Santorum`s risky running game

SPECIAL REPORT | MARCH 2012
To backers, he is ‘the best underdog ever.’
Yet some Republicans fear he’s a dog
that could bite the GOP. A look at his past
campaigns show why the presidential
candidate may be a bit of both.
BY KRISTINA COOKE AND EDITH HONAN
PITTSBURGH, MARCH 5
A
s Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum fought for his political life in
2006, his ally Senator Arlen Specter
offered a word of advice: Just stop talking.
What Specter meant was that Santorum
should stop talking about social issues, according to Adrienne Baker Green, a Specter
aide who witnessed the exchange.
Santorum’s outspoken style on issues such
as abortion and women in the workplace,
which had once made him a star among social conservatives, appeared to be alienating more moderate Pennsylvania voters who
would decide his fate in November 2006.
Santorum responded: “I can’t stop. Everyone is listening,” says Baker Green. Specter
says he can’t recall the encounter; Santorum’s campaign didn’t respond to a request
for comment.
Santorum lost the 2006 Senate election
by 18 percentage points, partly due to a wave
of anti-Republican sentiment that year, but
also because of his own words, which Dem-
REUTERS/CHRIS KEANE
Santorum’s
risky running
game
ocrats used to paint him as too extreme for
Pennsylvania voters.
The arc of Santorum’s political career in
Pennsylvania, where he first won over a Democratic district, then alienated voters, is beginning to look similar to his rise in the 2012
presidential race. With each advance, Santorum’s support has been partially undermined
by his own controversial remarks. Just days
before the Michigan primary, Santorum said
President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on
the separation of church and state made him
want to “throw up.”
PENNSYLVANIA’S KEYSTONES
Political consultant James Carville famously
described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and
Pittsburgh “with Alabama in between.” Political operatives there count at least three,
and as many as six, mini-states within the
state of various political stripes. Pennsylvania has backed the Democratic candidate for
president in every race since 1992, while voters tend to be more conservative in statewide
races.
In 1990, Rick Santorum, then a 32-year-old
attorney, set his sights on a U.S. congressional seat that had been held by Democrat
Doug Walgren for 14 years.
Santorum’s political experience up to that
point consisted of working as chief of staff for a
moderate, pro-choice state senator, Doyle Corman. Republican leaders and friends tried to
persuade Santorum to run instead for a relatively safe Pennsylvania house seat in Harrisburg.
THE SANTORUM CAMPAIGN REUTERS/STEVEN FALK
REUTERS/JASON COHN
“I wish I had that particular line back,” he
later said.
Santorum often portrays himself as a
champion of the blue-collar voter whose
experience winning rough-and-tumble elections in Pennsylvania shows he can attract
moderates and independents.
A look at his five races in Pennsylvania reveals a candidate who thrives in the role of
underdog and fighter. A hard-working doorto-door campaigner, he energized his conservative and evangelical base and won over
blue-collar voters by securing federal funds
that brought construction jobs.
Santorum also benefited from weak Democratic opponents and national trends that
dovetailed with his anti-tax and pro-life message.
Pennsylvanians who worked on those campaigns recall his off-the-cuff style as well as
his love of question-and-answer sessions in
which he would eagerly talk about a broad
range of issues. His advisers say he often
came up with the topics of his speeches on
the way to the venue.
Republicans in the Keystone State also recall a man who wouldn’t back down in an argument; often coming across as brash, abrasive and unscripted.
“Every so often, Rick throws the pass you
don’t need to throw, to use a football analogy. And he threw a couple he didn’t need to
throw,” says Alan Novak, a former Republican Party leader in Pennsylvania who is supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt
Romney for the GOP nomination.
“I always call them unforced errors.”
THE NATURAL: Running for the U.S. Senate in 1994, Santorum told his staff, “I have youth on my side.”
“He seems to derive his energy
from always having
a hill to climb.”
Santorum wouldn’t hear of it. He told
friends that Walgren was too liberal for the
district and that a conservative could win.
Keith Schmidt, who has worked on all of
Santorum’s campaigns and is now an adviser
on his presidential bid, says one of Santorum’s best political weapons is his intuition.
“He just saw an opportunity that I can safely
say no one saw that year.”
Santorum went all in. He quit his job and
convinced his soon-to-be wife to quit hers
and hit the campaign trail.
“We all told him he was crazy,” said State
Senator Jake Corman, who took over his father’s seat after Doyle Corman retired from
politics. But Santorum, he said, is fiercely
competitive by nature, “from board games to
public policy.”
Ron Klink, a Pittsburgh television reporter
who would later go into politics as a Democrat and would lose the 2000 Senate race to
Santorum, remembers Santorum standing on
a bridge leading into downtown Pittsburgh,
waving his campaign sign at passing cars.
“We referred to him as the Goof on the
Bridge,” Klink says.
Schmidt says Santorum was involved in all
aspects of campaigning. Santorum’s friends
and foes alike agree he is a natural retail
campaigner. He wore out three pairs of shoes
criss-crossing the congressional district, says
Schmidt.
“He personally hit 20,000 doors. That’s
just so ridiculous,” he adds. Santorum would
often follow up with a hand-written note to
voters he had met that day, Schmidt says.
Santorum had a simple message: The incumbent, Walgren, was out of touch with his
district because he lived in the Washington
area rather than in Pennsylvania. Santorum’s
slogan was “Leadership in Touch With You.”
“There were no warning signs at all. We
could not find him in polling at the beginning
of September,” Walgren says. “Our experience was he was able to leaflet very broadly,
essentially knocking on doors, with young
pro-life people. Pro-life was really gathering
steam ... and I was clearly pro-choice.”
Santorum ended up winning the district
with just over 51 percent of the vote.
BUMPER STICKER CAMPAIGN
His next victory -- winning re-election in
1992 -- owed a lot to Democratic Party’s own
troubles, Schmidt says. Two years later, with
the district looking likely to turn Democratic
in 1994, Schmidt says, Santorum turned his
sights on a Senate seat.
Santorum was back in his element as the
2
SANTORUM’S ELECTION DAY RETURNS
Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional district
U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania
(Winner)
SANTORUM
49%
51%
SANTORUM
38%
61%
SANTORUM
47%
SANTORUM
49%
46%
52%
DOUG
WALGREN
FRANK
PECORA
HARRIS
WOFFORD
RON
KLINK
1990
1992
1994
2000
SANTORUM
59%
41%
BOB
CASEY, JR.
2006
Source: Office of the Clerk, U.S. Congress
THE SANTORUM CAMPAIGN heard Santorum had a temper and hoped to
get under his skin during the debates.
“Having been a hard-nosed reporter, and
having been in Congress ... I was absolutely
positive, excuse my French, that I could piss
off Rick Santorum and could really get him
off of his center,” Klink says. “We had six debates. And I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t get
him to lose his cool.”
Santorum was ready. As part of his debate
preparation, Schmidt and Santorum’s other
advisers would have the candidate stand in
front of a mirror, while they took shots at him.
“We would say the awfullest things to him
and just get him off his mark – mean-spirited
things – literally interrupt him a few times,”
Schmidt says.
WASHINGTON INSIDER
Following his victory in 2000, and with
George W. Bush in the White House, Santorum rose to become the Republican majority’s third-ranking official. He was among the
Senate’s most passionate defenders of the
Iraq War.
REUTERS PHOTOGRAPH
underdog. At town-hall meetings that year,
he would tell voters that putting Santorum
bumper stickers on their cars was worth as
much as a $500 donation to his campaign.
Santorum packed his wife and young family into an RV and drove across the state to
introduce himself to voters, remembers
Becky Corman, the wife of his old boss, State
Senator Doyle Corman, and Santorum’s 1994
grassroots coordinator.
“I have youth on my side,” Schmidt recalls
Santorum telling his campaign staff. “You
can schedule me long hours, I’ll give six
speeches a day. I want to meet people.”
Santorum’s Democratic opponent that
year was Harris Wofford, a former president
of Bryn Mawr College and a founder of the
Peace Corps. Democratic strategists remember Wofford as a reluctant campaigner, uncomfortable with going on the offensive,
even as Santorum hammered him for supporting gun control.
Republican voters, especially pro-life evangelicals who had not been active in previous
races, hosted fundraisers in their homes, said
Novak, the former Pennsylvania GOP leader.
The crowds grew.
“He’s the best underdog you ever saw,”
says Novak. “He seems to derive his energy
from always having a hill to climb.”
The Republican Revolution was sweeping
the country. In Pennsylvania, turnout among
conservatives surged. They made up 40 percent of voters in 1994, compared with 26 percent in 1992.
Santorum beat Wofford 49 to 47 percent,
with the Christian Coalition and the gun lobby among his most enthusiastic supporters.
Among moderates, Santorum trailed Wofford by 15 percentage points.
Six years later, Santorum faced Representative Ron Klink for the Senate seat. Klink had
PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE: Santorum with state
compatriots John Murtha (center) and Arlen Specter
(right) with President George W. Bush.
But as his profile rose nationally, trouble
was brewing in Pennsylvania.
As the 2006 election approached, Bush’s
popularity was reaching its nadir. Santorum’s
support for the Iraq War was coming back to
haunt him in his core constituencies.
Santorum’s Democratic opponent that
year, Bob Casey Jr., was a pro-life, pro-gun
moderate who had the same name as his
father -- a popular former Pennsylvania governor.
“In 2006, we were doubly blessed -- we
could run against George W. Bush and Rick
Santorum,” says Democratic strategist Mary
Isenhour, who helped run Casey’s campaign
in 2006.
Santorum was also losing the women’s
vote.
At dinner parties attended by Republicans
that fall, Novak, the former party official, remembers being struck by how many women
said they were not planning to support the
senator.
Part of the problem was Santorum’s memoir, “It Takes A Family.” Against the advice of
several longtime supporters, Santorum published the book the year before the election.
In it, Santorum decried “radical feminism’s
misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value
and self-respect.” The line has come back to
haunt Santorum on the presidential trail. He
said recently that his wife, Karen, wrote that
passage.
Santorum was also taking heat for comments he made in a 2003 interview with the
Associated Press in which he appeared to
liken homosexual sex to “man on dog.” Santorum has been asked about the comment
repeatedly, and has never denied saying it or
offered an apology.
“Nobody could believe he had actually said
3
REUTERS/JASON COHN
this,” says Isenhour, the Democratic strategist. “That was about as extreme as we’d
ever heard from him, and then it kept getting
worse.”
There was also a charge of hypocrisy. In
1990, Santorum won against Walgren in
large part by portraying his opponent as a
Washington insider who didn’t live in the district. By 2006, Santorum had moved his family to McLean, Virginia, where he was charging his Pennsylvania school district for his
children’s education.
By July, with his poll numbers not moving, Santorum’s campaign met with a group
of fiscal conservative grassroots activists.
The group had backed the conservative Pat
Toomey over the more moderate Specter
in the 2004 Republican primary for one of
Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seats. They were
still furious over Santorum’s endorsement
of Specter, who was known disdainfully as a
“King of Pork.” Specter would go on to win
the election and then switch to the Democratic Party.
The group felt that Santorum had fallen out
of touch with the small-government direction
of the party. He, too, had gained fame for his
ability to bring home the bacon to his Pennsylvania constituents. He had supported an
increase in the minimum wage and government programs like No Child Left Behind, a
federal program that emphasizes testing and
performance standards in schools.
The meeting with the activists, most of
them in their mid-20s, had been meant as
a reconciliation. Several in attendance challenged Santorum on his support of deficit
spending and earmarks. The gathering devolved into a profanity-peppered shouting
match, say several people who were present.
“We walked in there, ready to reconcile,
and we were just berated,” says Jason High,
a conservative political activist. “It was not
pretty ... Rick just yelled and screamed at us.”
Bob Guzzardi, a real-estate developer who
says he gave about $30,000 to the Santorum
campaign that year, left the meeting, which
dragged on more than 90 minutes, feeling
“blown off.”
Ryan Shafik, a Toomey campaign aide who
had interned with Santorum in 2000 but had
fallen out with the senator, remembers San-
SENATOR CASEY: Santorum has been out of office
since his landslide defeat.
“Republican officials ... fear
that with Rick Santorum at the
top of the ticket, there’s going
to be a blood bath. ”
torum taking an imperious tone at the meeting. “’The conservative movement in Pennsylvania starts and ends with me,’” he recalls
the senator saying.
Santorum’s campaign manager, Vince
Galko, set up the meeting. He denies there
was shouting and says that most of those in
attendance remained supportive of Santorum’s campaign.
“The fact is that Rick went in there, showed
how hard he was willing to fight for every vote
and was willing to listen to all sides,” says
Galko. “Their intent was, ‘You’ve got to come
more to the right.’ His point – ‘I’m losing this
race because people think I’m too far to the
right.’”
“Keep this in context – you have the thirdranking member of the United States Senate who’s in the fight of his life in an election year, coming to Harrisburg to meet with
these folks, he wasn’t going in there to yell at
them,” says Galko. “He was going in there to
work with them and enlist their support.”
Santorum lost the 2006 race in a landslide.
Nearly six in 10 voters backed Casey, including 61 percent of female voters, according to
CNN exit polls.
The only voting groups he was able to win
convincingly were his base – evangelical and
born-again Christians, voters who oppose
abortion in all cases, and conservatives who
approved of George W. Bush’s presidency,
the exit polls showed.
“We were no great geniuses for taking him
out,” says T.J. Rooney, a Democratic campaign consultant and a former chairman of
the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee.
“He was out there shooting his mouth off. He
obviously doesn’t take direction very well.”
Jake Corman says the defeat wasn’t Santorum’s fault: “In 2006, people were ready to
fire Republicans.”
Today, some GOP campaign managers in
Pennsylvania worry that if Santorum wins the
nomination, having him atop the ticket could
hurt Pennsylvania Republicans in statewide
races. Shafik, the Toomey campaign aide,
says it could amount to a “Rickpocalypse.”
“The thing that Republican officials will
not say publicly, but are saying privately, is
that they fear that with Rick Santorum at the
top of the ticket there’s going to be a blood
bath” for Republicans, says Shafik.
Schmidt, still one of Santorum’s closest aides, said the campaign is betting that
just as Santorum and his politics were out of
fashion in 2006, nationally they are back in
fashion in 2012.
As a precedent, he cites 1994 when Santorum cast himself as the unapologetic conservative against Wofford, the unapologetic
liberal. This year, it would be conservative
Santorum versus liberal Obama.
“The fact that the president believes in
a liberal agenda and has articulated it well
[means] we’re going to articulate a conservative agenda,” says Schmidt. “And we’ll have
to see where the middle breaks.”
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