Former Sen. Rick Santorum, a potential 2012 presidential
candidate, told me that he would have fought the Medicare
prescription drug plan and other spending during the Bush
administration if a Tea Party had existed to back him up.
By now, it’s become conventional wisdom that Bush era
Republicans lost sight of their small government principles when
they had unified control of power in the early part of the last
decade.
Santorum was a leading Republican in this period, and during
that time voted for the Medicare prescription drug plan and
supported subsidies for dairy farmers. I asked him to respond to
the criticism that he was part of the problem.
“I said this to a Tea Party group the other day,” he recounted
in an interview at CPAC. “I was a conservative in Congress pushing
for us paying for the prescription drug plan and cutting subsidies
and doing everything that every person in the Tea Party I think
would love to see done. Some guy asked me, ‘Why didn’t you do it?’
I said, ‘Because you weren’t out there helping me.’ It’s very easy
for folks to say, ‘Well, 10 years ago, you should have done this.’
Where were the people at the rallies saying that we were spending
too much? Where were the voters to come out and say, ‘We need you
to do more of this?’ It didn’t exist. Look, Congress follows, it
doesn’t lead. I saw that. I was out there trying to lead and
getting as much as we could do done. But I could only go so far
because owe didn’t have a Tea Party movement that was moving the
country in that direction. “
He continued, “I look at my record and I’m very proud of what we
were able to accomplish in the context of a country that was not
out there clamoring for Social Security reform. You know, in 2005
when President Bush said ‘let’s do Social Security reform’ I jumped
and tried to do it. And I got my butt kicked for doing it. And I
did the same thing on Medicare. I did the same thing on Medicaid. I
did the same thing on welfare. Is there was anyone who was out
there trying to reform the real problems in Washington, the
entitlements, it was me. But they weren’t exactly piling out in the
streets saying, ‘Yay, Rick.’ In the end, I lost my election.”
I followed up by asking him about his support for dairy
subsidies in the form of the Milk Income Loss Contract program.
“It was a different time, number one,” Santorum said. “Number
two, the milk program, compared to Social Security and all the
entitlement programs was a small program about an industry that was
struggling in America — the small farmer in that part of the
country. My feeling is, sure, we can have a milk program that has a
concentration of milk into big super duper farms in the South and
in the West, and we will continue to see the deterioration of rural
Pennsylvania, rural New York, and other rural areas. And if people
are fine with that, that’s fine. I think there’s something to be
said for having viable businesses in that part of the country to
compete.
