June 6: One year to the day after announcing his bid
for the presidency, former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania
was on the phone, explaining the new venture he will announce on
news talk shows this morning — and expressing profound gratitude
for his interactions with the American public during his strong run
for the Republican nomination.
“I want to make sure we can give voice to our supporters,”
Santorum said. “A
big chunk of those were lower and middle income workers who
don’t think anybody is looking out for them. These are folks who
may not have college educations but who work hard, yet they get
left out of the discussion. Nearly 70 percent of Americans don’t
get college degrees, but we have to make sure that we have
educational opportunities for them to succeed in their chosen path.
They can be successful in ways that meet their aspirations for life
rather than meet what the elites expect.”
Toward that end, among others, Santorum today will announce the
launch of a
501(c)(4) organization called “Patriot Voices” — a “a
grassroots and online community… with a goal of 1 million voices
united [to] transform the political landscape of our country.” Its
mission statement includes the following:
OUR CORE FOCUS AREAS: We stand for the defeat of Barack Obama
and those who support his radical agenda. We cannot afford four
more years of his disastrous policies.
We stand for healthy families and a healthy economy. We want to
expand opportunities for all Americans by advocating policies that
encourage traditional marriage, support children and free
enterprise. Healthy families help produce a healthy economy.
We stand for freedom and its defenders. We stand with our
military and veterans. We stand with Israel and against the threats
and values of Radical Islam, and we believe that the Iranian Regime
can never obtain nuclear weapons. We believe in a strong national
defense including a missile defense system, which give us the
ability to defend ourselves and our allies.
We stand for the repeal of ObamaCare and other government
dependency programs that infringe on our freedoms, including
religious freedom. The overreach of government under President
Obama will continue to erode the freedoms that our country was
founded on if not stopped.
We stand for renewing America as an economic power by protecting
our innovative spirit, restarting our manufacturing capabilities
and unleashing America’s domestic energy potential through
pro-growth tax and regulatory reforms that also strengthen working
families, struggling communities, and our national security.
We will always stand up for the most vulnerable among us — the
unborn, the disabled, the elderly and the poor. We believe in the
dignity of each and every human life and we will support policies
that ensure the value of each person.
Santorum said his group would be doing issue-based education and
advocacy, plus some independent expenditures in support of various
candidates for office.
“We will have everything,” he said, “from press people to policy
people to field people who can help work in organized political
efforts.” And: “We’re out there trying to raise a couple of million
dollars to get things kicked off, and beyond that, as far as having
an impact on races, there will be additional money.”
Santorum sees Patriot Voices (patriotvoices.com) as a long-term
organization, not one just focused on this election year. But both
within and aside from Patriot Voices, he said, “My principle
objective is to defeat Obama and to elect conservatives to the
House and Senate.”
Speaking of which, completely apart from his new venture, the
subject was sure to come up: What, really, was discussed
when Santorum met last month with Republican nominee-to-be Mitt
Romney?
“It was an hour and half long,” Santorum said. “It was focused
on looking forward; we didn’t focus at all on looking backward. I
laid out what my thoughts were as to what he needed to do to be
successful on a macro scale and I walked through a couple of issues
I thought should be important to him. On a couple of examples he
has picked up on some of those. For example, when he spoke at
Liberty University, he spoke of the Brookings Institution study I
used to talk about, and the importance of men and women to be
married: important to the kids, important for the family, important
for the economy….
“I also made the point that he is not going to win this race by
moving to the middle. Changing the issue positions to appeal to the
middle is a folly. You have to get people excited about you; you
have to get them emotionally attached to you.”
As for how he sees things going now, he pronounced himself
“optimistic”: “I think that what Governor Romney is doing is
articulating a pretty strong, principled-conservative message, and
I am encouraged that he will continue to do that. I hope he will be
encouraged, from what happened in Wisconsin this week, to be
bold.”
Finally, Santorum spent a little time looking back at the
remarkable past year that began with him utterly discounted by the
purveyors of conventional wisdom, only to see him rise to within a
few thousand Ohio voters of becoming an even-money favorite for the
Republican nomination.
“I am thinking of writing a book,” he said. “It would be a
reflection, a sort of thank-you letter to our friends and
supporters, and a little inspirational. I mean I feel really good
about what happened and where America is and what our potential is.
On the campaign trail, it was almost spiritual; I got a real sense
of God’s providence in this country. It was an amazing journey. The
American people are wonderful. I can’t tell you the number of
people who say the same thing: ‘I don’t agree with you, but I
really appreciate the campaign you ran, I appreciate that you made
me think.’ I heard it over and over; people really care…. This is
the heart and soul of America; this is our watch; this is our job
to maintain it. It was good stuff.”
Santorum didn’t say it, but I will: Mitt Romney still needs to
find a way to connect emotionally with this American heart and
soul. Polling cross-tabs continue to show that while Mitt Romney
enjoys the support of large percentages of Evangelical voters and
of pluralities of manufacturing workers, that support is tepid
rather than enthusiastic. Romney needs them not just to
say they prefer him, but to get out and vote for him and,
more importantly, to volunteer for him, make phone calls for him,
encourage their neighbors to vote for him, and even drive neighbors
to the polls.
Mitt Romney can’t pretend to be Rick Santorum. But he can learn
something from Santorum’s empathy — empathy, not sympathy
— with (not “for” but “with”) the middle-American strivers who
provided millions of votes for Santorum this year.
Meanwhile, if Patriot Voices helps rally those middle Americans
into civic participation this fall, in a conservative direction,
the entire country could look like Wisconsin writ large: active,
enthused, dedicated to our republic. After all, as Santorum said,
“This is our watch; this is our job to maintain it.”
