A Passionate Persona Forged in a Brutal Defeat

By Katharine Q. Seelye
New York Times
March 16, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/us/politics/a-passionate-persona-forged-in-a-brutal-defeat.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1

[with video]

Rick Santorum's prospects for re-election to the Senate were not rosy when friends and advisers urged him in 2005 not to risk making things worse.

Mr. Santorum, hurting politically in Pennsylvania because of his defense of the Iraq war and President George W. Bush, had written a book, "It Takes a Family." It was a blistering attack on liberal "elites" and what he saw as their moral relativism as well as "radical feminists" who, he said, had devalued mothers who preferred staying home rather than going to work.

"I said, 'What are you doing?' " recalled David Urban, who had been chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and was close to Mr. Santorum. " 'You're running for re-election! Why not wait till afterward?' "

Mr. Urban said Mr. Santorum told him that these were ideas he really believed.

"There are some guys — Paul Wellstone was one," Mr. Urban said, referring to the liberal Democratic senator from Minnesota, "who know what they believe, they don't take polls and they don't worry about the consequences. For him, this book was a big marker."

That race, which ended in Mr. Santorum's landslide defeat, nonetheless helped him establish a persona — passionate and polarizing on issues of family and morality, hawkish on terrorism and Israel, eager to cast himself as putting principles ahead of politics.

Those very qualities may have cost him the election in 2006. But they have helped rebrand him as the face of conservatism in 2012 as he challenges Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination.

In 2006, Mr. Santorum was also dogged by criticism from the right — echoed today on the presidential campaign trail — that he was complicit in the big-government conservatism of the Bush years. First elected to Congress in 1990 as a reformer intent on challenging the ways of Washington, he found himself cast as an insider at a time when voters wanted change.

His loss, by 17.4 percentage points, was the biggest for any incumbent senator in Pennsylvania since at least the Civil War, according to G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College. That eyepopping margin is the chief reason that few people took Mr. Santorum seriously last year when he started running for president. How could he get elected anywhere after he had lost his own state so lopsidedly?

Mr. Santorum says he was caught in "a meltdown year" for Republicans, both in Pennsylvania and nationally. That was certainly true. In Pennsylvania, they lost most offices, including four Congressional seats. In Washington, they lost the House and control of the Senate.

But if the climate was harsh, Mr. Santorum was part of it. Always brash, he had become a more rancorous figure since he last faced the voters in 2000. He was No. 3 in his party's leadership and responsible for its messaging, which often meant either defending Mr. Bush or going on the attack.

And he took high-visibility roles on divisive issues, including abortion, homosexuality and the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

"His views were not consistent with the Pennsylvania constituency," said Mr. Specter, who was later driven from the Republican Party by conservative opposition and lost his Senate seat in 2010. "I'm talking about women in the workplace, the book, his opposition to birth control — that's not American, to be opposed to birth control." (Mr. Santorum says he personally opposes contraception but he has voted to finance it.)

The voters to whom he is appealing this year — mainly conservatives and evangelical Christians — are the same core voters he appealed to in Pennsylvania. But in 2006, they were a minority in the state's general election; now they dominate the Republican primaries. And they are drawn to Mr. Santorum's moral certitude, his fire-and-brimstone passion, his pugilistic posture of never giving up and never giving in.

A Weakened Incumbent

Conventional wisdom in Pennsylvania holds that Mr. Santorum lost the 2006 race before it began. In early 2005, polls showed that he had the highest negative ratings of his Senate career.

The Democrats recruited Bob Casey, the state treasurer with a revered name in Pennsylvania — his father, Robert P. Casey, was a popular former governor — to challenge him.

Mr. Casey, like Mr. Santorum, was Roman Catholic, opposed abortion rights and supported gun rights. His credentials neutralized Mr. Santorum on several of his signature issues, particularly with blue-collar voters in western Pennsylvania.

And, despite Mr. Casey's opposition to abortion rights, he was more acceptable to the antiwar social moderates in the Philadelphia suburbs, who are crucial to any statewide victory. "The Democrats couldn't have had a better candidate," said Liz Preate Havey, who is active in Republican politics and lives outside Philadelphia in suburban Montgomery County, a onetime Republican stronghold that has turned Democratic. With Mr. Santorum unable to draw a stark contrast between himself and his opponent, as he is doing now with Mr. Romney, the Senate race became a referendum — on him.

Pollsters said that two issues in particular had weakened him: his prominence in the Schiavo case, and his advocacy for the partial privatization of Social Security, which was not well received in a state with a large proportion of retirees.

The wrenching Schiavo case helped escalate his role in the nation's culture wars. Ms. Schiavo, 41, had been in a vegetative state for 15 years. Her husband wanted her feeding tube removed, saying she would not want to continue that way, while her parents opposed its removal, saying she showed signs of life. After multiple legal challenges, the tube was removed on March 18, 2005, under orders from a Florida judge.

Congress quickly passed a bill, co-sponsored in the Senate by Mr. Santorum and supported by Democrats, saying federal courts, which had refused to intervene, needed to review her case. Mr. Bush rushed back to Washington from vacation to sign it into law. She died 13 days after the tube was removed.

The spectacle left much of the public aghast. In a CBS poll, 82 percent of Americans said Congress and the president should have stayed out of the case. Mr. Santorum had gone further than most. Just before Ms. Schiavo died, he visited her hospice, met with her parents there and held a news conference. Critics said he contributed to the circuslike atmosphere.

Mr. Casey said at the time that he would have supported the legislation that Mr. Santorum co-sponsored — "you should err on the side of life," he said — but he faulted Mr. Santorum for what he said was grandstanding during a private family tragedy.

Mr. Santorum said at the time that he was "defending a disabled person from being executed," language that further inflamed passions.

A Combative Campaign

The actual campaign was fairly mundane, compared with the sideshow that Mr. Santorum's activities and comments had provided.

Mr. Santorum's chief argument against Mr. Casey was that he had sought four different statewide offices in six years. Mr. Casey neutralized the issue by pledging to remain in the Senate; he is seeking re-election this year.

Mr. Casey pounded home one message — that Mr. Santorum was a "rubber stamp" for Mr. Bush and had voted with him 98 percent of the time. Mr. Santorum never got out from under it.

It did not help that the Santorums, who had moved to Virginia after he first won his Senate seat in 1994, were "cyberschooling" their children in Virginia at the expense of taxpayers in Pennsylvania, where they maintained a residence. Mr. Santorum insisted he was doing nothing wrong because he paid taxes in Pennsylvania.

Vince Galko, Mr. Santorum's campaign manager, said that Mr. Santorum was under siege, by a hostile news media and by a drumbeat of negative news about the party. "Every week there was another slash, it was death by a thousand cuts," Mr. Galko recalled. "We were never able to get out ahead with our messaging."

In June 2006, a Quinnipiac University poll found that more than 40 percent of Casey supporters were mainly voting against Mr. Santorum. One pollster called him "his own worst enemy."

The Casey campaign had stoked the flames. For example, after the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church broke in Boston in 2002, Mr. Santorum had written on a Catholic Web site: "It is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm."

The comment was little-noticed at the time, but the Casey team unearthed it three years later and sent it to columnists, according to Saul Shorr, a top Casey strategist. It prompted Senator Edward M. Kennedy Jr., the Massachusetts Democrat, to demand that Mr. Santorum apologize. After Mr. Santorum refused, Mr. Kennedy took the rare step of upbraiding his colleague on the Senate floor, calling his remarks "irresponsible, insensitive and inexcusable."

Mr. Santorum fired back.

"I don't think Ted Kennedy lecturing me on the teachings of the church and how the church should handle these problems is something I'm going to take particularly seriously," he said during a conference call with news media from Catholic organizations.

Surely some voters agreed with him, but the Casey campaign achieved its goal of highlighting Mr. Santorum's combativeness. Mr. Shorr said Mr. Santorum often came across as "part Eddie Haskell, part seminarian."

By October 2006, Mr. Santorum's numbers had not improved and his team stopped conducting polls, said John Brabender, his chief strategist. Mr. Santorum devoted his waning time in the spotlight to warning that Americans had been "sleepwalking" through a "gathering storm" of terrorist threats. One ad featured a mushroom cloud. He cared deeply about the issue, but it did little to win over war-weary voters.

Mr. Shorr, the Casey strategist, said, "He found some satisfaction in just being who he was and going down with the ship."

In Trouble With the G.O.P.

If Mr. Santorum did not retreat on the big issues, he did trim around the edges on others. In an ad in 2006, he boasted of supporting a raise in the minimum wage and fighting efforts to cut financing for Amtrak, which is important to Philadelphia.

He brought his family on the campaign trail and aired gauzy ads with his young children speaking up for him. In other ads, he boasted of his work with Senate Democrats, "even" Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York (on restricting material in children's video games).

His campaign issued a brochure called "50 Things You May Not Know about Rick Santorum." Many items reflected a career of directing federal money back to his state, which he would probably not brag about today — "Rick helped secure $100 million in financing to build America's first-ever coal-to-ultraclean fuel plant" (No. 2); "Rick was successful in his efforts to prevent Congress from making cuts to the food stamp program" (No. 44).

He had the respect of some liberals, including U2's Bono, for what they saw as his serious efforts to combat poverty and fight AIDS in Africa. He also earned endorsements of some big labor unions because the money he brought home had created thousands of jobs for construction workers.

But this record antagonized some fiscally conservative activists who viewed him as a big-government spender who had voted to raise the debt limit. Many were still smarting from Mr. Santorum's endorsement of Mr. Specter in the Republican primary in 2004 over Patrick J. Toomey, the conservative challenger.

Mr. Santorum's staff was aware that he needed to mend fences with these activists, and in the summer of 2006 he met with about 10 of them.

Ryan Shafik, who had been an intern for Mr. Santorum and worked on Mr. Toomey's campaign, was among them. Mr. Shafik said that many aired their personal gripes —Mr. Santorum was arrogant — but the biggest complaints were about his spending and his use of earmarks.

Mr. Shafik said that Mr. Santorum's response was essentially to say "that's who I am," and the meeting "turned into a shouting match." Mr. Shafik, for one, did not help the re-election effort.

Mr. Galko, the campaign manager, said there was no shouting and that some did help the campaign. Either way, the meeting did not bode well.

On Election Day, Mr. Santorum lost by 700,000 votes. He lost almost all demographic groups except evangelicals and lost almost all regions except the most conservative rural areas. His challenge then is what it is now — to expand his appeal beyond that core.

Back then, he didn't much try. "In the final weeks, it would have been very easy to stick a finger in the wind and pick popular positions and lose by 5 points instead of 18," Mr. Galko said. "But he stuck to his guns, he went down with his beliefs."