a pennsylvanian's guide to the santorum you don't know - bunch

8/3/2019 A Pennsylvanian's Guide to the Santorum You Don't Know - Bunch

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A Pennsylvanian's Guide to the

Rick Santorum You Don't Know

Will Bunch Author, 'The Backlash' Posted: 1/5/12

Source: Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/rick-santorum-surge_b_1185833.html

You've probably heard all the good ones about GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorumby 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 Santorumthat 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 soon 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 andoften a laughing stock to most everyone else. Santorum's rise in the 2012 presidentialrace 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 tooextreme 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 politicalreporter, I arrived in town just seven months after Santorum became my state's juniorsenator. I followed his 12 years on the Washington political stage closely, and I thinkpeople obsessing on the "man-on-dog" stuff are missing the bigger picture. For onething, the self-styled "family values" expert has a surprisingly ambiguous record with hisown personal ethics. Also, Santorum's legislative record shows that his real workadayagenda was not so much waging culture wars as protecting the interests of the 1percent, the millionaires and billionaires who funded the modern Republican Party. Youcould say that Rick Santorum is just another politician. But that would be giving him toomuch 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 wasactually a bit of a scam. In 2001, following up on a faith-based urban charityinitiative around the 2000 GOP convention in Philadelphia, Santorum launched acharitable foundation called the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. While in its first few years the charity cut checks to community groups for $474,000, Operation GoodNeighbor Foundation had actually raised more than $1 million, from donors whooverlapped 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 connectedlobbyists, aides and fundraisers, including rent and office payments to Santorum'sfinance 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 toldme a responsible charity doles out at least 75 percent of its income in grants, and theywere shocked to learn the figure for Operation Good Neighbor Fund was less than 36percent. The charity -- which didn't register with the state of Pennsylvania as requiredunder the law --- was finally disbanded in 2007.

2. Likewise, a so-called "leadership PAC" created by Santorum that wassupposed to fund other Republicans instead seemed to mostly pay for the

lifestyle of Santorum and those around him. My investigation of the America'sFoundation PAC showed that only 18 percent of its money went to fund politicalcandidates, 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 Walmart, Target and Giant supermarkets. Campaign finance experts said the PAC's expenses -- paid for bydonations 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, whichSantorum was not, and closed to the general public.

3. Santorum was never above mingling his cultural crusades with theeveryday 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 anational right-to-die controversy. What my Philadelphia Daily News colleague John Baerlater 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, acompany that shared Santorum's passion for a low minimum wage for waitresses andother 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 Securityreform "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 hisfamily. During his years in the Senate, Santorum raised his family in northern Virginiaand 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 wereshocked when they found out the Penn Hills School District had paid out $72,000 forthe 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 downplayand defend his involvement in the so-called "K Street Project ," an effort created by GOPuber-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" onthe K Street Project and he met with Norquist -- at least occasionally and perhapsfrequently -- to discuss the effort to sure that Republicans were landing well-paying

jobs in lobbying firms that were seeking to then access and influence otherRepublicans.

6. Santorum had no problem with big government if it was supporting his

campaign contributors in Big Pharma. It's little wonder that Santorum ultimatelysupported Medicare Part D, a prescription drug plan for the elderly that has addedhundreds of billions of dollars to the federal deficit and was drafted in such a way tobest 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 druggiant GlaxoSmithKline said his departure from Washington "creates a big hole that weneed 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, includingbattling to limit any increases in the minimum wage and seeking to make changes inovertime rules that would 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, andchanges in charitable giving laws and of course eliminating the estate tax that wouldbenefit the billionaire heirs of Sam Walton.

8. Santorum has frequently insisted that his political values are guided by hisreligious values, and that John F. Kennedy's famous 1960 speech describing aseparation between the two had done "much harm" in America. But despite invitingsuch scrutiny, there's been little discussion of Santorum's ties to ultra-conservativemovements within the Roman Catholic Church. Santorum's comments about JFK weremade in Rome in 2002 when he spoke at a 100th birthday event for Jose MariaEscrivade 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 beencriticized by some for alleged cult-like qualities and ties to ultra-conservative regimesaround the world -- he did receive written permission to attend the ultra-conservativeSt. Catherine of Siena Church in Great Falls, Va., where Mass is still conducted in Latinand a long-time priest and many parishioners are members of Opus Dei, mingling withpolitical conservatives like Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and former FBIdirector Louis Freeh.



9. Santorum isn't above big government-funded boondoggles -- when they'relinked 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 hisrule in securing an $100 million federal loan for the project -- which had hiredPennsylvania's top Republican Party power broker of the 2000s, Bob Asher, as alobbyist 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 comesfor former politicians. After Tuesday night's virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, thePennsylvanian spoke eloquently about his immigrant grandfather working for decades inthe Pennsylvania coal fields and his massive hands; the grandson probably won't havethat problem. Losing an election in 2006 allowed Santorum to become a poster child forhow 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 theFox News Channel and as a board member for Universal Health Services, an ethicallychallenged company where executives had supported his Senate campaigns. The New

York Times' Gail Collins noted that Santorum had earned $970,000 in 2010 despiteseeming sort of unemployed.

The real Rick Santorum is indeed a frothy mixture -- of self-interest, loose ethicalstandards, and careerism in a career that's been largely devoted not so much to thesocial causes about which he makes headlines as looking out for the interests of bigcorporations and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. It's a shame that more votersdon't know that yet. That is the "Google problem" that Santorum actually deserves.

a pennsylvanian's guide to the santorum you don't know - bunch

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