Santorum Not The Guy is being published with the permission of Tea Party activist Bob Guzzardi
By Bob Guzzardi
Our former senator, Rick Santorum, has thrown his hat in ring for the Republican presidential nomination.
Santorum is not a Tea Party guy. He is an establishment insider, big government Republican. He is a big spender, union financed and an “earmarker”.
The Club for Growth notes that he supported No Child Left Behind in 2001, which greatly expanded the federal government’s role in education; the massive new Medicare drug entitlement in 2003 that now costs taxpayers over $60 billion a year and has almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities; and that he voted for the 2005 highway bill that included thousands of wasteful earmarks
I will grant that the Club for Growth does say nice things about him regarding some things — especially his support for broad-based tax cuts — but they don’t balance out.
I think his anti-growth anti-free trade votes are a result of his close ties to Philadelphia unions, like John Dougherty’s IBEW 98 which supported him openly.
He is no “fiscal conservative.”
I have met him and found him to be a very slick talker and unbelievably arrogant.
He would be a less than ideal candidate. The people of Pennsylvania handily rejected him in 2006 with him getting 797,000 less votes than he did six years before — and fewer votes in every county.
Anyone who picks the less than effective and well paid BrabenderCox as a consultant is not going to do well.
And of course many of us will not forget that then big government Senator Rick Santorum, choosing power over stated principle, hypocritically and relentlessly, backed union-financed Big Government Democrat Senator Arlen Specter against fiscal common sense Pat Toomey.
We all know the country would have been better off with Senator Pat Toomey’s ahead-of-the-curve understanding of the devastating economic effects of out of control Big Government debt and deficits.