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"FacebookPinterest\n\n In the commercial, four corpulent and oily Washington insiders are whooping it up in an elegant dining room. Through a swirl of cigar smoke, one of them calls out to the waiter, \"Bring us a bottle of your very best champagne!\" When the waiter raises the question of cost, the lout adds, \"Don't worry. If we don't have enough money, we'll just give the bill to...them!\" He gestures to the far end of the room, where a sad cluster of urchins sit around a barren table.\n\n The camera pans to a tall, trim young man with a small child cradled in his arms. In a soft but ringing eastern tenor he introduces himself as Rick Santorum and conveys his disgust for the political fat cats \"running up the deficit and passing the bill on to your children and mine.\" After he pledges to \"end their greedy spending practices,\" the camera cuts to one of the politicos staring at the bill, snickering, \"Time for another tax increase!\" The commercial concludes with a rousing slogan: JOIN THE FIGHT.\n\n They loved that ad in Pennsylvania. In 1992 voters responded to it by handing Santorum a second term in the U.S. Congress. Two years later, the ad was trotted out again to elect him to the Senate. Funny and poignant, it seduced the viewer with a bit of mystery. Send this courageous fellow into that dining room, it suggested, and see how things change.\n\n This June, more than a decade after the commercial first appeared, Santorum sat at a corner table in the ornate Senate dining room, vanquishing a platter of broiled sea scallops. He looked a bit out of place\u2014a vaguely untutored, overgrown schoolboy with a hook nose and oversize teeth, aura-deficient if handsome in a lopsided way. His hips had widened and a dab of gray had infiltrated his sideburns, yet he still seemed very much the lonely outsider.\n\n But he was not. One by one, the insiders came to him, joking with him, doing everything but mussing his hair. \"Hey, bruddah!\" called out Pete Domenici from New Mexico, clamping his seventyone-year-old hand on Santorum's shoulder.\n\n \"Now, you keep your name out of the press,\" admonished the senior senator from Utah, 69-year-old Orrin Hatch, as he flashed his lipless smile.\n\n Even former Oregon senator Bob Packwood, age 70 and nimbly reborn as a lobbyist, sidled up to Santorum's table to slyly inquire, \"Have I been reading about you?\"\n\n Santorum laughed a victor's laugh. Six weeks after he had infamously spelled out his \"problem with homosexual acts\" to an Associated Press reporter, the resulting firestorm had dissipated into just another sunny day in the clubby Senate dining room. Santorum was still the third most powerful GOP senator on the Hill, still on track to become majority leader by 2006. His hoary colleagues had been through this kind of thing with him before, when Santorum had disrespected President Clinton by repeatedly referring to him as \"Bill\" on the Senate floor and when he had reportedly called Senator Dianne Feinstein of California a bitch. Now he'd used the words homosexuality and incest in the same context, prompting groans from the moderates and condemnations from the liberals. But from his own, from the right, there came only a big brother's knowing chuckle: feisty, pesky Rick\u2014what's he gonna say next?\n\n \"People say I'm polarizing,\" the 45-year-old senator said that Friday afternoon, the words tumbling out in an emotive spasm. His altar-boy face clouded over in meditation. \"I don't personally think I'm polarizing. But I do say what I believe. And I think I have an obligation to do that.\" Before Santorum could explain what he meant by this, Packwood stood up from the adjacent table. Motioning to the dining companion he had been lobbying, the ex-senator told Santorum with mock gravity, \"You did not see this.\"\n\n Santorum's face split open into a grin. \"See what?\" he asked.\n\n Nodding approvingly, Packwood bellowed over his shoulder, \"And I never read about you.\"\n\n Santorum laughed, and muttered with genuine appreciation, \"He's great.\" But long after the slick Beltway lifer had vacated the room, the humor in that exchange remained as elusive as Santorum's obligation to speak his mind. Pennsylvanians had sent him to Washington to shake things up. Was this what they had in mind\u2014 Santorum rattling his saber at homosexuality while trading gibes with a reptilian serial adulterer? Having joined the fight, would they now join in loving the sinner while hating the sin? It is a curious morality that Santorum promulgates, compassionate conservatism encased in a shield of Realpolitik with a snarl of fundamentalist intolerance. But promulgate it he does; and unexpected as it may seem, political momentum is by no means against him.\n\n \"I wasn't supposed to be here in the first place,\" he said. \"I see every moment I'm here as a blessing\u2014and a moment to do good.\" He said this with calm matter-of-factness, in a way that fended off skepticism as well as the aching question: What exactly does Rick Santorum mean by doing good? He did not, as it turns out, arrive at his definition overnight. And yet he cannot wait. He is inside now. Time for good to raise hell.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"I don't have any road-to-Damascus experiences in my life,\" he said. \"It's sort of...\" His mind flailed for a bit, and his face tightened, it seemed, with the brutal labor of self-examination. \"I'm a poor planner,\" he offered. \"What I have a good nose for\u2014or maybe I've been blessed with an eye for\u2014is the opportunities that are important.\"\n\n The rise of Richard J. Santorum from obscure renegade to Newt Gingrich water boy to upwardly mobile Senate moralizer is a feat of pluck, dumb luck and conservative idealism. Above all, however, it is a triumph of his searing political instincts. His friends marvel at his ability to \"adapt,\" \"refocus,\" \"fill a void,\" \"see an opportunity\" and even \"transform himself.\" In Pennsylvania, a commonwealth best known for tempered statesmen like Arlen Specter, John Heinz and Bill Scranton, Santorum's power grabbing may appear unseemly\u2014but only in retrospect. For like other famous moralizers, he came upon us like a thief in the night.\n\n One afternoon in the mid-1970s, Phil English knocked on a dormitory door. As chairman of Pennsylvania's College Republicans, he had been sent to Penn State's main campus by the campaign staff of Senate candidate John Heinz to recruit a leader for a new chapter. The young man who answered the door did not, in appearance, stand out. Rather, he fit in: lankily good-looking, frat boy in manner, with a quick tongue and a lousy beard. The Italian keenness to his facial features came from his father, a Veterans Administration psychologist, who had immigrated from the lakeside town of Riva del Garda at the age of 8. His mother worked full-time as a nurse. The family had moved from West Virginia to Butler, Pennsylvania, to Chicago\u2014all of which meant that he had learned how to fend for himself, how to size up new environments in a hurry. Ideas were not his stock in trade. Action was.\n\n Young Rick's chapter quickly became \"something of a legend within the state and national organization,\" English remembers. \"He represented a group who thought it was critical to expand the College Republicans' outreach\u2014he didn't want it to be clubbish. He spoke the language of the students, and he made it cool to be for Reagan.\"\n\n He was also in one hell of a hurry, though to what end no one, including Santorum, knew. While accumulating an MBA and a law degree, he managed local campaigns and worked as chief of staff for state senator Doyle Corman. In Harrisburg political circles, Santorum displayed a knack for ingratiating himself with the well connected while thoroughly alienating those who were not. Socially awkward in his jacket and tie, he left many peers with the impression that he would have no political future beyond city council.\n\n But less than two years after he was hired by a Pittsburgh corporate law firm\u2014where he amused himself by lobbying on behalf of the World Wrestling Federation\u2014the fidgety attorney decided to run for Congress. Aghast friends like Corman tried to talk him into a cozy statehouse seat. His opponent was a liberal Democrat named Doug Walgren, a well-funded seven-term incumbent. Santorum responded with a textbook grassroots campaign. He wooed legions of volunteers from the College Republicans and pro-life groups, but his stump speeches were careful not to offend moderate voters.\n\n \"There was not a great ideological content to that race,\" notes Woody Turner, the campaign's finance chairman. Instead, the upstart attacked the incumbent for voting for a congressional pay raise and for living exclusively in the Washington, D.C., area.\n\n \"In 1990 people were really pissed off at [George Herbert Walker] Bush and the Congress over this budget impasse,\" recalls political analyst Jon Delano, who helped run Walgren's campaign. \"Santorum played right into the anti-incumbent national mood.\" Two years before H. Ross Perot and four years before Newt Gingrich, he caught the first frothing wave of the Angry White Male, and he rode it all the way to the nation's capital.\n\n By this time, Santorum had decided to \"get all of the fun out, the indiscretions, whatever you want to call them.\" During the campaign, he had married Karen Garver. The two had met while Rick was recruiting her for his law firm. They began raising a family and attending church. But a moral certitude had not yet entered Santorum's rhetoric. On the subject of abortion, he recalled, \"I was trying to put people off [with] 'I'm still thinking through this.' \" In fact, he never once brought up the topic on the House floor.\n\n \"As a first-term House member, you're not going to write any legislation,\" says Santorum media consultant John Brabender. \"The only thing you can do is make people's lives miserable.\" To this task, the brash Santorum was brilliantly suited. \"Mr. Speaker, I stand here in disgust and anger,\" he would say in one of his many screeds on the House floor\u2014once even wearing a brown paper bag over his head\u2014as he attacked his colleagues for leasing lavish cars, appropriating money for marble floors in the House elevators and bouncing checks in the House bank. But a sweeping cultural change was fermenting in the Capitol: Gingrich had replaced the more accommodating Dick Cheney as GOP minority whip in 1989, and the Newtster's crimson-eyed acolytes \"didn't know their place,\" says former Republican congressman Bob Walker with a laugh.\n\n As a member of Gingrich's \"Gang of Seven,\" Santorum coasted to reelection in 1992 with his \"Join the Fight\" campaign. The Democrats thought they could do him in by redistricting his congressional seat. He outfod them by running for the Senate. After narrowly defeating Harris Wofford, he sought to reprise his bomb-heaving act. He fulminated over discounted haircuts in the Senate barbershop. Bellowed \"Where's Bill?\" on the Senate floor. Even gave his own party a taste of his insolence, staging an unsuccessful coup against appropriations chairman Mark Hatfield for opposing a balanced-budget amendment. But Santorum's pugnacious vaudeville act did not play well in that hallowed chamber, so he simply dropped the act.\n\n In 1995, when Bill Packwood fell on his, um, sword, Santorum was tapped to shepherd the Senate's welfare legislation. With the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, a \"compassionate conservative\" was born. Today, Santorum and his staff use the phrase repeatedly, long after Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander, a fellow Republican, dismissed it as \"weasel words.\"\n\n \"Look, words are used to communicate not just facts but emotions,\" Santorum says. \"There's a lot of people in this country who hear the word conservative and think Jim Crow. A lot of people of color think that. And I'm not comfortable going into the AfricanAmerican or Hispanic community and saying I'm a conservative.\"\n\n That awkward admission aside, the senator's record would suggest that his compassion is genuine. To get his welfare bill passed, he had to fend off not only the many liberals who (incorrectly) predicted a train wreck but also virulent scolds like William Bennett, who called for a harsh crackdown on the mothers of illegitimate children. And Santorum has since championed novel approaches to other conservative chestnuts: empowerment zones; individual development accounts for low-income Americans; tougher penalties for criminals who use guns; tax credits for charitable contributions; and debt relief for Third World countries. At the risk of displeasing the warhorses of the GOP, he is willing to concede that government is necessary\u2014if only as a \"silent partner.\"\n\n Of course, to those who have endured Santorum's campaign rhetoric, his transformation bespeaks rank hypocrisy. After excoriating Walgren in 1990 for moving his family out of Pennsylvania and for voting for a pay raise, Santorum did both as a senator. Though he berated the Beltway crowd for the savings-and-loan scandal, he was strangely silent during the Enron debacle. He assailed Wofford for the federal deficit but has since signed off on President Bush's tax cuts while larding the budget with flood-control projects and funds for the refurbishment of Gettysburg National Military Park. He ranted throughout the Gingrich era about the need for a twelveyear term limit, yet he has shown no interest in stepping down in 2006. Instead, he told me with a charming lack of irony, \"Maybe eighteen [years] I'd be more comfortable with.\"\n\n All of which proves that during his evolution, Santorum stepped on his prehensile tail a time or two. But now he has arrived\u2014a senator in good standing, a man of faith and mission, leading his \"armies of compassion\" into the breach. Will it be enough to \"empower\" the poor with jobs and low-interest loans? Will Rick Santorum call it a day when compassion's work is done?\n\n We found out the answer to that question this April.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The Associated Press reporter Lara Jakes Jordan had brought up the priest scandals in the Catholic church. She was in for a wild ride. Santorum asserted that \"it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles.\" When asked by Jordan if he proposed outlawing homosexuality, the senator clarified himself: \"I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts, as I would with acts of other\u2014what I would consider to be acts outside of traditional heterosexual relationships. And that includes a variety of different acts, not just homosexual. I have nothing, absolutely nothing, against anyone who's homosexual. If that's their orientation, then I accept that. The question is, do you act upon those orientations?... You have to separate the person from the actions.\"\n\n Santorum turned to the Texas sodomy case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and offered his analysis: \"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does. It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist in my opinion in the United States Constitution, this right that was created [by the Supreme Court]. It was created in Griswold\u2014the contraceptive case\u2014and [in the] abortion [case]. And now we're just extending it out. And the further you extend it out, the more this freedom actually intervenes and affects the family. You say, 'Well, it's my individual freedom.' Yes, but it destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong, healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, whether it's sodomy\u2014all of those things are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.\"\n\n Reaction was swift from both parties, and just as quickly it vaporized. Democrats called for Santorum's removal from the Senate Republican Conference. The moderate Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island, stated that \"Senator Santorum's views are not held by this Republican and many others in our party.\" But of the many others, only two or three vocalized their dismay, whereas the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, pronounced Santorum \"a voice for inclusion and compassion\" and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer responded with a tepid \"The president believes the senator is an inclusive man.\"\n\n Santorum, for his part, remained defiant. \"I do not need to give an apology based on what I said and what I'm saying now,\" he told Fox News. \"I think this is a legitimate public-policy discussion.\" In Pennsylvania, Santorum's negatives climbed from the lower twenties to thirty. But his favorable rating held steady at fifty-five. Six weeks after the AP story broke, he delivered a commencement address at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia. An estimated one hundred students walked out before he began to speak. \"We are all called to love one another,\" the senator told those remaining, \"even people we disagree with, even people who hate us for what we believe.\" The audience applauded warmly.\n\n Santorum had survived and perhaps even benefited. \"That which doesn't kill you makes you strong,\" observes former congressman Bill Paxon, a friend of Santorum's. \"It was a test of loyalty and also a test of how you react when you're getting hammered. It's important to note the breadth of his support. This is a town that loves to see 'em twist and turn. In Rick's case, they came to his aid.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"It undermines marriage,\" Santorum said, when I raised the specter of same-sex unions. \"To me, marriage and the family are the essential underpinnings of a stable society.\" He cited a court case, filed on behalf of seven gay couples, which may soon decide if homosexual marriage will be an option for the people of Massachusetts. \"Other states in the country will have to accept that,\" he argued.\n\n When I asked how such a ruling would make any difference in his own marriage, Santorum replied, \"It changes society's view of what marriage is. Therefore, I would argue that it undermines the unique and special privileges given to you as a married couple, and it changes society's view of the importance of that unique bond.\"\n\n I apologized to the senator for not grasping his point. My wife and I didn't believe that our union was influenced by anyone else's. \"Okay,\" he said. \"Well, what are your children going to learn in school?... They do teach about marriage. They teach about all social constructs. They have to. And as a result, there'll be a feeling within the educational community that we have to address this issue. So there will be an impact on the entire culture\u2014and, I would argue, not a positive one.\"\n\n I found myself considering Santorum's children\u2014seven at last count, including one born four months premature who subsequently died. (Karen lost their eighth to a miscarriage on the day the AP story broke.) Since the eldest, Elizabeth, was born in 1991, the Santorum children have been reliable stage props in every one of Rick's campaigns. At the same time, he and Karen profess a need to shelter their children. During his 2000 campaign, the senator acknowledged that he and his wife practiced homeschooling because \"I hate to say this, but we get to pick who their friends are.\" And now his comments to me implied that it wasn't his marriage he worried about so much as what his children might come to think of the institution\u2014and perhaps what choices they might make as a result.\n\n As Santorum munched on his coleslaw, I asked what he would do if one of his children came to him to confess homosexual urges. The senator did not spew forth the contents of his mouth. \"I would treat it like I would any other thing my child comes to me with,\" he said. \"Try to deal with it in a loving, supportive way. You try to point out to them what is the right thing to do. And we have many temptations to do things we shouldn't do. That doesn't mean we have to give in to those temptations. I have temptations, as we all do, all the time, to do things we shouldn't do. Whether we have that disposition because of environmental factors, genetic factors, whatever, it doesn't mean you have to submit. We are people of free will and free choices.\"\n\n But, I pressed, what if your child chose to be gay, as Vice President Cheney's daughter had? Surely you would still love that child.\n\n \"It's all you can do,\" Santorum said. \"And I commend those parents who are in those difficult situations, and I would say to all of them, continue to be close to your children, continue to love them, continue to support them. Continue to help them in their life in a way that would lead them to a better and happier life.\"\n\n Lead them to a better and happier life... A few days earlier, I spoke with Dick and Melina Waldo and Allen and Fran Kirschner, four parents who had met recently in Santorum's office to discuss their gay children. Though the senator's staff insisted that the meeting was by no means heated or uncomfortable, the pain and shell shock were evident in the parents' voices a month after the exchange. They had brought photographs of their children, which the senator barely glanced at. They spoke of their wishes for happiness for those children. Santorum was unmoved. He did not wish to talk about anything personal. \"Ma'am, are you a lawyer?\" he abruptly asked Melina Waldo. \"Because I'm a lawyer, and what you're discussing is the law of the land.\" There is no right to privacy in the Constitution, he said. He insisted that he had nothing personal against homosexuals\u2014that once upon a time he lived next door to a gay couple. He concluded the meeting, the parents told me, without extending a hand or even saying good-bye.\n\n \"We tried so hard to put a positive image on what families with gay children look like,\" lamented Fran Kirschner. \"He wouldn't let us. It was almost as if he didn't want to let us in.\"\n\n Santorum's friends have attested to the passion of his beliefs. But passion without empathy is only stridency, unbound by tolerance or reason. \"Look at it this way,\" says Michael J. Perry, professor of law at Wake Forest University. \"There are certain acts that married couples engage in that the state might legitimately proscribe, [such as] married couples cutting one another up for sexual pleasure; the fact of marriage doesn't mean that it's protected. And at the same time, the fact that a couple isn't married doesn't mean that everything [they do] is unprotected. Yes, moral norms should govern sexual relationships. Otherwise you'd be oblivious to lack of consent, exploitation and abuse. But none of those moral norms lead you to the conclusion that a gay relationship is unjust, since those things can occur in a heterosexual marriage, too.\"\n\n Santorum is unswayed by such reasoning. His moral code is linked less to Roman Catholic orthodoxy\u2014after all, the pope condemns capital punishment\u2014than it is to an archconservative's catalog of abominations. \"Gays, for him, are easy pickings,\" says Andrew Sullivan, the famously gay and Roman Catholic social commentator. \"We're the first target. But straight people are next. Remember, the root of his horror at the Supreme Court's sexual-privacy decision was the Griswold contraception case. Santorum apparently believes that contraception is just as sinful as gay sex. If one should be illegal, why not the other?\"\n\n The truth is that Santorum's moral reach is as long as our capacity for sin is wide. In a 1999 speech to the Heritage Foundation, he revealed his motive for helping the dispossessed\u2014namely, that such issues \"reflect an impoverishment of the soul more than the pocketbook.... Nothing is as powerful as religious faith in protecting the most vulnerable in, and the least beneficial to, society.\"\n\n Yet the thrust of his speech wasn't about helping others. It was about judging them for their moral flimsiness. \"How is it possible, I wonder, to believe in the existence of God,\" he said, \"yet refuse to express outrage when His moral code is flouted? To have faith in God but to reject moral absolutes? My answer to these questions is that it simply is not possible.\" The government's neutrality on the matter of religion, Santorum contended, was \"an impossibility.\" Faith in America had become \"little more than a toothless tiger.... If we want a society that reveres life, that defends the family and that discourages delinquency and promotes decency, we cannot force a privatization of religion; we must allow the truth claims of religious faith to be uttered aloud in the public square.\"\n\n Of course, Santorum isn't some marginal character in the public square yammering like Nietzsche's fool that \"God is dead!\" When he utters truth claims, they standa good chance of becoming law. After years of apathy on abortion, he burst one day into the Senate chamber, a chrysalis exploding from a cocoon of doubt, and declared for the record, \"It's not just some cells, it's not just some tissue\u2014it's a baby!\" Seven years after his epiphany, due in large part to his stewardship, a ban on partial-birth abortions is on the verge of becoming the law of the land. Pro-choice legislators who sided with him, persuaded by the grisliness of the procedure, are left to wonder: Have they clambered aboard a slippery slope? Have they, in banning a monstrous deed, created a monster? Where will Rick Santorum go from here?\n\n \"You're asking me if I've planned the next move?\" he replied in the Senate dining room. Smirking a bit, he muttered, \"I wish I had a plan.\"\n\n He stared at his unmarred fingers as if marshaling his thoughts on \"the great moral issue of our time\": abortion. \"Well, there are a whole bunch of issues out there,\" Santorum continued. \"There's the fetalhomicide bill, which is coming up\u2014the Laci Peterson bill.\" Abruptly his litany faltered. \"Um,\" he began, then checked himself. The next words came out slowly: \"The court has really limited us to a great degree.\"\n\n He paused again, suspending that thought, and it hung there like an albatross: The court. It's limiting us. The court. It's limiting us. And for a fleeting instant, Rick Santorum did not look much like the handsome stranger who strode boldly into the avaricious inner sanctum of Washington. His eyes turned inward, his posture stiffened. The court... I wish I had a plan. \n\n \"You have a plan, and God has a plan,\" he said. \"Thank God, His plan's always better than yours.\" And now the words flowed without pause, without qualification\u2014smooth and forthright, like a television commercial, the focus never wavering, the lens sternly indifferent to the low and sinister clamor of dining-room deal-making. The deeply divided world beyond was quickly replaced by this tight unyielding shot of a leader, a divider, a man of acts to be judged and of fights to be joined...and yes, of course, of beliefs to be reckoned with. We are Americans, and Rick Santorum is an American leader, and we are in his plans.\n\n Robert Draper is a GQ writer-at-large."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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