The beatitudes of Rick Santorum

In an article of the same title in the Orlando Sentinel, Kathleen Parker says some nice things about Rick Santorum, Republican U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania who is in danger of losing his seat in the upcoming elections. I don't pay all that much attention to politics, but I have heard of Santorum and didn't realize that he had such a good and reasonable record (I had forgotten that he had "...been pushing Congress to donate ever larger sums to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria", see previous blog post:

Rick Santorum can't seem to win for losing, no matter what he does. The U.S. senator from Pennsylvania could save AIDS babies in Africa, end genocide in Darfur and put welfare mothers to work in his own office -- and he'd still be despised by a sizable number of those who hope Democrat Robert Casey Jr. will defeat him come November. Come to think of it, Santorum has tried all those things mentioned above, with some success, but often at great political cost. He has worked for global AIDS relief with Bono, the U2 rock star and one of Santorum's more unlikely fans. For his AIDS efforts, Santorum earned the contempt (and veiled threats) of some in the abstinence-only, family-values crowd. Santorum has been a leader in trying to stop genocide in Sudan, which he views as a front in the war against ideological Islam -- and has sponsored every major piece of legislation created toward that end. At home in Pennsylvania, he put five welfare mothers to work in his own offices while leading the movement that resulted in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton. Santorum, in other words, is one of those rare politicians who puts his money where his mouth is -- even though his usual supporters turn on him as a result. And yet his staunch Roman Catholicism has earned him a reputation in some quarters as a weirdo. If Santorum is "too Catholic," he has company in his opponent, who is also a Catholic and a near-mirror image of Santorum on most of the hot-button issues... The latest Pennsylvania poll, conducted Sept. 22-24 by Strategic Vision Political, shows Casey leading Santorum 50 percent to 40 percent, with 10 percent undecided. It's not clear what voters will gain by electing Casey given that the two candidates are seemingly indistinguishable, but there's no guessing what they'll lose in Santorum. Love him or hate him, for the past decade, Santorum has been the conservatives' point man for the world's disenfranchised -- the poor, the sick and the meek. If he loses, the face of compassionate conservatism will be gone.