[Vision2020] Campaigning Against the Modern World

[Art Deco]

[image: Campaign Stops - Strong Opinions on the 2012
Election]<http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/>
February 24, 2012, 1:04 pmCampaigning Against the Modern WorldBy TOM
FERRICK JR. <http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/author/tom-ferrick-jr/>

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.

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.

Santorum was different. 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.

Late in his 2006 re-election campaign, for example, when Santorum was
seeking a third term in the Senate, he was set off by a question from a
public school teacher at a street fair in Harrisburg who said she was “so
sorry that some of our money paid for the education of your children in
Virginia.” The Santorums had been home-schooling some of their children in
Virginia through a program run by the Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter
School. After a fierce exchange with the woman, Santorum sarcastically
complained: “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.”
It’s a YouTube moment <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s3oVtbcbHc&eurl=>.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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<http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/santorum-calls-obamas-agenda-about-some-phony-theology/?scp=1&sq=phony%20theology&st=cse>,
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. Predictably, Santorum is angry at that version
of Christianity. He sees it as weak tea.

As a fellow Catholic, I understand the roots of Santorum’s Christianity. We
read the same Baltimore Catechism, the Cliffs Notes of Catholicism for
grade school children in our era. At Mass, we inhaled incense and recited
the *Credo.* From an early age, we both ingested large doses of Catholic
theology and its elegant practitioners — Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas.

And there we part ways. Like many American Catholics, I struggle with the
church’s teachings as they apply to the modern world. Santorum does not.

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.

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.

For instance, I can’t think of many Catholics — I can’t think of many *priests
*— who would want to get into an argument over the use of contraceptives.
Santorum is, of course, the exception.

In 2010, Santorum delivered a little-noticed speech in Houston to mark the
50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s address in the same city before a
convention of Protestant ministers. Kennedy went before the group to
alleviate fears that if a Catholic was elected president of the United
States, the Pope would rule America. As Kennedy said at the beginning of
his speech: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and
state is absolute.”

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.”

In Santorum’s view, Kennedy’s speech led to a debasement of the first
freedom — the freedom of religion — so that it is now on “the lowest rung
of interests to be considered when weighing rights against one another.”

But to grasp the full weight of Santorum’s argument you have to hear him
out:

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?

For Rick Santorum, those are rhetorical questions.

*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.*


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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