Santorum 'not that focused' on 2012 race

By James Q. Lynch

The Gazette

Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum will be visiting northeast Iowa this week, not to see the fall colors and not for the reason you might think.

Well, not entirely.

More than three years ahead of the next presidential election “you probably shouldn't read too much into it,” the conservative Republican from Pennsylvania said about his visit to Dubuque Thursday.

“It's an import time in our country. I feel passionately about a lot of things,” he said by telephone recently. “Where it goes beyond that, I don't know.”

Santorum, 51, will keynote the American Future Fund's Conservative Lecture Series, speaking on “Jumpstarting America's Economy and Putting People First,” at 7 p.m. Thursday in Room 146 of the Charles and Romona Myers Teaching Center at the University of Dubuque, 446 Algona St., Dubuque. For information, call (515) 720-5250.

The lecture, in Iowa, is a chance to “speak into the moment” at a time Santorum sees as critically import to the future of the country. Seven months into the Obama administration, Santorum has “great concerns” about what he sees as assaults on basic American values such as belief in free market system and entrepreneurial capitalism.

The socialization of the health care system and the threat to the energy sector posed by cap-and-trade proposals, for example, are fueling the concern Americans demonstrated at tea parties and town hall meetings in August, Santorum said.

“People see as an assault on the basic fabric of America and they are upset about it,” he said. “They feel like no one is listening to them.”

Some media have portrayed them as “just a bunch of angry people who don't have anything to offer,” Santorum believes they have looked at the issues and “understand what makes America the greatest country is not because we have a big, old powerful government to take care of us.”

They feel “individually, personally threatened, nowhere more than in health-care,” he said. “It's hard to put cap-and-trade in personal terms. It's easy to personalize health care because we interact with that system.”

The Republican Party is best positioned to capture the energy of the opposition to health-care reform, bailouts and government expansion, Santorum said.

“It's not a political movement. Contrary to what people say, it really is springing up from the grass roots,” he said. “The question really is what party, if any, will capture the moral imagination of these people and able to turn this organic movement into a political movement.”

At this time, Santorum insisted, his role is as one of the “clear, conservative voices” speaking to those issues, not as a 2012 presidential candidate.

“I have to tell you, I'm not that focused at all on 2012, not even 2010 and even less on 2012,” he said.