One year after he lost his seat in the U.S. Senate — at a moment when his political party was hobbled and his own name had become a national dirty joke — Rick Santorum got a new job.
He became a newspaper columnist. Starting in November 2007, the former senator (R-Pa.) wrote a biweekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he developed and refined the political and ideological messages that have sparked his surge to front of the GOP presidential field.
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“At a time when the conservative movement is rudderless and the lineup of future standard bearers is a mix of Johnnies-come-lately and Johnnies-never-been,” Santorum wrote in his first column, “I hope to provide some ideas that could help restore America’s confidence in the conservative movement.” He noted in that first column that another Inquirer columnist had recently called him a “doofus.”
Over more than 21 / 2 years, the beaten former senator tried to find a new voice on a range of topics: anger over same-sex marriage and abortion, suspicion of Iran, and calls to defend religious liberty from government. Santorum wrote movingly of his young daughter’s struggle with a genetic disorder, which has become a keystone of his campaign biography.
But the columns also reveal Santorum’s limits as a politician.
Several columns are devoted only to other people’s failures, and he comes across as a tremendous downer. In the columns, he struggles to lift his message above fist-shaking outrage and (sometimes literal) prophecies of doomsday.
“Often wrong,” he called himself in one column. “But never in doubt.”
Santorum’s columns are difficult to find now — this week, only a few of them were publicly available on the Inquirer’s Web site. He was paid $1,750 for each one, according to the Inquirer’s rival Philadelphia Daily News.
The arrangement ended in the summer of 2010.
“It was really a financial decision,” said Harold Jackson, the Inquirer’s editorial-page editor, in a telephone interview. He said Santorum’s column was axed during a round of budget cuts: “We decided to end a number of [columnist] contracts, and he was one of those.”
Santorum’s columns returned often to the social issues that had made him famous — and infamous — in the Senate.
He mentioned abortion in at least 18 of them, and same-sex marriage in at least 11. In 2008, Santorum said he had not regretted “sounding the alarm” on gay marriage in 2003, referring to an interview in which he compared homosexual acts to bigamy, adultery and “man on dog.”
“Is anyone saying same-sex couples can’t love each other?” he wrote in that column, reiterating his opposition to same-sex marriage. “I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?”
Santorum predicted that the government would soon crack down even on people who spoke out against same-sex marriage.
“Within 10 years, clergy will be sued or indicted for preaching on certain Bible passages dealing with homosexuality and churches,” he wrote.
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