“If it wasn’t for him, that plant wouldn’t be here right now,’’ Strelick said. “That’s the truth.’’
Not everyone agrees with Strelick’s portrait of Santorum as the hero of the hour. But Santorum, it can be fairly be said, shows up.
He is nothing if not relentless. Political friends and foes alike say Santorum’s success over the years in elections he had no business winning owes much to his turbo-charged style of campaigning. In Iowa, where he scored an upset near-victory last week in the caucuses, he visited the state’s 99 counties in a Dodge pickup and often accompanied by one of his seven children; his wife and family temporarily relocated to the state during the campaign.
The tenacity extends to Santorum’s social conservatism, driven by a devout Roman Catholic faith that family and friends say deepened with the death of a newborn child and the genetic illness of another. Santorum defends his anti-abortion-rights, anti-gun-control, antihomosexuality stances with a certitude that has won him a devoted following, but has also struck many, even those inclined to his positions, as overboard, and sometimes borderline bizarre.
There was his claim that the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal erupted in Boston because of the city’s “academic, political and cultural liberalism’’ and his pointed exchange over limits on abortion with Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, in which he asked whether a fetus would be considered a baby if one foot, or even one toe, was still inside the womb.
Santorum is also an unvarnished critic of homosexuality - or, more precisely, homosexual sex. His position echoes Catholic church teachings but his rhetoric on the subject has been, at times, so scathing that when he was misquoted as comparing gay sexuality to “man on dog’’ bestiality it was widely taken as something he might well have said. The controversy helped shape Santorum’s image as a figure out of step with Pennsylvania’s more moderate voters.
