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National Review
Santorum, the Blue-Collar Brawler
His message for Romney: Bring on the re-match.
January 12, 2015
By Eliana Johnson

I’m sitting across from Rick Santorum at a Corner Bakery Cafe on North Capitol Street, near the U.S. Capitol, when a news alert flashes across my phone. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Mitt Romney has told a group of his top donors that he is seriously considering a third White House bid.

Santorum smiles broadly. “Bring it on,” he says. The surprise runner-up in the 2012 Republican primary, Santorum won eleven primaries and caucuses before eventually conceding a hard-fought battle to Romney. Now, he wants a rematch.

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Though the 2016 Republican field is likely to be crowded with candidates looking to woo conservative Christians, Santorum is not cowed. Asked what unique space he thinks he would fill in the field, he says, “The winner.”

“If we get in, we’re getting in to win,” Santorum says. “I’m not getting in to play a role. I’d get in because I think I have what it takes to win a primary and because I think I have what it takes to win a general election.” He talks like he’s already announced his campaign. “I’m not just in it to win a primary,” he says.

Santorum isn’t shying away from a confrontation with Jeb Bush, either. “Most Americans earn what they get. They don’t start off with a head start,” he says. He acknowledges that there are benefits and drawbacks to nominating somebody like Bush, a political legacy with near-universal name recognition, but it doesn’t take much prodding to get him to offer his own opinion. “Obviously if I thought it was really a good thing, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here at the table,” he says.

Santorum has long delighted in poking his finger in the eye of the Washington establishment and, based on the media coverage his preliminary campaign moves have generated – close to zero – one might suspect that the establishment is repaying him in kind. But Santorum has proven he has the ability to make himself a force despite long odds. His brashness and refusal, at the age of 35, to respect the Senate’s traditional rules of seniority in many ways prefigured the dozens of lawmakers who would be swept to office by the Tea Party. His election to the Senate in 1994, a rebuke to Clinton health-care plan that he denounced gleefully on the campaign trail, may prove relevant once again on the debate stage in 2016...

Read the rest of the article at the National Review


 
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