Santorum enters 2016 race, champions workers

CABOT, Pa. - Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania who was the runner-up for the 2012 Republican nomination, announced his second presidential bid Wednesday with a vow to fight for the forgotten American worker.

"Working families don't need another president tied to big government - or big money - and today is the day we're going to begin to fight back," Santorum, 57, declared, flanked by his family, including six of his seven children, at a factory here near his boyhood home.

This time, he won't have the advantage of being able to sneak up on people.

Santorum, who built his career on support of family values and opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, has appealed primarily to social conservatives, but he faces intense competition for that vote from candidates such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (who won the 2008 Iowa caucuses), and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

In all, more than a dozen Republicans are running or expected to run for the nomination, the most crowded field in decades. The former two-term senator will have to fight to poll in the top 10 to be included in the first televised GOP debate Aug. 6.

Santorum was the surprise winner in the 2012 Iowa caucuses, lifted by a surge of votes from evangelical Christians. He went on to win in 10 more states, capitalizing on conservative doubts about Mitt Romney.

This time, Santorum is downplaying the cultural issues and focusing on an economic populist message.

On Wednesday he called for a flat tax, which critics say would be a windfall for wealthier taxpayers, and a smaller federal government. He said the federal government's inability to control immigration had flooded the nation with 35 million mostly unskilled workers over the last 20 years and blamed an alliance of big business and political leaders such as Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"The result? Workers' wages and family incomes have flatlined," Santorum said. "Their priorities are profits and power."

The backdrop for Santorum's announcement nodded to his two messages. Penn United Technologies Inc. makes precision equipment for the oil and gas industries, among others, and its 600 employees have an ownership stake in the company. It also says on its website and in promotional materials that it was founded as a Christian company, adding, "We exist to glorify God."

Santorum grew up in Butler, 13 miles north of here, on the grounds of the Veterans Administration hospital, where his father was a psychologist and his mother a nurse.

At times the difference in Santorum's approach has been stark. At a gathering of 1,000 Christian conservatives in Iowa last month, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker read from an inspirational book, and Cruz implored the activists to get on their knees and pray to stop the Supreme Court from legalizing same-sex marriage.

Santorum, by contrast, called for an increase in the minimum wage and said that the Republican Party needed to abandon its 35-year emphasis on tax cuts for the wealthy and speak to the needs of the majority of Americans without a college degree.

The grandson of an Italian immigrant coal miner, Santorum has long had a streak of populism in his political persona, but it had been obscured by his other stances. So far, the new emphasis is not getting much traction with the party's base.

A RealClearPolitics average of five recent national polls found Santorum drawing 2.3 percentage points, 10th among the Republican presidential hopefuls.

But the campaign is just beginning, said Santorum strategist John Brabender, and the message will be heard. "He's not a senator or a governor, and he doesn't have his own TV show - and his last name isn't Bush," Brabender said.

Until just a few days before the 2012 caucuses, Santorum, an underfunded outsider, was almost an afterthought. He schlepped through all 99 of Iowa's counties, appearing in the small towns far from Des Moines, and that work paid off. But Santorum's 34-vote victory over Romney was not confirmed until two weeks after the fact because of problems with the count. He still resents being robbed of momentum.

Santorum has said he has to score big in Iowa, and his campaign announced trips to the Hawkeye State and to South Carolina, which also has a big evangelical electorate.

In Iowa, though, many of Santorum's senior advisers and grassroots supporters have signed on with other candidates. Field organizer Chuck Laudner, who ferried Santorum around the state in the Dodge Ram pickup dubbed the "Chuck Truck," is working for Donald Trump. Matt Schultz, the former Iowa secretary of state, was the only statewide official to endorse Santorum last time. This cycle, he is chairman of Cruz's Iowa effort.

"It's going to be extremely difficult for Rick to catch lightning in a bottle again," said Sam Clovis, a Sioux City conservative activist who endorsed Santorum in 2012. "The field is too deep; there are too many good options for people."

Case in point: Clovis is uncommitted, though Santorum cut an ad for him last year when Clovis ran in Iowa's GOP primary for U.S. Senate.

Kim Lehman, a former Republican national committeewoman from Iowa, said she was going to stick with Santorum because he's proven. "People like what's new, but he's tried and true," said Lehman, who once headed Iowa Right to Life. "He has my values, and he doesn't change his positions. I know I can depend on him."

Indeed, during his announcement, Santorum made sure to remind listeners of his commitments on social issues, though briefly.

"As president, I will stand for the principle that every life matters - the poor, the disabled, and the unborn," he said at one point. Santorum also pledged to "fight for the freedom for you to believe what you are called to believe, not just in your places of worship, but outside your places of worship, too," an indirect reference to the controversy over whether religious opponents of same-sex marriage can refuse to provide goods or services to same-sex couples.

Santorum reminded the audience of several hundred, which included supporters from more than two dozen states, that he has been an underdog before - in his 1990 election to the U.S House and his two elections to the Senate, for instance, as well as in 2012.

"Last time we changed the debate," he said. "This time, with your help and the grace of God, we can change this nation."

215-854-2718@tomfitzgerald

www.philly.com/bigtent