Concrete's American elections correspondent Jonathan Parr analyses a talk given by Presidential hopeful Rick Santorum earlier this month.
Outrage was caused by Rick Santorum at his talk on Friday 3 February at William Woods College in Fulton, Mo. The former Pennsylvania Senator spoke to an auditorium that was, at most, half-filled and the first few rows marked “reserved” remained conspicuously empty throughout the entire talk.
The moment came during the question period when a man stood up to ask Santorum why he would not have homosexual couples marry. Santorum responded in a long-winded manner about how that would be a privilege rather than a right, or equal treatment. At which point the man stormed out. I spoke to him afterwards and the man told me that he had “expected the same thing,” but that “Barack Obama has done what he said,” to protect the rights of the homosexual population of America.
I should mention at this point that I too had left before the end of Santorum’s talk after chasing his aide around the auditorium in an effort to ask Santorum about his immigration policies. He had said that immigrants to the United States find President Obama worse than the regimes that they had left; this, from a man whose stated policy is to “secure the border,” and “make English the official language of government.” I told his aide that I wished to ask a question and, later on, he even looked me in the face as I held my hand up, in a classroom-like manner, before taking the microphone away for no more questions.
The content of his talk was largely the superfluous fluff of slandering the other candidates and President Barack Obama. When he did finally talk about his own policies he focused on welfare reform and bringing jobs back to the United States to try and get more income to the country.
Now, perhaps Santorum was unaware of this, but President Obama had said practically the same thing in his State of the Union address at the end of January. For a man who said just minutes before that the candidate who would win is the one with a “clear, contrasting vision for our country,” perhaps he ought to rethink his stance and decide whether he lives up to his own idea of the person who might “defeat Barack Obama.”
Santorum is a bad man and the fact that a man like that has the potential to be President is a horrifying statement about the politics of the United States. The entire time he spoke, there was a huge banner with an eagle in red, white and blue, with the words “The courage to fight for America”. I don’t think that Santorum has the faintest idea what he is fighting for. It is this moronic, blind anger and blood-lust which raises the issue of what there actually is in America worth fighting for.