Guest post by Robert Jursik who covered Ovide Lamontagne’s Granite Oath series of speakers this past Tuesday night. The featured speaker was Rick Santorum, former Senator from PA.
Granite staters are renowned for our caustic dismissal of snow storms, yet we are not foolish about them either. With a massive one only hours away, we would not travel blithely beyond our homes – certainly not for politics and most certainly not for wine and cheese. Yet, there we were, nearly 200 of us, squeezed elbow-to-elbow into the Lamontagne family home in Manchester for a purpose too great for mere snow to deter: the first event of Ovide’s Granite Oath PAC’s Presidential Series – a reception for former US Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.
Santorum has started out of the gate early for a presumed Presidential candidacy. While media heavyweights like Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin carefully compose op/ed pieces from the comfort of their warm homes, Santorum is here shaking hands, learning names and faces, and recruiting serious people around him to make a presumed candidacy sing. His attendance with Ovide this evening was a natural harmony of two generationally-close men with nearly identical belief systems: Catholic, conservative, Republican, family-oriented, ardently pro-life and strongly supportive of both the Constitution and national security – a combination particularly attractive to the conservative Republican audience attending tonight.
And what an audience! Guests arrived from nearly every corner of the state, a potent mix of veteran party leadership, rank-and-file activists, curious media personalities looking for news, every Lamontagne relative within a 50-mile radius, free cheese-and-cracker hounds (like me), and – perhaps most importantly – campaign professionals gauging Santorum’s value as a candidate for whom they might one day work. Already, the formidable Mike Biundo, still radiant from his management of the hugely-successful Guinta congressional campaign, has signed on to manage Santorum’s America’s Foundation PAC in New Hampshire – a telling endorsement from him of Santorum’s electoral capability. Another campaign veteran who had only recently managed a US Senate bid described Santorum as “on his short list” of Presidential aspirants. Here in this house, crammed as it was like a Republican sardine can, was assembled the grand collection of the best conservative political architects in the state, presented with Presidential Job Applicant “Santorum” – and they were interested.
Should they be? Frankly,…
…yes. The 52-year-old Santorum started life as the son of Italian immigrants who came to dig in the West Virginia coal mines. In a testament to American opportunity, his father would eventually earn a license in Psychology and work for the VA. Santorum’s academic background includes a Bachelor’s from Penn State, an MBA from Pitt and a law degree from Dickinson. In 1990, Santorum stunned the Pennsylvania political world by defeating a seven-term Democrat to Join the US House. Within a year, Santorum – along with current House Speaker John Boehner and the “Gang of Seven” – lifted the lid on the House banking scandal, implicating twenty-two other Reps including two of his own Pennsylvania delegation – one of them a fellow Republican. The exposure of the scandal would eventually lead to the Republican takeover of congress in 1994.
It was Santorum who – with current Ohio governor John Kasich – created the legislation introducing Medical Savings Accounts, perhaps the best and most-underutilized free-market response to rising health care costs in the country. Santorum was responsible for the heavy legislative lifting that eventually resulted in the ban on partial-birth abortions, and was also singularly active in gaining passage of the bill transferring review of the Terry Schiavo case to federal authority. Throughout his career, Santorum has been stalwart in identifying the inherent nature of the War on Terrorism and is credited with creating the term “Islamic Fascism.” Santorum was among the first to recognize the sick nuclear ambitions of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and was one of only two US Senators to oppose the nomination of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense – which in light of Gates’ subsequent service to the Obama administration is, at least, arguably prescient.
At tonight’s appearance, all these points and more were variously mentioned in Santorum’s speech but attendees were naturally interested in him addressing their specific questions – and those with Tea Party fervor still warm in their blood wanted to see if a pugilist lived under the politician’s cloak. Simply put, is Santorum a warrior, prepared to prosecute further the energetic resistance to Obama-ism displayed by the American people only two brief months earlier? Time constraints allowed him to take only a few questions. At one point, Santorum was asked to describe his greatest successes and greatest failures. He easily identified his wife and seven children as his successes, which led to an extended description of the events surrounding his son, Gabriel.
In 1996, while pregnant, Santorum’s wife, Karen received the devastating word that the baby was critically ill within her womb, and unless drastic steps were taken, it would die. Termination was an option – however, the Santorums, who are traditional Catholics and attend a Latin Mass on Sundays, would not agree.
Doctors attempted intra-uterine surgery but the baby had to be born prematurely. Within two hours after its birth, it died. The shattered parents gave him the name Gabriel. Karen found her solace by writing in a daily journal which would eventually be formed into a book, Letters to Gabriel. To this day, Senator Santorum meets people who have read it and testify to him how the story gave them comfort in addressing their own loss.
As Santorum relates this story, there is palpable emotion in his voice and among the listeners. They have connected heart-to-heart over terms that ascend the baser forms of politics. In another question, Santorum was asked if he would favor the ratification of the new START treaty (he would not). Here, too, this led to another description of how the mainstream media refused to acknowledge the perilous and evil nature of the terrorist threat facing the United States. Santorum stated he would not be so cowardly as to censor the truth for the public’s fragile sensibilities. “I’m going to offend people,” he said, and received significant applause.
Santorum therefore demonstrated his possession of both a politician’s brain and a human being’s soul – an impressive mix for anyone in this line of work. Legislators must train in the stealthy arts of personal strategizing if they are to have any success, and only the cleverest rise as high as US Senate – or can survive more than a decade there. Yet, Santorum tonight needed to use the additional colors on his palette for maximum effect – to show that he is more than a traveling Congressional Record, but a man of principles and sincerity. By my standards, he accomplished this. How that will translate to future support were he to run for the Presidency, we will all discover in time. Until then, the good Senator has much more offending to do.
The ‘Grok thanks Robert for providing us with this article!
