by JEFFERY ST. CLAIR
PHOTO/Huffington Post
Counterpunch editors’ Note: In honor of Rick Santorum’s sudden emergence in the Iowa caucuses as the anti-Romney du jour, CounterPunch is reprinting this 2003 profile of the Pennsylvania zealot about his career in the United States senate, where he was almost universally reviled as both stupid and mean by his colleagues and staff. –AC/JSC
Rick Santorum had only been in the senate for a few weeks when Bob Kerrey, then Senator from Nebraska, pegged him. “Santorum, that’s Latin for asshole.” It was probably the funniest line the grim Kerrey ever uttered and it was on the mark, too.
Such a stew of sleazy self-righteousness and audacious stupidity has not been seen in the senate since the days of Steve Symms, the celebrated moron from Idaho. In 1998, investigative reporter Ken Silverstein fingered Santorum as the dumbest member of congress in a story for The Progressive. Considering the competition, that’s an achievement of considerable distinction.
Even Santorum’s staff knows the senator is a vacuous boob prone to outrageous gaffs and crude outbursts of unvarnished bigotry. For years, they kept him firmly leashed, rarely permitting him to attend a press interview without a senior staffer by his side. They learned the hard way. While in serving in the House, Santorum was asked by a reporter to explain why his record on environmental policy was so dreadful. Santorum replied by observing that the environment was of little consequence in God’s grand plan. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here 100 years from now.” The reference was to the Rapture, which apparently is impending.
Santorum is the self-anointed prophet of family values on the Hill, who issues frequent jeremiads on the threats Hollywood fare poses to the “fabric of American culture.” Of course, these sermons are hard to swallow from a man with Santorum’s resume. After all, before entering Congress Santorum worked as a lobbyist. His top client? The World Wrestling Federation.
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So it came to pass that on April 7, Santorum sat down for an interview with AP reporter Lara Jordan. He should have been on his guard. After all, Jordan is married to Jim Jordan, who oversees John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz, despises Santorum. He inherited the senate seat left open when her previous husband, John Heinz, perished in a plane crash. “Santorum is critical of everything, indifferent to nuance, and incapable of compromise,” Heinz said. This should have been a warning signal to Santorum that the interview with Jordan might be hostile terrain, but his intellectual radar seems to function about as well as Baghdad’s air defense system. Post-war, that is.
After a brisk discussion of the degeneracy of American culture, the interview turned to the subject of the pending Supreme Court case on sodomy laws. Like most religious zealots, Santorum is obsessed not just with homosexuals but with visualizing the postures and physical mechanics of homosexual love. He seized on her question with an enthusiasm many Republicans reserve for discussions of the tax code.
“I have no problem with homosexuality,” Santorum pronounced. “I have a problem with homosexual acts. As I would with acts of other, what I would consider to be, acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing against anyone who’s homosexual. If that’s their orientation, then I accept that. And I have no problem with someone who has other orientations. The question is, do you act upon those orientations? So it’s not the person, it’s the person’s actions. And you have to separate the person from their actions.”
In the past, one of Santorum’s staffers would have found some way to interrupt the interview and deftly muzzle the senator. But he was flying solo and evidently trying to impress Ms. Jordan with his encyclopedic knowledge of the work of Krafft-Ebbing. Note the senator’s excited and flirtatious tone.
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