Rick Santorum Campaigning Against the Modern World - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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As a journalist who covered Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania for years, I can understand the Tea Party’s infatuation with him. It’s his anger. It is in perfect synch with the constituency he is wooing.
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Even at the height of his political success, when he had a lot to be happy about, Santorum was an angry man. I found it odd. I was used to covering politicians who had good dispositions — or were good at pretending they had good dispositions.
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You could easily get him revved by bringing up the wrong topic or taking an opposing point of view. His nostrils would flare, his eyes would glare and he would launch into a disquisition on how, deep down, you were a shallow guy who could not grasp the truth and rightness of his positions.
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“It’s just a curious bias of the media around here. It’s wonderful. One person says something negative and the media rushes and covers that. The wonderful balanced media that I love in this community.”
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Santorum had reason to be peeved. He was running against the Democrat Bob Casey. He was trailing by double digits and knew he was going to lose. He was not a happy camper, but then he rarely is.
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As he has shown in the Republican debates, Santorum can be equable. The anger usually flares on matters closest to his heart: faith, family and morals. And if, by chance, you get him started on the role of religion in American life, get ready for a Vesuvius moment.
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Outside of these areas, he was more pragmatic. Then and now, Santorum held predictably conservative views, but he was astute enough to bend on some issues and be — as he put it in the Arizona debate — “a team player.”
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In the Senate, he represented a state with a relentlessly moderate-to-centrist electorate so when campaigning he emphasized the good deeds he did in Washington. Editorial board meetings with Santorum usually began with him listing federal money he had brought in for local projects.People who don’t know him — and just see the angry Rick — don’t realize what a clever politician Santorum is. He didn’t rise to become a Washington insider through the power of prayer. He may say the Rosary, but he knows his Machiavelli.
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That said, Santorum’s anger is not an act. It is genuine. It has its roots in the fact that he had the misfortune to be born in the second half of the 20th century. In his view, it was an era when moral relativism and anti-religious feeling held sway, where traditional values were ignored or mocked, where heretics ruled civic and political life. If anything, it’s gotten worse in the 21st, with the election of Barack Obama.Leave it to Santorum to attack Obama on his theology, of all things. He sees the president as an exemplar of mushy, feel-good Christianity that emphasizes tolerance over rectitude, and the love of Jesus over the wrath of God.
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Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.
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I once wrote that Santorum has one of the finest minds of the 13th century. It was meant to elicit a laugh, but there’s truth behind the remark. No Vatican II for Santorum. His belief system is the fixed and firm Catholicism of the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. And Santorum is a warrior for those beliefs.
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During the campaign, he has regularly criticized the media for harping on his public statements on homosexuality, contraception, abortion, the decline in American morals. Still, he can’t resist talking about them. These are the issues that get his juices flowing, not the deficit or federal energy policy.
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Santorum went to Houston not to praise Kennedy but to bash him. To Santorum, the Kennedy speech did permanent damage because it led to secularization of American politics. He said it laid the foundation for attacks on religion by the secular left that has led to denial of free speech rights to religious people. “John F. Kennedy chose not to just dispel fear,” Santorum said, “he chose to expel faith.”
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Ultimately Kennedy’s attempt to reassure Protestants that the Catholic Church would not control the government and suborn its independence advanced a philosophy of strict separation that would create a purely secular public square cleansed of all religious wisdom and the voice of religious people of all faiths. He laid the foundation for attacks on religious freedom and freedom of speech by the secular left and its political arms like the A.C.L.U and the People for the American Way. This has and will continue to create dissension and division in this country as people of faith increasingly feel like second-class citizens.One consequence of Kennedy’s speech, Santorum said,is the debasement of our First Amendment right of religious freedom. Of all the great and necessary freedoms listed in the First Amendment, freedom to exercise religion (not just to believe, but to live out that belief) is the most important; before freedom of speech, before freedom of the press, before freedom of assembly, before freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, before all others. This freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, is the trunk from which all other branches of freedom on our great tree of liberty get their life.As so it went for 5,000 words. It is a revelatory critique of the modern world and Santorum quoted G.K. Chesterton, Edmund Burke, St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther King to give heft to his assertions.That said, it was an angry speech, conjuring up images of people of faith cowering before leftist thought police. Who could rescue us from this predicament? Who could banish the secularists and restore religious morality to its throne?