Of all the amazing statements Rick Santorum made during this year’s presidential race, the one that astonished me the most was one that seemed innocuous.
In a speech in late March before Republicans in suburban Harrisburg, Santorum said that losing his Senate seat in 2006 was a “tremendous gift,” a lesson in humility that he had taken to heart.
“The people of Pennsylvania didn’t always give me what I wanted but they always gave me what I needed,” he said. “And it was a great, in many respects for me, a great gift to get away, to separate out, to get back and involved in the private sector. I had a little distance from Washington to see what was going on.”
Santorum should have felt humbled. He was a two-term incumbent who spent $20 million on his re-election campaign and still lost by nearly 18 points.
To me, one measure of electability is a candidate’s reach outside his party base. The Rick Santorum of 2006 had no reach. He ended up with 41.3 percent of the popular vote, while Republicans in Pennsylvania constituted 40.3 percent of the electorate.
CNN exit polls confirmed the shellacking Santorum took from his Democratic opponent Bob Casey Jr., losing virtually every voter group by wide margins: Democrats, of course, (Casey won 93 percent of the Democratic vote); independents (Casey 73 percent); moderates (65 percent); women (61 percent) and so on and so forth.
Santorum wasn’t defeated by the voters in 2006; he was repudiated. They did not like his politics. They did not like his personality. To put it in terms he might use, they cast him out of the Senate and into the darkness.
If that had happened to me, it would have been a cause of great pain and some soul searching.
An analogous situation is how the United States military reacted after Vietnam. It engaged in a long self-analysis that resulted in transformative changes in strategy, tactics and leadership with the goal of never, ever repeating the mistakes made in that war.
Santorum’s statement implies that in 2006 voters gave him the opportunity to engage in a similar self-analysis: What did he do that he should never repeat? What aspects of his personality could he alter to positive effect? How should his strategy and tactics be changed to improve the outcome?
Handed this “tremendous gift” from the voters, Santorum emerged from the crucible of his 2006 defeat unchanged. He was older, a little thicker around the middle, but in every other aspect he was the same Rick as in 2006. Only instead of playing on the smaller field of Pennsylvania, he decided to go nationwide and run for president.
It was as if the generals in the Pentagon, after reviewing their loss in Vietnam, decided that the best corrective action would be to attack China. That the mistake they made — waging a land war in a small country — could be rectified by waging a land war in a huge country.
Analogies can only take you so far. For Santorum, what made 2012 different was that while he did not change, his audience did. In Pennsylvania, he always appealed to the most conservative of the conservatives, and he did the same in the Republican primaries.
Where we Pennsylvanians saw arrogance, conservative and Tea Party Republicans saw passion. Where we saw rigidity on moral and social issues, they saw rectitude. Where we saw a hard-right politician, they saw a righteous warrior for their cause.
The very attributes and positions that made Santorum anathema to so many Pennsylvania voters in 2006 lifted him into contention in 2012 among a core of activist, angry Republicans.
Among the general electorate, one’s ability to like Santorum tends to be in inverse ratio to one’s exposure to him. The more regular voters saw him, the less they liked him.
When Santorum first announced for president, I thought he would be underestimated as a candidate (which he was) and that he had great potential if he portrayed himself as an economic populist: a man with working-class roots and disdain for the Richie Riches of this world. You know, guys with Harvard M.B.A.’s who worked for private equity investment firms. Not to mention any names.
But that didn’t get his juices flowing. The rights of homosexuals, the morality of abortion and contraception, the evil of Islamofacism, lectures on how moral turpitude had weakened America. Those were the subjects that got Santorum going.
In this way, he fit Winston Churchill’s definition of a fanatic — someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the topic.
When I covered the Senate race in 2006, Santorum’s advisers privately rolled their eyes and clucked over this tendency. In public, they just shrugged and called it “Rick being Rick.” In 2006, though, they tried their best to make Rick a little less Rick.
By the summer of that year, Santorum’s numbers against Casey had not improved. The needle was stuck on a double-digit lead for the Democrat. Something had to be done. So John Brabender, Santorum’s talented political and media guru, went up with a series of television ads designed to soften his candidate’s image, trying to recast Santorum as a nice guy with centrist instincts. I call this the Dusted Indigo Period of Santorum’s political career.
For these ads, Brabender had Santorum shuck his pin-striped blue suit with red power tie. Instead, he appeared on the screen in khaki slacks and buttoned-down cotton shirts — the kind seen in Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean catalogs, offered in a palette of solid colors with names like Merlot, Cabin Red, Juniper and Dusted Indigo.
In one, he appeared in a wrestling ring. As huge guys smashed each other in the background, Santorum declared that he deplored the smash-and-whack politics in Washington and that he had reached across the aisle to work with senators such as Joe Lieberman, Barbara Boxer and even (gasp!) Hillary Clinton.
In another, he appeared on the dance floor of a polka party, surrounded by seniors. He smiled as he recounted all that he had done to make sure their Social Security was protected (not mentioning how he supported President Bush’s plan to privatize parts of it.)
In a third, he sat at a kitchen table, shaking his head over how some in the media called him too conservative, while other called him too liberal. “The right thing to call me,” he said, “is passionate about helping the families of Pennsylvania.”
When I saw that last ad, I picked up the phone and called the Santorum campaign. Who, I asked, has ever called Rick Santorum too liberal?
There was someone. An ultra-conservative columnist for the very conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review had blasted Santorum for supporting an increase in the minimum wage. ”Santorum, ‘too extreme’?,” the columnist Colin McNickle wrote. “Pshaw! Try too liberal, at least on matters economic.”
The Dusted Indigo ads were clever, smartly done and showed Santorum in his best light.
But they also are an object lesson on the limits of hitting the reset button on your image and political identity. To use a current example, it’s not like an Etch A Sketch. The shadows of the real Rick Santorum remained embedded in voter’s minds. The ads did not work. The needle did not budge. In November 2006, he lost to Casey by a margin of 708,000 votes statewide.
There’s something admirable in Santorum’s consistency. He never temporizes. He remains true to his core values. He is a righteous man. He is also poison politically.
What happened to him in Pennsylvania in 2006 would have happened to him nationally in 2012 had he won the Republican nomination.
Santorum got out of the race at the right moment. He won’t have to worry about winning or losing the Pennsylvania primary. He scores points among Republican leaders for not prolonging the race. He is getting mentioned as a possible candidate in 2016.
From the ashes of his 2006 campaign, Santorum has resurrected his political career. This experience of running for president has been a tremendous gift, too. Once again, he will have an opportunity to learn from his mistakes. Once again, he will not.
When he re-emerges on the political stage, he will be the same as when he exited it. It will be more of “Rick being Rick.” It’s what he does best.
Tom Ferrick Jr. is senior editor of Metropolis, a Philadelphia news and commentary Web site. He has covered government and politics in Pennsylvania since 1974.
