After a campaign that didn't quite get a candidate where they he or she wanted to go, many are willing to happily sink into the backgrund or launch new careers. Some end up on cable news, while others try their hand at radio. And while many still support the principles they campaigned on, fewer have taken an active role in shaping the elections once they've left their candidacy. Rick Santorum, who arguably was the closest to winning the nomination behind Romney, has decided to continue to stand for conservative principles with his new 501(c)4 organization Patriot Voices, "a grassroots and online community of Americans from across the country committed to promoting faith, family, freedom and opportunity in accordance with the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."
Transcript of the the interview is below:
GLENN: Rick Santorum is here. Oh, jeez, now he's got another website to push. Jeez, I thought we just got out of this Rick Santorumforpresident.org thing and now Pat, every time he's going to talk to him, is going to say patriotvoices.org.
Rick, how are you, sir?
SANTORUM: I thought I was listening to, like, a speech at the academy awards. I mean...
GLENN: Except you don't get a trophy at the ‑‑ you don't get a trophy.
SANTORUM: I want to thank my mom, I want to thank my mom and... no, that was good. Congratulations on the contract.
GLENN: Thank you very much.
SANTORUM: That's good job. Good job. Congratulations and many, many more.
GLENN: Let's talk about you because you're making me wildly uncomfortable talking about me. I don't do it very often. Let me ‑‑
STU: Okay. By the way, you can hear all this on GBTV.
GLENN: Come on! I was the only one who stood up in that meeting and said it shouldn't be named that!
SANTORUM: I never hear you pitching anything on the show.
GLENN: Shush, shush, shush. It's making me very uncomfortable.
SANTORUM: Yes, of course.
GLENN: All right. So Rick, people say that you launched this thing this weekend, patriotvoices.org, which is a 50 ‑‑ 501 ‑‑
SANTORUM: (C)(4).
GLENN: (C)(4).
SANTORUM: Right.
GLENN: Which means ‑‑
PAT: You're running for president in 2016. Basically, essentially that's what it means, doesn't it?
SANTORUM: No, it doesn't. It means we want to be active as much. I can't go out and say this was the most important election in the history of our country and as I was out on the campaign trail and then because the campaign wasn't ultimately successful in making me the nominee, I'm going to pack up my bags and go home. I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of folks who have signed up to help us, we have over 3 1/2 million votes and we have a lot of folks that we hear from a regular basis that want to keep the things that we talked about during the campaign out there and have concerns about the Republican establishment and going forward and whether conservatism is going to, you know, it's going to be front and center and so we're going to use this organization to try to, you know, keep those issues out there, help candidates that support those issues. And I've made it very clear one of the objections is to make sure that Barack Obama's defeated and that we elect a House and a Senate that can get some of the things that are necessary to get done in this country.
GLENN: Okay.
SANTORUM: So this is part of how we're going to help going forward.
GLENN: All right. So help me out. Because Rand Paul came out and he's getting all sorts of heat. And, of course, you're a neocon, too. Rand Paul came out and endorsed Mitt Romney, and immediately he is the Antichrist with the libertarian right and, you know, is, you know, fighting for the destruction of America somehow or another. Can you please explain how a vote that isn't cast is a vote for Barack Obama and what the differences are between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, in case anybody is unclear?
SANTORUM: Well, I mean, Barack Obama's trying to fundamentally restructure America into a country that is unlike the country that we were founded to be and that made us the greatest country in the history of the world. That's the premise of my campaign. That hasn't changed. Barack Obama has a fundamentally different view of what America should be. And it's rooted, as you've talked about in his history which, of course, nobody wants to talk about, but it's been displayed clearly in his public policies which are oriented toward accumulating more power and control into Washington, D.C. It's the destruction of dissemination of the family and media institutions between the individual and government. I mean, it is a comprehensive agenda. Let's just be very clear about this. What Barack Obama wants to do to this country and make it into a European social welfare state and that's probably the kindest thing I could say about what his objective is. Mitt Romney and I have some differences on issues. Mitt Romney understands the greatness of America. He understands the foundational premise of America, limited government, free people, strong families and strong communities. He may not have in my opinion adhered to that on everything he's ever done but his foundational understanding of free enterprise and capitalism and limited government and strong family and media institutions, I have no question about. And that is a fundamental difference between these two candidates that has to be laid out and laid out clearly. Anybody who chooses to step aside in this battle has stepped ‑‑ has basically disarmed themselves and in so doing enabled ‑‑ who otherwise I think would vote for Romney have enabled the other side to have the upper hand.
GLENN: Okay. So your, your objective with Patriot Voices is to stand, to obviously stand, you know, against Barack Obama but will you also ‑‑ let me just ask the question: Will you also stand ‑‑ when Romney wins, will you stand against the GOP and Romney if they start more of this bailout nonsense and everything else?
SANTORUM: Yeah. I've been clear about that. We're here to support candidates that are the best candidates available out there to forward the American exceptionalism view of public policy is to, you know, limited government, free people, strong families, et cetera. At the same time we're going to be here past the election, we're going to be here during the election, and we're going to be an issue‑oriented organization. We are going to hold, whether it's Governor Romney or others, accountable for their campaigns as well as what they do if they're successful in their campaign.
GLENN: Let me ask you this: I know you're for Ted Cruz and you're for Liljenquist, are you not, in Utah?
SANTORUM: I haven't done the official endorsements of that but I have, in fact the last time I talked about this officially was on your show, but for me it's important that we have a strong principle ‑‑ if we can't elect a strong vocal principle conservative in Texas and Utah, what hope do we have? We're not going to elect them in Massachusetts and Maine. We have to go to the states where we can elect these types of real, you know, transformational conservative figures in states that can elect transformational conservative figures, and certainly Utah and Texas are two of them and to me the race is pretty clear as to who those figures are and it's Liljenquist and Cruz.
GLENN: Orrin Hatch has to be a friend of yours.
SANTORUM: Orrin's a good man. I like Orrin. I really do. But, you know, he's been very kind to me over the years but it's time for Utah to have another Mike Lee, someone who's making a difference down there in Washington, D.C.
GLENN: What do you think of Rubio?
SANTORUM: I like what I hear. I mean, I think he's a dynamic, articulate spokesperson. I think he has, you know, he has really a gift to be able to communicate in a very compelling way a vision for the country. I think he's got the vision thing down very well. I may not agree with him on every single issue. He represents a different constituency in Florida than I did in Pennsylvania, but I think he's a great future leader of our country.
GLENN: Is he a ‑‑ is he a ‑‑ is he a true small government conservative?
SANTORUM: Like I said, he represents different constituencies in Florida than I do and there are some issues that we don't necessarily see eye to eye on, but look, my sense is in listening to him and hearing him talk and following him in his career that he is ‑‑ he's understood like a lot of folks as we've gone through these last four or five years that were reaching a point where, you know, things that we may ‑‑ that you may have been able to go along with in the past just simply aren't viable and we need to do what Scott Walker's done, let's provide real strong principled leadership, let's get ‑‑ let's not just talk the rhetoric and understand the vision but let's have that vision actually play, you know, play itself through in the public policy that you support. I can't comment other than the fact that I think a lot of, a lot of conservatives hopefully are coming around to this and getting away from some of the things that they may have done in the past.
GLENN: There is a ‑‑ there is an article in Hemispheres magazine. I'd just like to get your, you know, your idea on this. Hemispheres asks Michelle Obama the question about, you know, saving the planet and, you know, she's really grounded in this gardening bullcrap that she's, you know, pumping out which I believe all the best gardeners come from, you know, right inner city Chicago.
SANTORUM: Inner city Chicago, yeah.
STU: (Laughing.)
GLENN: But she's asked by how fragile the world is, et cetera, et cetera. And she says, wow, you're asking me to go deeper than I've ever gone before. Jeez. Well, I'm sure it's part about being a mother and watching my own kids grow. They're at the age where they're starting to sprout like a garden in summer. It's such a powerful thing to watch a kid change shoe sizes in just a matter of months. It reminds you that time is fleeting. Things happen. A seed turns into life. It's instantaneous in a way. But then you have to care for that life.
SANTORUM: Ooh.
GLENN: Do you have any gardening comments on that?
SANTORUM: Yeah. We have, you know, seeds that turn into life all the time in America and that unfortunately he and ‑‑ she and her husband don't recognize the dignity of that life when it germinates. But maybe I go off in a different direction there. Look, this is ‑‑ it's wonderful happy talk because it isn't have any real moral implications. The fact of the matter is that what they are ‑‑ what they are putting forward is a ‑‑ and I said this during the campaign and I got a lot of pushback on it but I called President Obama's environmental policies a radical theology. And let me just be clear ‑‑ and I didn't back away from it, and I'm not because it is a ‑‑ it is a in part a faith. It is a ‑‑ it's not a faith in a higher being. It's a faith in nature. It's a faith in sort of this radical element where, you know, nature is the object of our existence, not the other way around. God isn't ‑‑ you know, God is the creator of nature but, no, nature is a creator itself and we have to honor nature. That to me is a very, very scary view of how the world is ordered. And it allows for a lack of moral principles and implication because there's no higher being to call it to. So a lot of this radical environmentalism is rooted in something that I think we have to be very, very careful as to what we're teaching our children and I think we have to teach about creators and we have to teach about the creation, not teach about Mother Earth being something that we have to, you know, to serve.
GLENN: Rick Santorum ‑‑
PAT: And to hear more you wouldn't go to RickSantorum.com anymore. You'd go to patriotvoices.org, isn't that right?
GLENN: Yeah, yeah.
SANTORUM. It's dot‑com, not dot‑org.
PAT: Dot‑com. Patriotvoices.com.
SANTORUM: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. Thank you so much.
GLENN: All right, all right, all right you two. Thank you very much.
SANTORUM: I know you don't hawk things on your show. So I really appreciate that you took the time to do this.
GLENN: Patriotvoices, is it dot‑com, dot‑org?
PAT: Dot‑com, patriotvoices.com.
GLENN: All right. Okay, Rick. Thank you very much. I appreciate it, sir. Possibly the guy that if Romney doesn't win, possibly the guy that will be the next president of what's left of the United States of America in 2016.
