Back in the day, I spent a couple of years with Dan Savage as my editor and immediate boss, so when I say that I blame Dan for many things, know that it’s personal. And one of those things, unfortunately, is that I can’t stop giggling about Santorum’s come-from-behind victory (OK, near-victory) in Iowa, and where that leaves him in the mix.
OK. I’ll stop now. Really.
But in the glare of media attention this week that has followed Santorum’s Iowa surge, one bit of history has been almost totally absent, and it shouldn’t be. That is the utter venality of a man whose entire campaign has been a crusade – and I use that term carefully and intentionally – to impose his morals on the rest of us.
Santorum’s righteous morals, however, haven’t extended to political corruption, as we learn in this snippet from DubyaTime:
Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican–a senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors. “The underlying theme was [to] place Republicans in key positions on K Street. Everybody taking part was a Republican and understood that that was the purpose of what we were doing,” says Rod Chandler, a retired congressman and lobbyist who has participated in the Santorum meetings. “It’s been a very successful effort.”
That’s a passage describing the so-called “K-Street Project,” a pay-for-play scheme, launched by Tom Delay and Grover Norquist, which tied lobbyist “access” to Congress with a revolving door of lucrative jobs for Republican staffers and former elected officials like Chandler. Santorum’s partner in crime in his shepherding of this scheme? Jack Abramoff, the eponymous center of a sprawling corruption scandal that sent one Republican lawmaker and several staff members and Bush Administration officials to prison, and should have resulted in the imprisonment of many more. The Republican congressional caucus in the mid-’00s was a working definition of “culture of corruption,” and Santorum was one of its champions.
The campaign of Newt Gingrich has gotten a lot of attention for the jarring dissonance between Gingrich’s smug calls for morality (if you’re a poor black kid, say) and his own past ethical lapses, but Santorum’s hypocrisy is just as glaring. And there’s a bonus: focusing on Santorum’s role in the worst DC corruption case in a generation also reminds voters that much of the Republican field, including likely nominee Willard Romney, is just as cozy with and eager to do the bidding of the corporate lobby industry – exactly the sort of financial cronyism that has pissed off so much of the country.
This bit of fairly recent history should be shouted from the rooftops. The last time Republicans ran all three branches of government, they turned DC into an ethical cesspool. What better way to remind voters of what that looked and smelled like, than with the sudden emergence of a generous pile of Santorum?
