.” The one about the “man-on-dog sex” (prompting the greatest journalistic response ever, when the reporter told Santorum that he was “sort of freaking me out.”) The one about how the Catholic Church’s priest sex abuse scandal was caused by Boston liberalism, or the one about how President Obama should be anti-abortion because he’s black and abortion is like slavery. And so on and so forth.
That’s the Rick Santorum that America has come to know over the last 15 years or so – an unapologetic and almost goofy culture warrior whose obsessions – like thinking that gay sex is a gateway drug to bestiality – make him a hero to social conservatives and often a laughing stock to most everyone else. Santorum’s rise in the 2012 presidential race has people talking about whether his views on social issues – talk of annulling gay marriages, seemingly questioning the right to even birth control --- make him too extreme to be president – and that’s an important topic to discuss.
But I also think Santorum’s weird sexual bluster can obscure who he really is, and what truly matters about his suddenly surging campaign. As a Philadelphia-based political reporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state’s junior senator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I think people obsessing on the “man-on-dog” stuff are missing the bigger picture. For one thing, the self-styled “family values” expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with his own personal ethics. Also, Santorum’s legislative record shows that his real workaday agenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1 Percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. You could say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him too much credit.
Here’s a Pennsylvanian’s brief guide to the Rick Santorum you don’t know:
1. This compassionate Christian conservative founded a charity that was actually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charity initiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched a charitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation Good Neighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors who overlapped with Santorum’s political fund raising. Where did the majority of the charity’s money go? In salary and consulting fees to a network of politically connected lobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum’s finance director Rob Bickhart, later finance chair of the Republican National Committee. When I reported on Santorum’s charity for The American Prospect in 2006, experts told me a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and they were shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36 percent. The charity – which didn’t register with the state of Pennsylvania as required under the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.
2. Likewise, a so-called “leadership PAC” created by Santorum that was supposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America’s Foundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund political candidates, less -- and typically far less -- than any other “leadership PACs.” What America’s Foundation did spend a lot on with what looked like everyday expenses, including 66 trips to the Starbucks in Santorum’s then hometown of Leesburg, Va., multiple fast-food outings and expenditures at Wal-Mart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC’s expenses – paid for by donations from wealthy businessmen and lobbyists – were “unconventional,” at best and arguably not legal. Santorum also funded his large Leesburg “McMansion” with a $500,000 mortgage from a private bank run by a major campaign donor, in a program that was only supposed to be open to high-wealth investment clients in the trust, which Santorum was not, and closed to the general public.
3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with the everyday work of raising political cash. In 2005, Santorum made headlines – not all positive – for visiting the deathbed of Terri Schiavo, the woman at the center of a national right-to-die controversy.What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baer later exposed was that the real reason he was in the Tampa, Fla., area was to collect money at a $250,000 fundraiser organized by executives of Outback Steakhouses, a company that shared Santorum’s passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses and other rank-and-file workers. Santorum’s efforts were also aided by his unusual mode of travel: Wal-Mart’s corporate jet. And he canceled a public meeting on Social Security reform "out of respect for the Schiavo family" even as the closed fundraisers went on.
4. Santorum didn’t seem to be against government waste when it came to his family. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginia and rarely if ever seemed to use the small house that he claimed as his legal residence, in a blue-collar Pittsburgh suburb called Penn Hills. So Pennsylvania voters were shocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 for the home cyberschooling of five of Santorum’s kids, hundreds of miles away in a different state. The cash=strapped district was unsuccessful in its efforts to get any of its money back from Santorum.
5. Washington's lobbyist culture -- Santorum was soaking in it. The ex-Pennsylvania senator spent much of his final years in government trying to downplay and defend his involvement in the so-called "K Street Project," an effort created by GOP uber-lobbyist and tax-cutting fanatic Grover Norquist and future felon and House majority whip Tom DeLay. By all accounts, Santorum was the Senate's "point man" on the K Street Project and he met with Norquist -- at least occasionally and perhaps frequently -- to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence other Republicans.
6. Santorum had no problem with big government if it was supporting his campaign contributors in Big Pharma.It's little wonder that Santorum ultimately supported Medicare Part D, a prescription drug plan for the elderly that has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit and was drafted in such a way to best help pharmaceutical companies maximize profits from all the unbridled spending. When Santorum was defeated for a third term in 2006, an internal memo at the drug giant GlaxoSmithKline said his departure from Washington "creates a big hole that we need to fill.
7. The defender of family values was also slavish in his devotion to a large American corporate behemoth, Wal-Mart: In the wake of the report about Santorum's travel in the Wal-Mart corporate jet, I counted the many ways that Santorum had done the bidding of the world's largest retailer in the Senate, including battling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes in overtime rules that woulld benefit the company and hurt its blue-collar workforce, tort reform to limit lawsuits against what is said to be the world's most-sued company, and changes in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that would benefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.
8. Santorum has frequently insisted that his political values are guided by his religious values, and that John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech describing a separtion between the two had done "much harm" in America. But despite inviting such scrutiny, there's been little discussion of Santorum's ties to ultra-conservative movements within the Roman Catholic Church Santorum's comments about JFK were made in Rome in 2002 when he spoke at a 100th birthday event for Jose Maria Escrivade Balaguer, founder of the secretive group within the church known as Opus Dei. Although Santorum says he is not a member of Opus Dei -- which has been criticized by some for alleged cult-like qualities and ties to ultra-conservative regimes around the world -- he did receive written permission to attend the ultra-conservative St. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., where Mass is still conducted in Latin and a long-time priest and many parishioners are members of Opus Dei, mingling with political conservatives like Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and former FBI director Louis Freeh.
9. Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they're linked to his allies and campaign contributors. Consider the type of project that the Tea Party loves to hate, a $750 million energy plant in Schuylkill County, Pa., that was to convert coal to liquids but needed massive subsidies. Santorum boasted of his rule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hired Pennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as a lobbyist and paid him at least $900,000. Despite Santorum's efforts, the plant has not been built.
10. Santorum apparently believes in "an entitlement culture" when it comes for former politicians. After Tuesday night's virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, the Pennsylvanian spoke eloquently about his immigrant grandfather working for decades in the Pennsylvania coal fields and his massive hands; the grandson probably won't have that problem. Losing an election in 2006 allowed Santorum to become a poster child for how ex-pols quickly and easily cash in in America, as a lawyer-rainmaker and joining a "think tank" (that for a time was called America's Enemies) and as an analyst for the Fox News Channel and as a board member for Universal Health Services, an ethically challenged company where executives had supported his Senate campaigns. The New York Times' Gail Collins noted that Santorum had earned $970,000 in 2010 despite seeming sort of unemployed.
The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethical standards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to the social causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of big corporations and the wealthiest 1 Percent of Americans. It's a shame that more voters don't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.
The latest head-scratching move from Team Romney (sounds like a new project from the "South Park" guys) was a decision to -- in the wake of Rick Santorum's surge as a conservative alternative for the former Massachusetts governor -- roll out an endorsement...from John McCain.
On one level, sure, it's Politics 101. McCain is probably more popular in New Hampshire, where he won the GOP primary in 2000 and 2008, than he is in Arizona, so today's endorsement at the start of "New Hampshire week" is supposed to be a back-breaker. But Romney is probably going to win New Hampshire in a landslide with or without McCain's backing.
The thing about McCain is that while the GOP rank-and-file tolerated him in the fall of 2008, the Tea Party base of Republicans (64 percent of last night's Iowa caucus goers) will never forgive him for the ultimate sin of -- in their mind, anyway -- handing the White House over to Barack Obama. So with Santorum picking up boatloads of stray Tea Party voters, especially in South Carolina, that's the image the Romney campaign puts out there? McCain? Dumb.
Meanwhile, the New York Times said picking a candidate wasn't any easier for McCain than it's been for your average Republican:
Mr, McCain’s prickly relationship with Mr. Romney during the 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination animated a series of debates in which Mr. McCain accused Mr. Romney of supporting a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Mr. Romney accused Mr. McCain of “the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.” In “Game Change,” a book on the 2008 campaign, the senator repeatedly groused that Mr. Romney would say anything to win the nomination and accused him of lacking a soul.
But the ill will between Mr. McCain and Mr. Santorum may run deeper, through their years in the Senate. In May, talking to the radio host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Santorum spoke at length about the intelligence that he said United States security forces obtained through the waterboarding of the Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a technique Mr. McCain has denounced as part of his broader campaign against torture.
“He doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works,” Mr. Santorum said of Mr. McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war who was tortured repeatedly during his years in captivity.
Sorry for the light posting this week -- a combination of stories for the newspaper (here and here) and the first winter cold of 2012, which seems to already be getting better. That's OK, because the Daily News' John Baer, who has known and covered Rick Santorum longer than I have, wrote a masterful piece on deadline about the Pennsylvania man whose rise to 45th president of the United States of America seems slightly less improbable today.
Then there was his publicized culture-of-life support in 2005 for the comatose Terry Schiavo during a Florida legal fight between her husband and her parents over her life-support. Rick went uninvited to pray with her parents. He went on a Wal-Mart jet. He used the trip to get to a $250,000 fundraiser for his re-election campaign - proving, I guess, he believes that commitment to causes is important.
Santorum compared himself to Winston Churchill in 2006, warning against a "gathering storm" of evil-doers out to destroy our nation.
These days he just says bomb Iran - and tries to explain why he endorsed Mitt Romney in 2008.
So if the national media wonder how an incumbent senator and member of Senate leadership in 2006 lost re-election in his home state by 17 points, I've got the answer: Pennsylvania got to know him.
Now it's the nation's turn.
As Baer hints in his piece, get ready for the onslaught of Romney hedge-fund-funded SuperPAC ads seeking to portray Santorum as just another career Washington politician (which he is...more on that hopefully later this week.) I'm not sure if that sticks with the culture warriors of the GOP primary electorate, especially in the upcoming battleground of South Carolina. Or maybe voters just like sweater vests.
Any student of politics knows that third terms are always murder, and fourth terms -- to the rare extent that they happen -- are even deadlier. I learned this living and working in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when first New York Mayor Ed Koch and then New York Gov. Mario Cuomo went from life of the party to the annoying 2 a.m. guest who refuses to leave, the second each began their third four-year term in office. Yes, you (and when I say you, I'm not referring to the typical Attytood commenter) could invoke the case of FDR, but he needed a world war to keep his job in 1940 and 1944....a tad extreme if you ask me. Even the holy institution of marriage has "a seven year itch," when the whispered (or coughed) sweet nothings (like..."I need to do a better job," or "Time's yours") become annoying as hell, and you start asking why he always forgets to put the toilet seat down or how much time is remaining in the first half.
Without further ado, the greatest case for term limits in American history.
(Original image here)
Thanks to the holiday and the altered work schedule, I got to see Sunday's "60 Minutes" and its report on House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Most of it was actually fairly predictable, but it was hard to ignore this moment near the end:
In what was overall a pretty softball interview with Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, there was one pretty telling moment to illustrate the type of toxic political environment we're living in, due primarily to Congressional leaders like Eric Cantor and that is the unwillingness to even admit facts.
When asked about his image of being someone who is unwilling to compromise and the fact that the man he claims is his hero, Ronald Reagan, was willing to compromise on taxes and work with Democrats, Cantor denied that Reagan ever "compromised his principles." When Leslie Stahl pointed out the obvious, that not raising taxes was one of his principles, Cantor's press secretary interrupted the interview, yelling from off camera that what Stahl was saying wasn't true.
The moment had all the qualities of a 9-year-old boy protesting the existence of the Easter Bunny. The reality, of course, is that Reagan, by the most accurate accounting, raised taxes 11 times as president; he did. of course, slash top marginal rate for the wealthy, but in particular his deal to RAISE payroll taxes for Social Security, a non-progressive tax cut if there ever was one, meant that a typical blue collar worker paid more of his income to the government after Reagan left office than before he came in. This is what the modern GOP has come to. It's one thing, arguably, to dispute the widely accepted science on global warming -- at least in that case there's something to debate, however weakly. But now GOP officials -- not the rank and file voters but the House Majority Leader and his press spokesman -- dispute known facts and figures in cold type. For the love of God, tear down this myth.
Don't comeback anytime, I've already had your kind
This is your pay back, money grabber
Don't come back anytime, you've already robbed me blind
this is your pay back, money grabber
-- "MoneyGrabber," by Fitz and the Tantrums
OK, technically this incredible blue-eyed soul song of the 21st Century came out in late 2010, but it didn't get much attention until this year, and you can also debate whether it's about a love gone bad or...Goldman Sachs, but I'm going to go with the latter interpretation.
2011 was the year that the 99 Percent put the moneygrabbers on notice, and 2012 is the year that we cast them out. I don't actually know how that will happen in an election between Wall Street darling Mitt Romney and Wall Street darling Barack Obama, but it's a new year and I have an irrational faith that good things are going to happen. I hope you do, too.. and that you have a safe and happy holiday weekend.
See you in 2012 for the end of the world...as we know it.
Steve Van Buren's birthday should be a kind of a civic holiday here in Philadelphia -- the Eagles are our municipal religion, right?...and it's not even a point of argument that no Bird has done more for his team, or dominated the sport in his era, than the running back who was called about a half-dozen nicknames ("Wham Bam," "Moving Van") as fans tried to quantify a rugged mixture of speed and strength that the NFL had not seen before he came along.
There's a lot to the story, but really all you need to know is this: In 79 seasons of football, including this sorry excuse for one, the Eagles have won just three championships and two of them were on Van Buren's back: 1948, when the LSU grad scored the only touchdown in a raging blizzard at Shibe Park, and 1949, when Van Buren rushed for an epic 198 yards in a virtual monsoon in the L.A. Coliseum, of all places. There's a lot more to Van Buren and the Eagles' remarkable first title in 1948: As I announced earlier this month, I'll be telling it in a three-step journalistic project in January in the Daily News, Sports Week (powered by the Daily News) and an Amazon Kindle Single. Stay tuned.
One reason I'm so drawn to Van Buren's story is the contrast between the can-do brio of football's underpaid and underpadded "Greatest Generation" and the billion-dollar bluster of the NFL in the 21st Century. Ray Didinger had a good look back on Van Buren recently and shared some telling responses about the kind of modest life that the NFL Hall of Famer lived:
He lived quietly in Northeast Philadelphia for many years, hung out at Philadelphia Park race track and watched the Eagles on TV. He didn’t do appearances or autograph shows. He didn’t return to the Hall of Fame for induction weekends. He didn’t like a lot of attention. Ask about his career, as I often did, and he’d say, “I did OK” and leave it at that.
It was with way too little fanfare that Van Buren turned 91 yesterday in an assisted-living home outside of Lancaster, Pa. Today, a group of his remaining football buddies, including Eagles' alumni guru Jim Gallagher and his 1948 teammate Bill Mackrides, among others, are visiting this football legend and paying their regards. Van Buren -- who wears his Eagles' cap every day -- has suffered his share of health problems in the last third of his life, including a stroke. I think I join every other Eagles fan in hoping his 91st birthday week brings him as much pleasure as he brought to his adopted hometown over so many years.
Rich Hoffman has a must-read column on the monstrous allegations against former Daily News sports columnist Bill Conlin, and it does its best to answer a question that a lot of people outside of 400 North Broad Street have legitimately asked, which is why the DN's sports department has not weighed in so far on their ex-colleague:
They are the important people here. But to work in the Daily News sports department is to experience this uniquely, and maybe not as an outsider might expect. Because before all of this happened, Conlin really was an island, alone both in his enormous talent and in reality. And while it is true most sports writers are notoriously office-phobic, it remains a fact that most of the Daily News staff members have never once seen Conlin in person.
A co-worker asked me the other day whether I had called Conlin, and I replied I had not. I thought about it for a second and could not remember ever having spoken to Conlin on the telephone - and the number of emails we have traded over the years probably can be counted on one hand. I asked my co-worker, who has been at the Daily News for about 25 years. He, too, could not remember ever speaking to Conlin on the phone.
Which doesn't mean we didn't talk when we saw each other, because we did - once a year, twice a year, for a couple of minutes. I met him when I was 22, and our relationship stayed the same over 3 decades: He told the jokes, and I laughed at them. It was just easier that way. Assigned to cover the ceremony honoring him last summer at the Baseball Hall of Fame, I enjoyed listening to him tell some of the old stories, surrounded by family members and a few old friends.
But there was no great closeness, and there wasn't between Conlin and just about everyone at the Daily News. He was that isolated. He burned bridges with some and ignored most of the rest, and that's just the way it was.
This is information that the public should have, and yet it's complicated to get out there. In my opinion, there are two things about Bill Conlin and the Daily News that matter. One is that looking back, the acknowledgment that what he is accused of doing -- and nothing has really undercut the published allegations -- is depravity on a horrific level, and as Hoffman writes, nothing will ever trump our sadness and sympathy for those who've come forward. Looking ahead, the paper needs to continue to be more aggressive than any other news outlet (including the Inquirer) in uncovering other alleged crimes by Conlin or anyone who enabled them, and also go above and beyond normal journalistic practices of openness and transparency.
So one of the points that Hoffman puts out there today is that even to people in the sports department at the Daily News, the wirelessly connected Conlin was not a friend or a trusted colleague but a virtual stranger who happened to be a public figure. (On the city desk, the number of contacts my long-time colleagues have had with Conlin is typically "zero," including me personally, and maybe "one" in a couple cases.) For more than 90-95 percent of people in this newsroom, Conlin was as well-known as...Jerry Sandusky. It's a bizarre thing. Think of your workplace -- a police precinct house or a hospital or a plumbing supply company. There's probably someone who's "the public face" of your outfit the way that Conlin was the "public face" of the Daily News. It's probably someone you work with 40 or more hours a week, not a total stranger. Such is the odd situation that can occur in the computer age with "the wonders" of our disconnected workplace, which is maybe a metaphor for modern society itself.
Is that relevant information? Yes and no. It's not nearly as important as the things mentioned two paragraphs above, but a lot of people are asking questions about the institution of the Daily News, and the ways that the Conlin scandal is either similar to or different from situations at Penn State, the Catholic Church, and elsewhere. This may help readers answer some of those questions...for now.
If the Daily News rises to the occasion, and (in my biased opinion) it almost always has in the 16 1/2 years that I've worked here, you'll get even more answers to your questions in the weeks ahead. Because people deserve answers.
This reminds me of that scene in the movie "The Perfect Storm," when the terrified meteorologist looks at the radar in panic and says, "It's happening!"
At the start of the month, Rick Santorum needed the following things to happen in order for him to be competitive in Iowa: Newt Gingrich needed to fade. Evangelicals needed to move toward his campaign. Then voters needed to see some tangible sign of momentum, in order to speed up the tortoise-like pace of his Iowa campaign.
The former Pennsylvania senator has now gotten at least a dose of all three ingredients. Gingrich’s campaign has lost ground in every recent Iowa poll. Santorum won the endorsement of a number of high-profile Christian conservatives, including the head of The Family Leader. And today, Santorum placed third in an Iowa poll for the first time, running fairly close behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in a CNN/Time magazine survey.
The survey may not be all it’s cracked up to be: it only tested Republican voters, even though non-Republicans can get access to the caucuses. But it also followed a PPP poll released Tuesday night showing that Santorum has the highest net favorability rating of any Republican candidate in Iowa.
Whatever else, Santorum seems all but certain to post the highest finish in a presidential primary or caucus of any former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, which is quite an achievement. On one level, it's shocking that Santorum's rise in the polls has taken so long -- putting ideological critiques aside, he's clearly one of the sharper tools in the GOP's rusted 2012 shed, and he's targeted his appeal to the same evangelicals who gave the Hawkeye State to Mike Huckabee in 2008.
I think his biggest problem, politically, is that he talks like someone who's spent most of his adult life as a Washington insider, circa 1990s, and doesn't know how to "bring tha crazy" the way that the talk radio/Tea Party faction of the party likes it. Yes, a man who spoke in a political interview about "man-on-dog sex" isn't crazy enough for the modern Republican Party. Ponder that. And, at the end of a day, Santorum is a man who wears out his welcome -- his 59 percent rejection by Pennsylvania voters in 2006 was the highest I've ever seen for an incumbent senator not facing corruption charges.
Santorum's surge means people may finally look at his actual record. It won't be pretty. The real Senator Rick Santorum was a shameless pimp for Big Pharma who battled to hold back the working class Americans at companies like Wal-Mart and Outback and who founded a charity which was exposed (by Your Blogger) as not especially charitable. Maybe that kind of record is "evangelical," but not in any sense that I'm familiar with.
The Nobel Peace Prize called. It wants its good name back.
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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