As I have said on more than
one occasion, one of the perks of living close to Iowa during caucus
season is getting a chance to see the presidential candidates up close.
After a two-month layoff, I had the chance to go back to Iowa Wednesday
night and listen to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum speak at a
house in Sioux Center. It was officially described as a house party, but
it also had a lot of town hall elements to it as well. Sen. Santorum spoke for roughly two hours and then visited with the roughly 40 people who attended.
Among the topics that he spoke on were:- National security and radical Islam -- National security has been a common theme among the GOP candidates that I've heard and for good reason. Not only have recent attacks by followers of ISIS and the continued menace of Iran made people in America worry, but national security might be the GOP's strongest issue come Nov. 8, 2016. Santorum said that the way to defeat ISIS is to take their land (thus depriving them of their caliphate) and that Iran must not be allowed to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. Santorum's comments on national security overlapped with his comments on radical Islam, where the senator elaborated on the dangers that radical Islam poses to the world while displaying his knowledge on the topic.
- Immigration -- Santorum is known for his anti-amnesty views on immigration and spoke about them them Wednesday. He said that those who are here illegally "need to leave" and proposed using E-verify to combat illegal immigration, saying that cutting off the financial incentive to come here illegally would go a long way toward solving the problem. He also said that amnesty is not fair to those who came here legally and followed the rules.
- Other issues -- Santorum also reiterated his pro-life stance on abortion and choking up while speaking about his daughter, Bella, who was born with Edwards syndrome. He also highlighted his views on marriage, mentioning that he had proposed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man and one woman in the wake of a 2003 Supreme Court decision that struck down anti-sodomy laws in Texas. Additionally, Santorum proposed a 20 percent flat tax to replace the current income tax system.
- After the event, Sen. Santorum and one of the attendees engaged in a discussion about immigration. While the attendee and Santorum disagreed on the issue, the discussion remained civil.
- Santorum brought up an interesting point on the immigration issue. He said that the biggest opponents of amnesty were immigrants who had came here legally and went through all of the legal processes that they were supposed to. Along those lines, Santorum and Sen. Ted Cruz -- two of the strongest amnesty opponents in the presidential race -- both had fathers who were immigrants and came here legally.
- One concern that Santorum expressed about a nuclear Iran was the prospect of the Iranians using a nuclear explosion to create an electormagnetic pulse (EMP) that could potentially devastate the United States' electrical power grid. On an aside, the Soviet Union used a similar tactic to conquer the United States and win the Cold War in the 1987 ABC miniseries Amerika.
Here a few photos from Wednesday. Jacob Hall took the one of me with the senator.
