To know him (in Pennsylvania at least) is not to love him. A union endorsing a Republican is something that catches the eye.

by Ralph Z. Hallow

HOUSTON — After a big win in Saturday’s Kansas caucuses, Rick Santorum is riding high almost everywhere but in his native Pennsylvania.

While Christian-right leaders such as James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Tom LeFever, Rebecca Hagelin and Richard Viguerie were holding a fundraiser in Texas for the former senator Friday, some in his hometown of Pittsburgh were expressing doubts about the candidate’s reliability as an advocate of small government and fiscal integrity.

“I guess you could say there’s a disconnect between Rick Santorum’s claim to be a small-government fiscal conservative and the Pittsburgh tunnel project he pushed for as a U.S. senator,” said Jack Brooks, a former top official in a powerful Pennsylvania trade union that backed Mr. Santorum’s failed Senate re-election bid in 2006.

Mr. Santorum, running a shoestring campaign to wrest the Republican nomination from front-runner Mitt Romney, has claimed to be “the true conservative” in the GOP race. Not surprisingly, his rivals on the national scene say he is anything but. A campaign ad by his rival, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, tags Mr. Santorum as a “fake fiscal conservative.”

Newt Gingrich, appearing on Fox News on Sunday, again questioned Mr. Santorum’s conservative bona fides.

What’s gone largely unnoticed, though, is the deep skepticism about Mr. Santorum’s fiscal and social credentials on the right among those who know him well from his hometown of Pittsburgh.

[…….]

Mr. Santorum’s emergence as the main challenger to Mr. Romney is based in large part on his appearance as one of the Republican Party’s most successful amalgamators of social and fiscal conservatism.

Yet from Gov. Tom Corbett to U.S. Sen. Patrick J. Toomey, state GOP Chairman Rob Gleason and on down the political food chain, no major GOP politician in the state has endorsed Mr. Santorum.

One complaint is that Mr. Santorum’s claim of being the only truly small-government conservative among the three top GOP nomination contenders is undermined by his support of big-government spending while in the Senate — especially when it comes to the mile-long Pittsburgh tunnel project that was part of a deal with Mr. Brooks and his union.

In exchange for helping push through federal support for the project, Mr. Santorum won the endorsement of the state’s building and construction trade unions — including Mr. Brooks’ 14,000-member carpenters union.

Even Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican from Pennsylvania, turned against the project when its overruns climbed to $450 million and then hit $528 million.

“We had a deal with Santorum,” said Mr. Brooks, whose Greater Pennsylvania Regional Council of Carpenters, along with other major building and construction trade unions, endorsed Mr. Santorum after the senator went to bat in Washington for construction of the tunnel under the Allegheny River. The tunnel’s only stop is at the two taxpayer-funded sports stadiums built with Mr. Santorum’s support.

“Very seldom are you going to have a union endorse a Republican,” said Mr. Brooks. “But the project created 4,000 jobs” — even if they were temporary — for workers in the construction and building trades.

Critics, including Mr. Specter, say the tunnel’s gargantuan costs far exceed its projected benefits to western Pennsylvania.

“Santorum makes a big deal out of earmarks and he participated in one of the biggest of all time, twice as big as ‘the bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska, which cost taxpayers $240 million and was never built,” said David O’Loughlin, a Pittsburgh developer and contemporary of Mr. Santorum’s.

Proud of having brought the bacon back to the state he represented, Mr. Santorum has defended earmarks but more recently has said lawmakers went overboard with the practice.

[…….]

“Rick is definitely a social conservative and is very true to the pro-life movement, but fiscally he supported the big-government position,” said Larry Dunn, who was the Republican Allegheny County Commission chairman.

Kenneth Behrend, a Pittsburgh lawyer and former GOP official who has known Mr. Santorum since their days in the Young Republicans, said the presidential candidate wasn’t always so sure of his stand on abortion.

Mr. Behrend said that before Mr. Santorum first ran for Congress in 1990, he “tried out a speech with all of us in Young Republicans” and “didn’t mention the pro-life issue.”

“Afterward, I asked him where he stood, and he said, ‘I haven’t made up my mind. I don’t have an answer right now.’

“Then when he took a pro-life position, he suddenly had all kinds of volunteers helping him run for Congress,” said Mr. Behrend, who described himself as a “populist Republican” who switched to the Democratic Party when he saw the GOP “backing big government” and “opposing individual rights.”

“I’m not sure I fit in either party now,” he added.

[…….]

The 53-year-old presidential contender’s role in supporting public financing of new stadiums for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates and the tunnel project still sticks in the craw of friends back home.

“It was disconcerting to see Rick take a public position in favor of taking public money to pay for stadiums instead of having the teams’ owners pay for those stadiums,” said Mr. Behrend. “Typically, whichever interest helped support his political career, that’s the one he supported.”

Read the rest – Santorum not so strong with Pennsylvania folks

Stupid, whiny, scold. He has this incredible need to put his foot in his mouth. I felt bad that he lost in 2006 but now that I see what a klutz he is I think he deserved it.

by Michael Finnegan

Rick Santorum renewed his criticism of John F. Kennedy on Thursday night for saying during his 1960 campaign for the presidency that he believed “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”

“That’s not America,” the Republican presidential hopeful told a crowd at an Alabama dinner banquet. “That’s France. That’s a naked public square where people of faith are out of bounds.”

Santorum’s remarks came as he and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich battle for the support of conservative evangelical Christians in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries Tuesday. Both candidates are Catholic, and both have been playing up religious issues, to the consternation of some fellow Republicans who fret that the party would be better off focusing on jobs.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a Mormon who leads in the chase for party nominating delegates, has been less aggressive about overt appeals to voters based on religious faith.

In his dinner remarks, Santorum backed away from his comment that Kennedy’s 1960 speech on church and state made him want to “throw up.”

“Obviously, the language that I used was at a minimum inarticulate,” the former Pennsylvania senator told several hundred people at the Alabama Policy Institute banquet on the Gulf Coast.

But he said his passion stemmed from years of frustration that so many people had succeeded in undermining the right of “freedom of conscience.”

He paraphrased Kennedy as saying, “I will take no advice, directly or indirectly, from anybody of faith. I will not permit that to be discussed.” By saying that, Santorum argued, “he went too far.”

Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, gave the speech to ministers in Texas in an effort to assure skeptical Protestants that the pope would not dictate his decisions in the White House.

“I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy vowed to make decisions on birth control, divorce and other subjects “in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.”

Santorum said he would continue to speak out on the importance of religion in public life.

“Please pray for me that I do so more articulately in the future,” he said.