OTTUMWA, IOWA — Rick Santorum doesn’t believe President Obama is a Muslim or a Communist, but when one man at a small town hall meeting here said Obama’s both, Santorum chose only to correct him on the communist part.
Santorum told TPM it’s a kind of a policy of his not to correct someone when they say something inaccurate. When it’s about the President’s faith, that is.
“I don’t think the President’s a Muslim,” Santorum said after the town hall meeting at the public library in downtown Ottumwa. “The President says he’s a Christian, I believe he’s a Christian. [But] I usually don’t necessarily contradict people when they say things that, frankly, I don’t agree with.”
In Ottumwa, that person was Gerald “Bill” Jones, a 90+ year-old local who told Santorum he originally hails from Newcastle, PA. Before the town hall even began, Jones was telling the dozen or so gathered to chat with Santorum just what he thought of Obama.
“We’ve got to get rid of that Muslim Communist,” Jones said.
He repeated the line to Santorum a few minutes into the session.
“We’ve got to get rid of that Muslim Communist in the White House,” he said again. “I make no apologies for that statement.”
Santorum launched into a long answer that eventually refuted Jones’ contention that Obama is a Communist. Sort of.
“A lot of his policies are aimed toward big government, government controlling the means of production,” Santorum said, “which, of course, is the definition of Marxism.”
Santorum ticked off a litany of standard crimes aimed at Obama by the Republican presidential field, including allusions to Solyndra and the view that Obama “abandoned the rule of law” and “gave” the car industry to the unions.
“Why? For a very simple reason: they supported his campaign, and they’re going to support him a lot more in his campaign and they’ll have a lot of money to do it because of what he did for them,” Santorum said. “So this is crony capitalism. I wouldn’t call it crony capitalism.”
The word “Muslim” did not come up in Santorum’s response to Jones.
Later, the two actually sparred over the idea of “notch babies” in the Social Security debate years ago. Jones said he was a notch baby, and said because of it he had been kept from getting some of the benefits he deserves.
Santorum vehemently disagreed — despite his later declaration that he let people say inaccurate things without correcting them — even hand-drawing a chart to show that, as Santorum said, Jones and the other notch babies actually got more money then they were supposed to under the law.
