Rick Santorum is a former senator, presidential candidate and apparently the latest Republican flavor of the week. With his late surge in the Iowa caucus polls, Santorum is receiving more attention than ever. And with that attention comes increased scrutiny regarding his past statements — some of which are inexplicable and simply bizarre.
And while political prognosticators are calling him a wildcard in the GOP primary contests, his remarks on the issues — particularly race — are just wild.
On Meet the Press yesterday, Santorum — who didn’t have an easy time of it with David Gregory — asserted that Obama is the most divisive president ever.
WATCH SANTORUM’S APPEARANCE ON ‘MEET THE PRESS’ HERE:
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When Gregory asked Santorum if he faulted Republicans in Congress for not compromising with the president to make government work better, Santorum said the following: “Well, you, you have to have someone you can work with, and this president has done more to divide than any other president that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. This president goes out and gives speech after speech after speech trying to divide America between class, between income group, between racial and ethnic groups.”
Santorum added, “This is, this is the great divider in chief. And it’s very difficult when you’re being lampooned by the president on a regular basis, not just as a party but individually, to then — and the president, who I don’t believe has met with Boehner or any of the Republican leadership in now six months, hard to compromise and work with someone who won’t meet with you, who won’t sit down and try to, try to negotiate things and try to talk. And so I’m not, I’m not surprised at all the Republicans are having a difficult time with someone who has no interest.”
The candidate gave no specific examples to support his claims that the president is divisive, while ignoring the countless examples of White House outreach to Republicans in Congress over the past few three years. These efforts on the part of the White House often proved futile, as GOP lawmakers were focused on the single goal of dividing the country to win the election. “Rich versus poor,” he said. “It is classic class warfare. It’s dividing. It’s a very divisive message.”
And in an interview with CNS in January 2011, Santorum suggested that President Obama should be anti-abortion because he’s black.
“The question is…is that human life a person under the constitution? And Barack Obama says no,” Santorum said. “Well if that human life is not a person then…I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say ‘now we are going to decide who are people and who are not people,’” he added.What Santorum implies, as have anti-abortion billboards posted in inner cities, is that African-Americans such as Obama should oppose abortion because they were once considered three-fifths of a person by law and not completely human. And in saying this, Santorum succeeds in belittling women’s reproductive rights and the civil rights movement.
For the former Senator, disrespecting the civil rights movement is nothing new.
Last year, at the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, DC, Santorum proclaimed that “America was a great country before 1965” — before the creation of the welfare state, and the time in which President Johnson signed historic civil rights legislation. Further, he accused Obama of not believing in American exceptionalism.
“Social conservatives understand that America was a great country because it was founded great,” Santorum told the audience. “Our founders, calling upon in the Declaration of Independence, the supreme judge, calling upon divine providence, said what was at the heart of American exceptionalism…’We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.’”
“He was talking about Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance, and it was in response to the Ryan budget,” Santorum said, referring to Obama. “And he said this, talking about these three programs: He said ‘America is a better country because of these programs. I will go a one step further: America is a great country because of these programs.”
On the issue of Iran, Santorum’s solution is to bomb the nation’s nuclear facilities, an action which would seem perilous at the least. “This president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement. We saw that during the lead-up to World War II, appeasement,” he said recently of Obama’s Mideast policy.
Rick Santorum has a problem with Islam and Muslims. He claims America is at war with Islamic fascism, and once referred to the “fight against Islamic fascism” as “the great test of our generation” in a 2006 op-ed.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2011, Santorum argued, ”[Obama] doesn’t say that Jihadism is evil. He doesn’t say that sharia law is incompatible with western civilization and the United States, which they are.” And he claimed that Christianity has not shown any aggression towards the Muslim world, blaming the “leftists” for corrupting the historical understanding of the Crusades: “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom,” he said a few months later in South Carolina.
Senator Santorum chose to employ an anti-Islam strategy in his 2006 reelection bid, and it failed miserably. Pennsylvania voters sent him packing. He lost to his challenger Democrat Bob Casey by 18 points, the largest margin of defeat for an incumbent senator since 1980. 2006 was a bad year for many Republicans, but it was an exceptionally bad year for Rick Santorum.
A diehard values conservative, Santorum has taken a number of stands to place himself in the middle of the radical rightward fringe. He is a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, comparing homosexuality to polygamy, sodomy and adultery, and concluding that equal rights for gays and lesbians “destabilize the family.”
Santorum blamed the Catholic Church child sex abuse scandal on liberalism, and characterized the abuse of children by priests as “a basic homosexual relationship.” And he wants to ban abortion through a constitutional amendment, and would mandate the teaching of intelligent design in the public schools.
So, is Rick Santorum a winner? We’ll see, but he might also be a used car salesman and no one is buying his clunker of a product. Remember that the political graveyard of this season’s GOP primaries is already strewn with the careers of such would-be superstars as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry. Santorum just might be another mediocre GOP candidate with a questionable history, crazy ideas, and little to no chance against Obama.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter at @davidalove
