Collegian staffers weigh in after attending Santorum-Casey debate: Casey

By Francesca Lo Basso
Collegian Editor
October 18, 2006

I may have only been on a farm once in my life, but last night I saw enough mud-slinging to last me a lifetime. In the proper fashion of egalitarian democracy, the Bob Casey, Jr.-Sen. Rick Santorum debate at the National Constitution Center was filled with snide comments, crude interjections and unnecessary slander – on both sides. However, I’ll say this much for Casey, Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for Senate: he didn’t start it.

After Casey’s opening response, Santorum dug right in with fawning praise for the Constitution Center and Philadelphia and this great representation of historic democracy and thanks for having me and it’s great to be here and...oops, your time is up.

Throughout the debate, Santorum kept a running tally of how many times he felt Casey avoided answering a question, punctuating the beginning of each of his responses with “0 for 2” and “0 for 3” so that it sounded more like a recap of an Eagles game than a political function.

Casey went on to discuss that “we need a new direction for America: accountability” and this accountability means getting rid of Donald Rumsfeld – something I couldn’t agree with more. He pointed out that Rumsfeld was conspicuously absent in 2002 and 2003 when he should have been putting pressure on the administration to take every possible measure before issuing military action. While Santorum is keen on dropping a bomb at the drop of a hat (saying things like “You don’t negotiate with terrorists,” and sprinkling his foreign policy agenda with the words “aggressive” and “strike”), Casey is more focused on implementing and enforcing sanctions, such as preventing Iran from receiving foreign gasoline, seeing as how 40 percent of their oil comes from outside the country.

Santorum made a point of saying it’s crucial that we “define our enemy, which my opponent didn’t do,” but his meaning of a definite enemy is to declare war on “Islamic fascism.” Yes, Mr. Santorum, let’s aggressively strike an ideology because that has a red “X” over it on a map of the world. But the real jaw-dropper came when Santorum gave a dig to the entire Democratic Party by somehow interjecting the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal into a talk about Social Security. Santorum said he’s been trying to reform social security since 1996 until “other stuff happened and we, um, got sidetracked.”

But, the best is yet to come. Each candidate is allowed to ask the other candidate one question, and when it came turn for Casey’s, he said that, in honor of a longstanding tradition by Pennsylvania senators, he is going to release five years worth of his tax returns. He asked Santorum if he would do the same, and Santorum’s response – and believe me, comrades, this is the stuff where reality is far more deliciously perverse than anything fiction could contrive – was to say, “Yes, I’ll do the same, but it will be embarrassing for me because of how much money I have.”

Take that, residents of Philadelphia – a city where more than half of the population lives on less than $35,000 a year and 10 percent of the population is below the poverty level. We feel embarrassed, too that you purport to represent our interests.

lobassof1@lasalle.edu