Just off Highway 17 in the Charleston suburb of Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina, we found the shopping center where the state
campaign headquarters was located. It was Tuesday, Jan. 17, and my
13-year-old son Jefferson was along for the ride on my road trip to
cover the South Carolina primary. The day before in Myrtle Beach,
Jefferson had helped me cover the
press conference where former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman announced
he was ending his presidential bid and endorsing former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Then, that Monday night, we’d
covered the Fox
News debate that was generally acknowledged as a solid win for
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
We hadn’t come to the Palmetto State to cover Gingrich, Romney
or Huntsman, however, and so on that Tuesday afternoon, driving
from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, we pulled off Highway 17 in Mount
Pleasant to visit Rick Santorum’s South Carolina headquarters.
Wheeling into the parking lot, I spotted two familiar-looking young
men walking out of the office, carrying large boxes. Rolling down
my window, I asked, “Where y’all heading?”
“Mail drop,” said John Santorum, eldest son of the candidate, as
he and his younger brother Daniel loaded the boxes into an SUV and
drove off to the local post office.
Lots of Republicans talk about “family values,” but the Santorum
campaign could never have made it as far as it did without the
valuable work done by the candidate’s wife, Karen, and their
children. During the long months when the former Pennsylvania
senator struggled to raise money and media attention, Santorum’s
wife and kids were among the campaign’s hardest-working volunteers.
They made phone calls and stuffed envelopes and did the work that
other campaigns paid staffers to do. The first time I covered
Santorum’s campaign — at a
barn party in Roland, Iowa, a week before the Ames Straw Poll
— his daughters were serving ice cream to the few dozen supporters
in attendance. On that first Saturday in August, Santorum was below
4 percent in the
Real Clear Politics average of Iowa polls, and his national
poll numbers were so low, he barely qualified to participate in the
early debates.
Among the candidates leading Santorum in the polls at the time,
former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was destined to quit eight days
later, after a disappointing third-place finish at Ames. The winner
of the Aug. 13 straw poll, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann, ended
her campaign on Jan. 4, the day after she placed sixth in the Iowa
caucuses. Atlanta businessman Herman Cain, who placed fifth in the
Ames Straw Poll, eventually called it quits in early December, and
Texas Gov. Rick Perry — whose official entry into the 2012
Republican field on Aug. 13 made him a front-runner overnight —
raised and spent more than $19 million in a campaign that earned
him fifth place in the Iowa caucuses and sixth in the Jan. 10 New
Hampshire primary before calling it quits two days before the Jan.
21 primary in South Carolina. Santorum’s campaign raised just $2.2
million in all of 2011; by the time he emerged as one of the final
four candidates for the GOP nomination, he had outlasted five
candidates — Pawlenty, Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman, and Perry — all
of whom once led him in the polls, and whose campaigns spent a
combined total of more than $55 million.
Santorum’s low-budget campaign accomplished miracles, beating
Romney in 11 states, and topping Gingrich in all but two states,
South Carolina and Georgia. Yet by the time the campaign trail
brought Santorum home to Pennsylvania, Romney’s overwhelming
delegate advantage left Santorum little hope that he could win the
nomination. The Romney operation had already launched another one
of its multimillion-dollar attack-ad blitzes in Pennsylvania and
the experts — who had never expected Santorum to make it this far
— were finally right in predicting that he could go no further.
Faced with the prospect of almost certain defeat in his home-state
primary on April 24, Santorum went to Gettysburg and gave one of
the best speeches of his entire campaign, praising the youngest
member of his family, 3-year-old daughter Bella.
“She is a fighter,” Santorum said of the little girl, born with
a rare and usually fatal genetic disorder, who had just been
released from the hospital for the second time this year. As his
wife stood behind him, struggling to hold back tears, Santorum
continued: “This was a time for prayer and thought for us over this
past weekend and just like it was, frankly, when we decided to get
into this race. Karen and I and the kids sat at the kitchen table
and talked about our hopes and fears and our concerns. We were very
concerned about being the best parents we could possibly be to our
children, and making sure they had a country where the American
dream was still possible.… We started out, almost a year ago now,
in Somerset, in Pennsylvania, and I told my story, our story, of
our family — my grandfather who came to this country and worked in
the coal mines, my father who served our country in World War
II.”
Santorum continued, telling the story of the “Chuck Truck” — a
Dodge pickup driven by Chuck Laudner, an Iowa Republican who
crisscrossed the Hawkeye State with a candidate none of the experts
gave a chance. “Over and over again, we were told, ‘Forget it, you
can’t win,’” Santorum recalled in his final campaign speech. “We
were winning. We were winning in a very different way. We were
touching hearts. We were raising issues that, well, frankly, a lot
of people didn’t want to have raised.”
Ah, yes, the “social issues” — none of the experts wanted to
hear about abortion and marriage and other things that Santorum
talked about. Just eight years ago, when President Bush was
re-elected, the pundits proclaimed that “values voters” had been
the key to Republican success. But 2012, the pundits said, the
Republican campaign would be all about the economy, with as little
attention as possible to the kind of issues that made Santorum such
an unexpectedly successful contender.
His teenage sons were still doing mail-drop duty that January
day my son and I arrived at Santorum’s South Carolina headquarters.
At that point, everyone still believed that Romney had squeaked to
a narrow victory in Iowa. It wasn’t until two days before the South
Carolina primary that a recount showed Santorum had won the Hawkeye
State, but that news made little impact at a time when the campaign
seemed to have become a two-man race between Romney and Gingrich.
Santorum and his family kept fighting. After Newt stumbled in
Florida and Nevada, Santorum scored surprising victories Feb. 7 in
Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri, won Tennessee, Oklahoma, and
North Dakota on March 6, Kansas on March 10, Missouri and Alabama
on March 13, and Louisiana on March 24.
Now, back home in Pennsylvania, his improbable success having
carried him farther than anyone imagined during those months when
he was riding around Iowa in the “Chuck Truck,” Santorum reached
the end of the campaign trail.
“We made a decision over the weekend that… this presidential
race for us is over, for me,” he said Tuesday. With his family
standing behind him, Santorum made a final vow. “We are not done
fighting.”
