Washington D.C., Jun 8, 2011 / 12:35 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Introduced by his wife Karen and joined on stage by his seven children, former Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum officially launched his campaign for president on June 8 at a rally held at the Somerset, Pa. County Courthouse.
“I believe now, that Americans now are not looking for someone they can believe in,” Santorum said referring to President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign slogan, “Change You Can Believe In.”Instead, Santorum said, today voters are “looking for a president who believes in them.”Santorum added: “I'm ready to lead. I'm ready to do what has to be done for the next generation, with the courage to fight for freedom, with the courage to fight for America.”
Santorum, 53, is currently one of two Catholics to enter the race to be the country's next president. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House and Catholic convert, announced his run last month.
He told the crowd of several hundred supporters that he chose the spot to announce his campaign because it was near where his grandfather Pietro worked as a coal miner after emigrating from Italy in 1927.Somerset is also not far from where a hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on its way to Washington, D.C., during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The spot was thus symbolic of key themes Santorum hopes to highlight in his bid for the presidency – the need to restore traditional American values and economic competitiveness, and the need for a strong defense against the threats of America's enemies. The former two-term senator was once the third-ranking Republican in the Senate's leadership. He lost his seat in 2006 to Democrat Bob Casey.But in an exclusive interview with National Review Online editor-at-large Kathryn Jean Lopez conducted for Catholic News Agency, he said, “You learn more from loss than from success.”Santorum said that he is ready to lead and that the voters are ready for a candidate who believes in God and the importance of religion to American democracy. “Americans want our leaders to have a reliance on God �” he said. “We want leaders who understand that faith is essential to the sustenance of democracy, that faith is an agent for good, that it protects the weak and defenseless, that it motives people to confront injustice.” In the following interview he talks about his campaign themes and the relationship between his political message and his Catholic faith.
CNA: When you speak to a group like the Faith and Freedom Coalition, like you did this weekend, or go to work at a place like the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where you have been a fellow, does it feel a bit like coming home? On paper, at least, are faith and freedom and ethics and public policy a good summation of why you ever bother with politics?
Sen. Rick Santorum: Yes, absolutely. I am certainly compelled by my faith to help engage in making this a better country, supporting a culture of life, and confronting the enemies of freedom.
Faith and freedom are dependent on one another, and our founders understood this. Freedom was meant for a virtuous people, and virtue is forged out of faith. Without faith, without religion as an active agent in our personal and public life, we will not be able to maintain the freedoms that we have been so uniquely blessed with. The two options to freedom rooted in faith are a spiraling into moral and cultural anarchy, or the replacement of internal restraint with external restraint, which is called totalitarianism.
CNA: You frequently talk about having a narrative that will move the ball forward. What do you mean by this? What's the narrative? What ball?
Sen. Santorum: The narrative is “freedom under God.” The narrative of “why” America was established is found in the Declaration of Independence – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Sadly, many of our leaders are asking the question “What is America?” This is not the first time. In his day, Lincoln said we didn't have a good definition of liberty and were in great need of one. Freedom and equality, properly understood, as our Founders understood those terms, have been lost. By moving the ball forward, I mean that we have to renew our understanding of the Founders' vision, return to it, and own its implications in our public and private lives.
Under our current leadership, the freedom of the individual has been subordinated to the growth of the government. That's the European model – not ours. People talk of teachable moments. There's never been a greater one than now.
CNA: So, where will America be after four years of Rick Santorum as president? Because with your announcement Monday, that's what you're aiming for.
Sen. Santorum: America will be well down the road to fiscal sanity and stability. The American private sector will be thriving. Decisions will be returned from Washington bureaucrats to main streets and homes. The American worker will have job opportunities in a robust economy spurred by growth-oriented fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policy. The most vulnerable among us will have a vocal and consistent leader in the White House with an administration dedicated to their protection. We will be friends to our allies and restore a lot of essential trust that has been lost. And our enemies will be confronted as enemies, not appeased as if we are the weak party and the supplicant. Both our friends and enemies will know where America stands. Fundamentally, faith in American greatness and in Americans themselves will be restored.
CNA: Why do you want to be president of the United States?
Sen. Santorum: I want to be president because I believe the American people deserve a leader who believes in them. I think 2008 was an experiment where a lot of people wanted a president they could believe in. That experiment failed.
My sense is people want a leader who trusts the American people, one who promotes rather than hampers the free enterprise system, one who believes in the growth of our private sector economy not the growth of the public sector government. In short, I want to be president because we have a great many things we need to get right – from national security and foreign policy to the economy to domestic social issues – and the current president has gotten almost all of those things wrong.
CNA: You've never been an executive? How are you qualified?
Sen. Santorum: By experience and by temperament. I've served the public in a lot of different ways, but one way is by exhibiting strong and decisive leadership, with a willingness to take positions that may not have been politically expedient, but were for the common good.
I've been elected a member of the House, elected a member of the Senate, and was elected to the leadership in the Senate. And in those roles, I was able to write, originate, and push substantive, meaningful legislation – from welfare reform in 1996 to the Syria Accountability Act to the Iran Freedom and Support Act to the Born Alive Infant Protect Act to the ban on partial-birth abortion.
Those bills, and many, many others, weren't popular at first, but through work and talk and persuasion, I helped get them passed, and more often than not with bipartisan support. I look forward to putting my record before the American people. And of course, nothing qualifies you more for public service than a household of seven children.
CNA: What are you most proud of from your congressional record? Welfare reform?
Sen. Santorum: All of these things have been important. I think what I'm most proud of is the fact that I was known as someone who was willing to take on the tough issues and not trim my views or my votes for convenience or to appease any one constituency at the expense of another. In Pennsylvania, populated by one of the most elderly electorates in the nation (and seniors vote!), I was willing to address entitlement reform, and almost lost my first senate race because I was talking about the inevitable insolvency of Social Security and the fiscal instability of Medicare, Peggy Noonan once wrote about me that my style has been “to face what his colleagues hope to finesse.”
CNA: You were working on reforming health-care before it was cool, weren't you?
Sen. Santorum: Yes. I've been at it a long time. As both a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committee in the 1990s, I was one of the first pushing for healthcare savings accounts and for reform of Medicare.
Health care is one of those rare issues that implicates each and every one of us, and America has been blessed with the most advanced system that the world has ever seen. We have been incredibly innovative and successful in providing effective and quality care. But the choices have to be left in the hands of patients and health care providers for this to continue.
The “new order” that makes us dependent on government is not just a reorienting of our health care system, but a vast effort to make every American dependent on the government for their very lives.
CNA: Is your impression people still primarily associate you with abortion and marriage?
Sen. Santorum: Some do. I think the Left does. That's fine. I don't shrink from that, I'm proud of it. The protection of the vulnerable, whether children in the womb or the elderly at the end of their lives, is something to be proud of. The defense of some of our most important institutions the world has ever known – marriage and the family – why should anyone be embarrassed about standing for them?
But I also have a long record on tax, financial, and entitlement reform. I worked with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle on issues of inner city, rural, and global poverty. How can a society survive with three of our four of its inner city children are born out of wedlock? It's probably just harder for some on the other side to understand those issues and, thus, less easy for them to criticize me for them.
The same is true on national security and foreign policy. I have been a leader not just while in the Senate with legislation like the Syria Accountability Act and the Iran Freedom and Support Act, but have devoted the past four years of my life to a program at a think tank to address the rise of radical Islamism, and its anti-American allies such as Venezuela.
CNA: What can you reasonably move forward on on those issues as president?
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