Sen. Rick Santorum has campaigned on his squeaky clean, goody-two-shoes image long enough.
Santorum can’t be blamed for his persistent strategy — on Jan. 3 his campaign scored a near-victory at the 2012 Iowa caucuses, losing to former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney by just eight votes.
Santorum’s right-wing Catholic, ultra-conservative image has gained favor with the religious right in the comically fragmented contest for the GOP nomination. The clean-cut Santorum, sweater vest and all, has consistently campaigned on his Christian and family values.
In Iowa, Santorum’s political strategy worked in gaining momentum as a viable conservative alternative to Romney. Santorum effectively became Iowa’s GOP man of the moment.
Bob Mann, Manship School professor and director of the Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs, accompanied a group of Manship School students in Iowa to experience the process first-hand. Mann’s interactions with Santorum supporters left an overwhelming impression of loyalty to the so-called genuine candidate.
“They seemed to be very intensely loyal to him and his message. His social conservatism seemed to really resonate with them. I got the sense that they thought, of all the candidates, he was the one that was the most sincere and the most committed,” Mann said.
Santorum is an effective communicator, and he successfully campaigned for the hearts and minds of Iowans. The alarming reality is that so many Iowans seemed intensely loyal to a candidate that’s about as genuine as a reality TV show.
In 2006, Santorum was listed in the annual “Most Corrupt Members of Congress Report,” released by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Santorum’s ethical faults range from the funding of his children’s education, misusing his legislative position in exchange for contributions to his political action committee and his alleged involvement in the “K-Street Project” scandal.
Since 2001, Santorum has admitted to living with his wife and children in Leesburg, Virginia, spending a month out of the year in a home he owns in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. From 2001 to 2005, Santorum had five of his children enrolled in a Penn Hills cyber charter school at an estimated cost to local taxpayers of $72,000. Under Pennsylvania law, school districts are required to pay for the tuition of students in their district who are cyber-schooled.
Santorum blatantly ignored the residency requirements in the Penn Hills school district, costing taxpayers thousands in return.
Santorum’s image of consistency should be connected more so with his pattern of collecting money from special interests in return for legislative assistance.
In 2005, two days before introducing a major bill that would benefit private national weather companies, Santorum’s political action committee received a $2,000 donation from the CEO of the Pennsylvania based AccuWeather, Inc. That’s just one in a long line of questionable campaign contributions from the likes of tobacco companies, beer companies and energy interest groups.
The biggest of Santorum’s ethical blunders may have been his alleged involvement in the “K-Street Project” scandal.
In 2001, Sen. Santorum began hosting weekly meetings with a select group of Washington lobbyists. The meetings are believed to have been connected with a larger plan — launched in the 1990s by Rep. Tom Delay (R-Texas) and conservative activist and lobbyist Grover Norquist.
The goal of this project was for Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices and political loyalties of Washington’s lobbying firms and trade associations. The idea was to pressure these institutions to drop their Democratic lobbyists and replace them with Republicans.
The idea that Santorum’s supporters could believe in his fabricated genuineness and be so intensely loyal to a man who’s so intensely immoral is remarkable.
Santorum may very well be a viable candidate in 2016, but for now his candidacy is just another reflection of the severely fragmented GOP contest.
Matthew Westfall is a 23-year-old mass communication senior from Winchester, Va. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_mwestfall.
 
 
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