IOWA CITY ? In Iowa this week, Rick Santorum looks for the first time like he?s in the right place at the right moment in the presidential campaign.
But to listen to the candidate speak, you might think that place is the floor of the United States Senate, and the moment is 1998.
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There is growing evidence, both from polls and anecdotally, that while Santorum may not have fully caught fire in Iowa, the once-cold embers of his campaign are hot and starting to glow. With Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann drifting toward irrelevance, Newt Gingrich?s poll numbers plummeting and Herman Cain off the stage entirely, the state?s conservative and evangelical faithful may be giving Santorum a long and serious look. Santorum, after all, has campaigned the Iowa way ? traveling the state relentlessly, taking questions for hours, hunting caucus support voter by voter.
Yet even as Santorum enjoys the moment of national attention he?s labored for months to earn, the former Pennsylvania senator hasn?t put to rest the central challenge of his campaign: showing voters that he?s the best fit for the moment that is 2012, rather than a political holdover who?s been out of office for half a decade and whose political touchstones are ancient history to many voters.
For Iowans inclined to view Santorum with skepticism, the Republican keeps offering up reminders that the high point of his political career, in many respects, was several presidencies ago.
In Muscatine Thursday, Santorum recalled going ?toe to toe with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ted Kennedy? on welfare reform, touting the issue expertise he gained on the House Ways and Means Committee. In Coralville, Santorum reminded voters that it had been he, back in the day, who wrote a book to rebut Hillary Clinton?s claim that ?it takes a village to raise a family, to raise our children.?
At a film screening in Des Moines earlier this month, Santorum launched into an anecdote that he introduced as ?a story about when I was debating the partial birth abortion bill in 1998? ? an episode he?s related numerous times, about sparring with California Sen. Barbara Boxer. In the second-to-last pre-caucus debate, Santorum boasted of having ?exposed the House banking scandal? in the early 1990s.
And Santorum often brags of having taken on the Democratic consulting team of Paul Begala and James Carville in his first Senate race ? 17 years ago.
?The symmetry in my political career in what we?re doing here is pretty amazing,? he mused at his Coralville stop this week. ?I ran against the author of Clintoncare in 1994.?
Santorum isn?t the only presidential candidate whose political career is firmly anchored in the 1990s: Mitt Romney made his first bid for office in 1994 and Gingrich?s reign as speaker spanned the middle of the decade.
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