TAMPA, Fla. — Rick Santorum broke with the “you didn’t build that” theme that was on repeat throughout the first night of the Republican National Convention Tuesday, picking up where his presidential campaign left off by emphasizing social issues.
As he did many times during the primaries, Santorum said one of America’s main problems is that “marriage is disappearing” among the poor, something he blamed on an “assault on marriage and the family.” It’s a message Mitt Romney has co-opted for his own campaign.
Social issues were a much smaller part of Santorum’s convention address than they used to be on the primary campaign trail. The primetime speech came on a night when the theme of the night was “we built it” — a dig at President Obama’s supposedly anti-business hostilities — and a host of various speakers touted their experiences building businesses or watching them grow. In another Tampa speech, this time to delegates from Ohio, Santorum sounded a lot more like his primary-era self.
Still, Santorum’s central theory from the primaries — that using the federal government to promote and encourage heterosexual marriage will fix the nation’s woes — made an appearance in primetime, serving as a reminder to viewers that social conservatives still have a lot of pull in the GOP and that the party is firmly opposed to same-sex marriage rights.
“The fact is that marriage is disappearing in places where government dependency is highest,” Santorum said, according to prepared remarks. “Most single mothers do heroic work and an amazing job raising their children, but if America is going to succeed, we must stop the assault on marriage and the family.”
“We understand many Americans don’t succeed because the family that should be there to guide them, and serve as the first rung on the ladder of success, isn’t there or is badly broken,” he said.
Romney shares Santorum’s opposition to same-sex marriage, and after Santorum dropped out of the primary, Romney picked up on Santorum’s focus on the value of heterosexual marriage. In a pair of speeches over the summer aimed at evangelicals, Romney channeled Santorum on marriage, even name-dropping him.
“We’re going to have to get America recommitted to those anchors, to the power of family,” Romney told the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington back in June. “We need to strengthen the commitment that exists in this country to family.”
