DES MOINES, Iowa — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum had a message Tuesday night for those who doubted whether his perennially single-digit candidacy would ever take off: “Game on.”
It’s still not clear if Santorum or former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will finish the Iowa caucuses in first place, but the former Pennsylvania senator, who is positioning himself as the conservative alternative to Romney, clearly took a victory lap.
“We are off to New Hampshire,” he said.
Santorum spent more time in Iowa than any other candidate, and was in good spirits Tuesday night as he called it a “great journey.” He joked about the 36 campaign events he has held at franchises of Pizza Ranch, an inexpensive chain of Iowa eateries.
“Thank you so much, Iowa,” he said, in a chain of thank-yous that included campaign volunteers, caucus-goers, and his family.
Santorum began his 20-minute speech, delivered without notes or a teleprompter, with a tribute to his wife, quoting the Christian writer C.S. Lewis as saying that “a friend is someone who knows the song in your heart, and can sing it back to you when you’ve forgotten the words.”
He ended by paying tribute to his children, six of whom were on the stage. His youngest, daughter Isabella Maria, was born with a chromosomal anomaly called Trisomy 18. Most children born with this impairment die in infancy. One percent reach their first birthdays.
Santorum raised cheers form the crowd when he noted that Isabella, “our little angel … is three-and-a-half years old. Bella is here with us in spirit, and is deeply embedded into my heart.”
He devoted much of his speech to a passionate defense of his view that Americans’ rights descend from God.
“The essential issue in this race,” he said, “is freedom: Whether we will be a country that believes that government can do things for us better than we can do for ourselves, or whether we believe — as our founders did — that rights comes to us from God.”
“When he gave us those rights,” Santorum said, “he gave us the freedom to go out and live those rights out, to build a great and just society, not from the top down but from the bottom up.”
Touching on his economic and tax prescription, Santorum said he would “flatten the tax code. Get rid of it. Replace it with five deductions. Let’s create two rates: 10 and 28 [percent].”
“Why 28?” he asked. “If it’s good enough for Ronald Reagan, it’s good enough for me.”
David Martosko contributed reporting.