Rising conservative star Rick Santorum stopped by the radio show today, just days after his amazing showing in the Iowa Caucus.
“I'm up here in New Hampshire and just finished an event in Manchester and headed up to Northfield which is in the beautiful Lakes region here in New Hampshire and we had a crowd last night in Brentwood, 300 people jammed into a place. They were out the doors. Just wonderful response, people signing up. People coming by our headquarters, dropping off checks. Got folks coming and volunteering,” Santorum said.
Glenn asked Santorum about the difference in spending between he and the other frontruneer, Mitt Romney.
“Chuck Grassley told me this at the very beginning when I first got out there. It's that you can't buy Iowa. And you know what? You can't buy New Hampshire. I don't know how much time you spend up there in the State of New Hampshire. Just about everybody in New Hampshire is an elected official. I mean, you run for everything up here. I mean, and your state legislature, there's 400 of them in New Hampshire and they get paid $100 a year,” Santroum said.
“And so the idea that people are just going to listen to TV ads and listen to what the national media says or what the national poll said, that's just, that is not New Hampshire. And I've been up here, this is my 31st visit. I'm done over 100 town hall meetings. We have a great base of support up here and it's building everybody day and we feel very comfortable that the citizen participants up here in New Hampshire are going to do what's necessary to make sure that our country turns around and they are going to give us a little bump.”
Glenn asked Santorum to come onto GBTV for an extended interview, saying that he wanted to get to know the candidate more and wondered if he filled the “hole in America” that needed to be filled by a Winston Churchill figure. Glenn noted that Churchill was run out of town for speaking out against the dangers of Germany. Glenn noted and has noted in the past that Santorum had a similar experience when he was speaking out against radical Islam and was eventually voted out of office in Pennsylvania.
“Well, I shrink at comparing myself to anybody, a huge historical figure like Winston Churchill. So if we can put the Churchill relationship away because that's a little ‑‑ I'm a huge Churchill fan and wouldn't even say my name in the same breath. So let me just say this, that they did run me out of town in Pennsylvania and, you know, I lost my lot. But as you know, we did a ton of interviews during that time and we were saying words like Churchill back then but they didn't want to hear it. I was out there talking about Iran and I was out there talking about winning in Iraq at a time when people said we needed to leave and tuck tail and take our lumps and get out and it wasn't popular. And I understand that, and I took ‑‑ I took the lumps but I didn't give up. And I went out there and worked on national security issues for the last five years as a think tank and wrote about it and lectured all over the country, on college campuses even on radical Islam and the threat of Iran in particular. And now here we are. And look. Look at Iran. Look at what they're on the precipice of. In a sense we're at this moment, everyone thinks the economy's the number one issue, and it is, but the president of the United States of course, while he can have some impact in the economy, runs the national security of our country. That's what president does. That's his constitutional duty. And having someone I think in ‑‑ as the nominee of our party who's got it right on these issues at a time when I think national security may be the biggest issue going into the fall election given what is possible in Iran between now and November,” Santorum said.
Santorum also took time to defend the attacks that are coming and have come at him throughout the election cycle.
“You know, people may not believe what I believe but they know that I believe what I believe. And I think that's really an important thing. That these folks are going to go and hit me, they are going to say, oh, you said this, and you can't be this extreme. And I'll say, well, I did say this, I'm not extreme, and here's why,” he said.