Posted on 04/05/2012 8:17:49 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I’ve known Rick Santorum for 22 years, having first met him in 1990 before he’d won his first campaign for Congress. I interviewed him on WORD-FM, an evangelical Christian radio station where I was a frequent guest host (and eventually a full-time host) early in his campaign.
If I was not the first media personality to interview Rick, I was one of the first. I had Rick as a guest at the request of my friend, Mark Rogers, who was running Rick’s campaign. Over the years I interviewed Rick at least a dozen times and debated him several times as well. I personally knew most of his staff, almost hired one member of his staff as the research director of a think tank I ran, and eventually did hire another of his staff members as my administrative assistant.
As I mentioned before, I was friends with the man who ran his first campaign and who ended up being Rick’s chief of staff when Rick was in Congress. I was best man at the marriage of a Santorum staff member and one of my closest friends. This couple may well be my wife’s and my closest friends. I’ve had dealings on more than one occasion with a media/public relations firm run by John Brabender, who has done most of Rick’s media campaign work.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
That's not a reason to ignore the allegations though, is it? The author writes about lies Rick Santorum told when he was a Congressman and Senator for Pennsylvania. Since PA was Santorum's home state for most of his political career and the PA primary is April 24th, Santorum's record and statements as a representative of PA are relevant.
I suspect that had Rick Perry been the chosen candidate of the Christian Right, his record and statements would have been scrutinized just prior to the Texas primary in May. And that would be relevant also, IMHO.
The piece is full of things like this: "Not long after that I was summoned to Rick’s office for an alleged reconciliation meeting, where I was lectured about how he really was a true conservative and that people like me should not be ‘sore winners’ and should line up in support of him again.
"Summoned" by who? "Lectured" by who? When did this happen? Around 1997 it seems?
There are a lot of words in this thing that was written but not much to chew on. Not a great deal of supporting facts that I see. Not that I care. As I already said, I do not support Santorum.
I've been following all this left-wing attacks on Santorum, and that is virtually the only one where he actually said what they say he said. He screwed up big time on that one. But it's an exception. All the other attacks, on examination, took his words out of context and lied about what he actually said.
Typical is the headline currently on Drudge, one of the giants of the Romney Lie. Rick is taking a four-day weekend from the campaign trail, and with it is a picture of some kind of comic puppet.
Well, those four days happen to be Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. A lot of us will be taking the time to observe Holy Week, I would imagine. Even the banks and the markets are taking an extra day off. But Drudge makes it seem as if it's Rick's comical cave=in to Drudge's gay god, Mitt Romney.
So, you’ve decided to skip the “lies,” and focus on minor details. Not convincing.
You would have to really wonder about anyone who would willingly form an alliance with former Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy.
Murphy is a singularly dishonest and unlikeable character.
In case you didn't notice, that was almost entirely the fault of Bush and Rove. The Democrats swept the country in 2006, and built their congressional majority that year. Pennsylvania is a swing state, and not an easy victory for a conservative Senator, especially with a strong opponent who was a very good liar and also had the sympathy vote. Bush won big in 2004, but over the next two years he disappointed his base and threw it all away. 2006 was a disaster over most of the country.
Rick did endorse Specter, for several reasons: Because Bush and Rove, not yet discredited, said they needed him to put through more pro-life SCOTUS nominees like Clarence Thomas, who never would have made it without Specter's powerful support. And indeed Specter did push Roberts and Alito through, before he went south again. Also, because Specter had endorsed Santorum earlier, so he owed him. Although Specter then betrayed Rick and turned his back on him.
Pennsylvania happens to be a swing state, and without Specter's support, plus the base voters who were foolishly angry about the Specter endorsement earlier, plus Bush's growing unpopularity, Rick was bound to lose.
It’s Bush’s fault!
If you say so.
Oh absolutely! And it's very disheartening they've learned nothing of how the game is played and only see who they might "like"....They should have seen the media 'play' in New England when they lifted Santorum to the front.....he sure didn't get it by his popularity.
They gave him the stage thereafter....and with Romney's ads in Florida we watched as they continued to push Newt off the stage.
Makes my blood boil that the best man for the job,, Newt, could not be seen thru the media blackout and the sudden appearance of Santorum....simply was a matter of the Pied Piper doing it's work and the Republicans following.....same o' same.
An interesting and telling article, but much was already known and it will not make a difference with those that support Saintorum.
-His supporters will either ignore it, attack it or make excuses for Rick... just as they have done all along.
-Any article bringing attention to his deficits are too late to stop him, and if discredited.... too late to help him.
Unless this entire mess goes to a contested convention, where a rabbit is pulled out of a hat, this game is over......meaning that Romney will get the nomination and go on to lose against Obama.
PREPARE for 4 more years of pain and suffering, because that is most likely what we are going to experience.
Well, it is a fact that the 2006 election was a disaster for the Republicans.
The 2002 midterm election went surprisingly well for the Republicans, since midterms tend to be difficult, historically, for the incumbents. And Bush did very well in 2004, with a huge turnout of Evangelicals.
By 2006, that enthusiasm was gone, and millions of Christian conservatives who turned out for Bush in 2004 stayed home.
It is certainly a fact that Santorum was not the only incumbent who was thrown out in 2006. It was a disaster over most of the country.
I'm not here trying to "convince" you. I don't care what you think about this "thing" that was written as if it is some kind of thunderclap. It has the word "confession" in the title but the guy is not someone that is on the inside of anything that I can see. His views are external to his subject. He does not "confess" anything other than what one might read in some response to a google inquiry. Even he says he is an "observer". Well, I have observed the Pope but I can't "confess" a darn thing to you about him. My point is that this is a lighweight piece with not much to get excited about. Just some stuff stitched together then he speaks in a very serious manner. LOL!
Again, I don't care about Santorum. Frankly, I find him kind of creepy. So that is my "confession". I declare Santorum creepy after observing him. Maybe I should write a piece about that and send it to Forbes because it seems they need any kind of content filler they can get...
“Now some of you can see.....”
Deer see the headlights of a car coming at it at 70mph.... they either freeze and do nothing, run off into the woods and hide or jump in front of the car.
If this one video didn’t make folks realize that Saintorum was unfit for the job, nothing else will. After all, he was once an alter boy.
Here is the only real conservative in that has been in the race... and he loves the constitution:
http://dailycaller.com/2012/03/25/santorum-zimmerman-has-a-very-sick-mind-motive-a-malicious-one/
Well, I guess what I’m doing is begging someone to prove to me that there is a candidate for me to vote for— to prove to me that one or the other should be Obama’s opponent.
I’ll hold my nose and vote for the Obama’s opposition, and I don’t think that will be Santorum. But, if it is, I’ll vote for him.
I then added some very inappropriate comments about the OP’s motives for which I have apologized. CAWW has since made clear that he agrees Romney needs to be stopped; beyond that, I don't want to speak for him and run the risk of saying things he would not say.
Bottom line — the Santorum campaign **MUST** respond to this. The article is damaging. I believe it can be responded to, but I'm the wrong person because I don't know Pennsylvania politics, and in any event, I'm not in any way formally connected with the Santorum campaign and Santorum’s people, not just his supporters, need to respond to an article capable of causing this magnitude of damage.
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59 posted on Wed Apr 04 2012 13:06:55 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) by caww: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/04/04/problems-with-the-truth-confessions-of-a-22-year-rick-santorum-observer/
I've been around politics long enough to know that something like the article caww cited didn't come out of nowhere. It's virtually tailor-made to damage Rick Santorum in his home state with his core constituency of conservative Christians. While I am not going to criticize the motives of the author and am inclined to take him at his word about his reasons for writing and maybe even his own timing, the timing of the article's prominent appearance in a major conservative magazine like Forbes is pretty likely intended by the Romney campaign to attack Santorum and is likely part of an effort to knock Santorum out of the race by wrecking his polling numbers in Pennsylvania.
I know nothing about the author or his background as an Christian broadcaster or his credibility in Pennsylvania. I also don't know local issues. What I do know is this article has to be rebutted by the Santorum campaign, and rebutted quickly.
I see at least two potential problems with the article. There may well be others which I have not noticed because I don't know Pennsylvania politics, and what I write here is tentative. Somebody from the Santorum campaign needs to write a much better response.
First, the article uses the “lie” word in ways which are questionable at best. That is a very, very serious charge. That word needs to be used very rarely and only when it can be proved that someone has deliberately stated things he knew to be false with an intent to deceive. Most statements by political figures are made carefully enough that they can't be caught in a deliberate lie, so even if I think an elected official lied, I usually can't prove it, and if I can't prove it I'm not going to make the accusation.
In this specific article, while I think some of the accusations (i.e., the charitable giving) are potentially capable of being proved to be deliberate lies, I'm not at all convinced the article has proved that Santorum lied even about that, and much less so the other accusations. I don't recall any case where I have accused Gingrich or even Romney of lying, and the evidence the author cites is weak in at least some of the situations he cites. I'm not saying it's wrong, only that the evidence isn't there.
Second, I am not at all convinced that Santorum backing a proposal to use government funding to keep professional sports teams is a good example of his supposed “big government” views. Do I like such things? No, but the reality is that I live in an area where the entire future of our community depends on Department of Defense spending, and where things like TIFs and CIDs and NIDs and other things of that type are standard engines of economic growth which the broadcaster dismisses as Keynesian economics.
I think it's clear that Pennsylvania is far from the only area where governments have spent tens of millions of dollars to keep a professional sports team in town, or to provide some other incentive to a private business to keep its owners in town or convince its owners to move to town or expand an existing operation. We can say Santorum was wrong to do that, and that's fine, but blaming Santorum for doing what his constituents wanted, especially when what they wanted has become standard practice in economic development, is asking Santorum to be the sort of elected official who probably can't get re-elected in a moderate-to-liberal state.
If that's the worst example the author can come up with of Santorum’s supposed “big government” views, I think the author is proving only that Santorum is from a northern “rustbelt” state where the government has been involved in providing incentives to business for at least a century. I also think it wouldn't be too hard to find lots of conservative Southerners who support the same or similar incentives to business. Feel free to disagree — that's a fair question — but those who disagree would have been in a very small minority of people in government until the current economic crisis in which lots of people agree staving off bankruptcy needs to be the key priority.
I'm 100% with you on that!
PING for later.
Except who did he actually siphon votes from?
Back in Iowa, he ended up winning, and for all we know if he hadn’t, RIck Perry might have been that dark horse rising from Iowa. That would have changed things greatly.
He certainly didn’t siphon votes from Gingrich.
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