Casey for Senate / Santorum exemplifies the worst of Washington
2006-10-23
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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rss feedThere was a time when conservatives ran against Washington, D.C., but Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, in fighting the challenge by state Treasurer Bob Casey this year, has a problem doing that. He is Washington, D.C.
More precisely, the 12-year incumbent is the sort of calculating politician who has made the 109th Congress the out-of-touch and ethics-challenged institution that has added to the store of public cynicism.
Whatever may be said about his politics, when he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1990 and won his Senate seat in 1994, Mr. Santorum was the brash and reform-minded upstart. Today all that can be fairly said is that he is still brash, but the upstart now has settled into the role of a big man in the ruling establishment.
For all his talk of being just "an Italian kid from a steel town," Mr. Santorum, 48, was entirely in character when he was playing happy host every week to well-heeled corporate lobbyists of K Street seeking to shape the public's business in ways denied to ordinary people. That is what he has become.
To be sure, Mr. Santorum has his principles, but usually they take the form of some narrow moralizing that reduce the choices of those in a minority -- gays who want the freedom to marry and so live regular lives, women who are in a jam and feel they must have an abortion.
Some good people share Mr. Santorum's views on these issues, and actually Democrat Bob Casey, 46, is one of them, but Mr. Santorum, unlike his opponent, finds it hard to disagree without being contemptuous. It is his nature. His politics are not about uniting but dividing.
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