Candidate Evaluations: Rick Santorum

by Benjamin Studebaker

The list of presidential candidates has expanded again–Rick Santorum has decided to join the mess. This forces me to return to the Candidate Evaluations series, where we examine a US presidential candidate’s background, policy history, and explicit statements in an attempt to figure out whether the candidate would actually be any good at being president, rather than focusing on electability or likeability, as is common in the mainstream press. When I started this series, I did not imagine I would be made to do so many of these, but here we go again.

Here are all the previous entries in the series, in case you’ve missed someone you’re interested in:

This is Rick Santorum:

Santorum has a BA in Political Science from Pennsylvania State University, an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh, and a law degree from PSU. This gives him the same academic background as Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Marco Rubio (though Cruz and Clinton attended more prestigious universities than Rubio or Santorum). Santorum was a lawyer for a few years in the late 1980’s before he was elected to congress in 1990. He jumped to the senate in 1994, and remained in the senate until he was annihilated by Bob Casey in 2006. Prior to the election, he had the lowest approval rating of all the sitting senators, with only 38%. This is likely because Pennsylvania is a swing state and Santorum consistently held particularly hard-line conservative positions, especially on social issues. Throughout his political career, Santorum has taken a number of strident positions:

  • He supported a balanced budget amendment long before this became the cool thing among republican primary candidates, voting for it as early as 1997. Balanced budget amendments cripple the government’s ability to respond to economic crises with stimulus spending.
  • He rejects the science on climate change, attributing global change to natural variation.
  • He takes a particularly strong stance on immigration, opposing not merely comprehensive reform but also the DREAM Act. He goes further on immigration than any other candidate I’ve looked at this year, even suggesting that we should place further restrictions on legal immigration.
  • He wants to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a system that has the same kinds of issues as the one proposed by Ben Carson. He also compared Obamacare to the apartheid regime in South Africa.
  • He voted for the Iraq War, continued to oppose withdrawal from Iraq to the very end, and he even believes in a bizarre conspiracy to hide evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Even now, Santorum still wants to send more ground troops to Iraq.
  • He still wants to carry out George W. Bush’s failed 2005 attempt to privatize social security, which would have subjected retirees savings to the instabilities and risks of the markets.
  • He not only wants a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage nationwide, he also wants to recriminalize consensual sodomy.

The sodomy stance makes Santorum the most anti-LGBT candidate in the race:

LGBT rights activists have not failed to notice. On the internet, Santorum’s name has been popularized as a vulgar sexual term on Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary, Know Your Meme, and other such places.

To his credit, Santorum does support a small minimum wage hike–he would raise the federal minimum wage by $1.50 over three years. This is not as high as most activists have been hoping for. Under Santorum’s plan, the federal minimum would be $8.75 in 2019, and in the meantime inflation will eat away at the value of that money. Some US states already have state minimum wage laws that are higher than $8.75, and many more will likely exceed that figure by 2019:

Still, this is more than any other republican candidate is offering on this issue, and in places where the state government is indifferent to minimum wage workers, this would be significant.

Conclusion

While Santorum deserves credit for his relatively moderate position on the minimum wage, this cannot make up for his stances on immigration, Iraq, and LGBT rights, which are the worst of any of the candidates that have declared so far. On top of this, he has the same retrograde positions on government spending, climate change, healthcare, and social security that are common to the other candidates in his party. He should not be president.