Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)
The FAMiLY Leadership Summit
Stephens Auditorium
Ames, Iowa
August 9, 2014

[Democracy in Action TRANSCRIPT] video

Thank you.  Thank you.  They're running my clock so please—  First thing I want to say is just thank you very much Tony [Perkins] for the kind introduction, thank you for the warm reception.  And first thing I always have to do when I come to Iowa is just to let everybody know that Karen and the family are great.  Thank you all for all your prayers particularly during the election in 2012 for our little girl Bella.  She turned six years of age in May.  She is a miracle every day and we are blessed to have her with us.  And I'm here because they gave me permission to come and leave the house this weekend to visit Iowa.  They're disappointed they're not here, and I mean that in all sincerity.  We had just an amazing and wonderful time traveling around those 99 counties here in Iowa and getting to know the people of Iowa and we look forward to making some travels again in the future.

I wanted to share with you though, my wife Karen said to me, in fact we just talked a few minutes ago, and she reminds me all the time, she says Rick, people want to hear something positive, because the speeches, they're going to be hearing today particularly from those who are looking at the 2012 [corrects self], 2016 election are probably going to be—and maybe deservedly so—very rough on President Obama.  You're going to hear a lot of rhetoric and a lot of truth told about how divisive this president is, how he has fractured this country, how this country is in much worse shape in almost every conceivable way, whether it's the state of the family, whether it's the state of our economy, whether it's the state of our culture, whether it's the state of our presence and prestige and respect around the world, there really isn't much that this president hasn't had a negative effect on. 

And so it is easy, it is satisfying, it is fun as a speaker to come up here and pound the president.  But I"m going to try to do something a little different.  And the reason I'm going to do something different is because maybe its the experience I had in Iowa, the experience running for president  in 2012, which was to go around and really get a chance to see the American people and talk to them, and I've done a lot since then, and what I hear and what I feel from folks out there is that people are very, very stressed out about the future of our country, about their own future, particularly folks who are struggling in the middle of America.  They're tired of the division, in fact even angry about the division, this bickering that never seems to accomplish anything anywhere. 

We have a president who I call the divider-in-chief, who has come to Washington, DC and been the most divisive political figure in Washington in a long, long, long time.  He goes out and deliberately tries to divide, and while Democrats and Republicans don't necessarily see that the same way, they see the result of it.  They see the result that neither side can really come together and do anything together.  And if we are a party that goes out in this election cycle and just points out all the flaws, as many as they are, and says that's what we're going to run on; we're going to talk about how bad the president is and we're going to be better, and that's all we have, we may still win the election.  If you look at the polls we still could very much win a lot of elections doing just that—but we'll miss an opportunity.  We'll miss an opportunity to reach people who for the first time maybe in a long time are willing to listen to different points of view, because they know this socialist-liberal-progressive agenda of President Obama is a failure, this isolationism and packing up and disengaging from the world and letting the UN run things is not the answer.

So what is our message?  What are we going to do then if there's an opportunity—and I believe that it really is there—there's an opportunity for us to have a realignment.  I think it's incumbent upon us to seize it.  Why?  Because if you look at what's going to happen in a couple of years, when the presidential race comes up, you know the attitudes may be different by then.  Things may, who knows what's going to happen, but we may be in a position where people aren't as open and certainly we're going to see bigger turnouts of the Democratic base in a presidential year.  So if you look at the math for president, if we don't see a realignment of the Republican Party, if we don't see this party reaching out and bringing in new people, then the demographics don't look very good for us.  So how do we do that?

Well I wrote this book a couple of months ago, and I'm not going to sit here and hawk my book, but I wrote it because I really feel like this is a different vision for our country, not just  our party.

You know the Republican Party has a habit of going out and focusing in on one very narrow group of people in America when we talk about how we're going to turn the economy around, how we're going to create the American Dream for everybody.  We talk about small businesspeople, entrepreneurs.  Do you know only one in 10 workers in America own their own business, yet that's who we talk to all the time.  We talk to 10-percent of America all the time.  And you know if you're Hispanic only 7-percent of the Hispanic workers own their own business and only 5--percent of African-Americans own their own business. 

And so you wonder well why aren't we connecting with all of those other groups?  Because our message is to a very narrow group of people.  Now they're important folks; they're the job creators and they're important to the economy.  All those things are right.  And the policies we're advocating, I'm not saying we need to abandon any of them.  But there's a lot of other people in America who are looking for us to see what we are trying to communicate for them. 

I always have this question.  I ask this.  I'll look at a couple of reporters down here.  What's your favorite word?  What's your favorite word?  In fact I can ask each and every one of you, what is your favorite word.  And I can tell you with absolute certainty that I know the answer to each one of you.  I know each one of your's favorite word.  You say well how is that possible?  I'm not Karnack, for those of you who remember the Johnny Carson show.  We all have the same favorite word.  It's our name.  It's our favorite word.  We love to hear it.  Bella.  I sing to Bella.  Now she's not a very discriminating ear when it comes to singing, but I do sing to Bella and she loves to hear me sing.  And I'll sing her songs and she enjoys it, but if I throw her name in the lyrics every now and then she really loves to those songs.  We all love to hear our names. 

And the same goes when a politician or leader stands up and tries to paint a picture.  They try to paint a picture.  And if you don't see yourself in that picture then we're not painting a picture that's going to be including a vast number of people in America, the 70-percent of Americans who don't have a college degree, the 90-percent of Americans who work for a living for somebody else instead of owning a business.  If they're not in that picture then we're not connecting with people who are hurting in America, who feel like neither party is taking to them.

Republicans talk about businesses and Wall Street and Democrats talk about government program and handouts and where is the rest of America.  We need an agenda that talks to them, that's a pro-growth agenda
don't abandon the things that we believe inbut focus on the things that are going to matter to the folks in America who are struggling, who are feeling left behind and left out of the conversation.

So what do we do; how do we do that?

First, I went to Burlington, Iowa a little over three years ago and announced a whole plan on how to restore "Made in America."  The idea that we can make things here in America, and that manufacturing can come back to Iowa and to all these little towns all across America.  To make things, to create the jobs that used to sustain Newton and Burlington and Missouri Valley and a whole bunch of other towns in Iowa, but across this state and across this country.  What's wrong with being a party that says we want to create a playing field here in America for our manufacturers that's a level playing field not for the manufacturer that competes against the manufacturer in Missouri as opposed to Iowa.  No.  Because manufacturers don't just compete like Walmart does with Target or with Red Lobster and Olive Garden.  Manufacturers compete against global competition.  And we talk about the role of government providing a level playing field.  It's not just providing a level playing field here in America, but it's providing a level playing field against the folks that we have to compete with around the world. 

And this president has raised taxes, he's raised the regulatory bar, he's made it harder and harder environmentally to produce anything here in America.  He's tried to drive up energy costs by making it impossible to drill on federal lands.  He's making it harder to manufacture. 

We need a manufacturing plan that says to workers: We got you.  We understand.  I grew up in a blue collar town in Western Pennsylvania, and all the folks I know, their dads worked at the mill, provided a solid, stable family environment, provided for good solid communities.  Sure technology's important, that's great.  But you know there was a company that was sold a few months ago called WhatApp.  It sold for $19 billion.  It had 55 employees.  Now imagine a $19 billion manufacturing company, how many tens of thousands of workers. 

We have plans that I proposed cutting a tax on manufacturers, the income tax on manufact
, eliminate it, eliminate the tax on manufacturing income.  Take the money that's already been made by manufacturers overseas, let them bring it back here, and not have to pay a 35-percent tax if they inves it in building plant and equipment here in this country.  We can compete against anybody, but it's the government that's made us uncompetitive.  Let's make American workers competitive again.

An important part of that is energy.  Here in Iowa all the forms of energy produced here, oil, gas—  We should have a program of energy that says we want the most economical energy that's possible.  You want to talk about keeping manufacturing costs down, the number one cost for manufacturers is energy.  We have stable, great sources of energy, and if the government got out of the way, that's an easy policy to change.  Get out of the way and allow energy to be produced in this country so manufacturers will come back in droves.

Infrastructure.  I mean by the way these things I'm talking about, energy and manufacturing, infrastructure, they're not partisan issues.  These are things you can get some of your friends and neighbors from eastern Iowa to join us and say yeah well we need investment in infrastructure.  What do we need to do?  We need to get the federal government out of overseeing infrastructure projects in America.  We need to get them out. 

I serve on a board of a company that's an asphalt company and I will tell you that the cost of the federal regulation on the projects we bid are 20, 30, 50 percent additional cost because the federal government comes in and rewrites everything the state wants to do. 

Can we trust—I mean I understand why some people are uncomfortable, well we can't trust the states to do certain things.  We can't trust the state to build a road?  I mean do we really need the federal government to oversee road building in America?  Of course not.  Let's cut the federal gas tax, let's put the federal gas tax back to what it should be, which is to pay for interstate highway construction and leave the people of Iowa, if they want to build four-lane highways through the cornfields, great.  If folks in San Francisco want to use organic walnut shells to build bike paths let them do that.  Whatever they want to do.  Let the local people decide.

There is a lot we can talk about to help average Americans get construction jobs, manufacturing jobs, energy jobs, the 70-percent of Americans who don't have college degrees, who are struggling.  We have an agenda to put you back to work and also help you with training.  I just came from Indiana a couple of weeks ago.  Mike Pence, the governor there, told me about a program he's instituted.  He's re-instituted vocational education in every single high school in the state of Indiana. 

We have all this focus on going to college as college prices go up and up and the value of, economic value of college education comes into question.  And we are graduating people through academic courses that are not training them for the jobs that are going to actually sustain them in their lives.  There's noting wrong with working with your hands; there's nothing wrong with our high schools teaching people how to have trades and skills so they can go out and work and provide for their families and their communities. 

And while we're on the topic of education, we're going to solve the problem of education not by having the federal government or a bunch of elite institutions telling us what our curriculum and what our standards need to be in our schools, we need to let parents make that decision and get rid of Common Core.

Okay so we've now have provided a picture where the average American can see themselves in the plan of how they're going to get a better job and how they're going to be able to be trained and their children are going to be trained for these jobs, but you know what?  There's also a crisis not just in education and jobs, but there's another business that's struggling in America.  It's the family business.  Oh, I don't mean the family business as you think of it.  But did you know that the word economy comes from the Greek word oikos,  which means home, household.  You see every household is a little business, it's a little economy.  If you think about it.  There's income.  There's expenditures.  Everybody has to balance the books.  It's a little business. 

And we have a lot of our businesses who are struggling because families who are raising children aren't forming.  Moms and dad aren't together raising children.  And we see the federal government not just being an idle bystander, but actually someone who makes it harder for families.  We have a tax code that penalizes you if you get married.  We have programs that penalize you if you're receiving any kind of welfare programs or food stamps or something like that. 

There's all sorts of barriers for you to get married.  I was in Wisconsin during the campaign and found out that if you were a single mom earning $15,000 a year and you had two children you got $38,000 in welfare benefits from the state of Wisconsin.  If you got married you lost them all.  We create barriers to marriage in government programs, we create burdens to marriage in our tax code.  Our child tax credit, our child deduction aren't anything near what they were when families were being supported by the federal government.  The family business is the most important business America has because its raising the next generation of Americans and we need to support it in every possible way.

Now imagine having an agenda that went out there and talked about workers and families and education.  People say well we have to change our position on immigration in order to appeal to Hispanics.  The Hispanics are workers and they're concerned about their families.  And the out-of-wedlock birth rate among Hispanic families, you think well it's probably close to what it is in the white community.  It used to be.  It's not any more.  Now almost 50-percent of Hispanic kids are being born out-of-wedlock.  They've seen the destruction within even the Hispanic family in America. 

And if we have an agenda that goes out and says we understand workers need the opportunity to rise because recent immigrants are those workers.  And we need to opportunity to rise and we're going to help your family, we're going to provide education for you and your children.  We don't have to abandon the rule of law.  We have to communicate with where people are in America.  And that's what we'll do. 

But we have to also face the reality that what's hurting American workers maybe more than anything else if you're an unskilled worker in America is a huge amount of immigration that's going on in this country.  And I'm not just talking about illegal immigration.  Yes we've seen 12, 15 million illegal immigrants here who are competing in primarily unskilled jobs.  But in the last 14 years since 2000 there have been more people who have come to this country legally than any 14-year period in American history and that includes the great wave.  And you know historically in America what we've done every time we've had huge waves of immigration, they've been waves.  What happens to waves?  Well they come in and then  they go out.  They provide a respite.  They provide a respite for a lot of reasons,  for labor markets to adjust.  One of the reasons that we see labor markets in such distress and wages not going anywhere is because there's a flood of labor coming in. 

And we have the Democratic Party  who doesn't care.  They say they care about the workers but they don't.  You know what they care about?  They care about bringing as many people in to get as many of their votes as possible.  That's what they care about.  They care about power, and this is a way to power and unfortunately on our side, on the Republican side, we have the business community who sees labor as a commodity.  Ladies and gentlemen I don't see people as a commodity; I see people as individuals and valuable people whose wages should not be depressed to keep profits high by having people come into this country to keep wages down.  So we need a policy that puts Americans first.

An American immigration policy that says no to amnesty, that says yes to securing the border and that says that we need to dial back on chain immigration in this country which is resulting in over a million people a year coming here to suppress our labor markets.  It's a very simple formula, and it's not against anything. 

I'm the son of an immigrant, and I'll give you the experience of my father.  He was one of the guys caught in the wave.  My grandfather came at the end of the great wave in 1923.  In 1921 and 1924 they passed two immigration laws that shut down immigration.  After 1924 immigration was about 100,000 a year.  It's now over a million a year in America today.  It was 1000,000 a year, and so my father was in Italy and my grandfather was in America for seven years it took for him to wait and see his dad.  You could say well we shouldn't do that to people.  Well my dad would always say America was worth the wait.  It's worth doing it the right way because it was right for America to take a pause and to make sure that Americans were looked after first so that when he came he had the opportunities that the American Dream will give to all of your children.

This, ladies and gentlemen, believe it or not is a message that Republicans can stand up and proudly talk about.  It's a conservative message but it's a unifying message.  I just went for the last 15 minutes and didn't mention Barack Obama.  And people who are sitting aside and looking at both parties and saying a pox on both your houses, they're going to have their antennas up and say here's someone who wants to unify. 

You know the Republican Party is the party of the union, that's how we started.  We were the party of bringing people together.  We're not the special interest party.  We're not the party of labor unions.  We're not the party of the abortion rights groups, we're not the party of the environmental groups, we're not the party of all of these different groups that make up the Democratic Party.  We're the party of the average person and we have to start taking and acting like a party that represents everybody, not just a certain few.  And if we do that, you will be amazed.

I remember when I was first involved in politics people used to talk about Reagan Democrats.  Ronald Reagan, when he got up in 1979 and '80 and laid out his economic platform, he didn't do what we do now as Republicans; he didn't go back and stand up and say well 35 years ago this is what worked for America.  And that's what we do.  We stand up and we always refer back to Ronald Reagan.  I mean I love Ronald Reagan, but us referring back to Ronald Reagan is like Ronald Reagan standing up and referring back to Wendell Willke.  Now how popular would that have been?  But hat's how long ago it was.  That's how long ago it was.  We need to have policies that address the problems that confront America today, and it's a positive, uplifting vision and we need leaders running for election in this election to embrace this vision so they're talking to average Americans about their problems and paint a picture with their face in that picture.  We start doing that, we start re-drawing the map of America. 

One final note because it's so much important and so much on my heart.  A week from Sunday I'm heading to Israel, and I'm heading to Israel because I'm embarrassed for my government.  I want to show the people of Israel that there are people around this country who stand in solidarity with them even though the Obama—there, I did it, I had to break my pledge there—even though the Obama-Clinton-Kerry regime over the past five years has turned their back and isolated a country that is fighting for its life, literally fighting for its life as the world community surrounds it.  We play footsies with Iran, we give aid to Hamas, we support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Ladies and gentlemen, we need leaders who understand the threats that confront this country.  We need leaders who are willing to stand up and fight for our values, not just in this country but fight for our values around the world because if we don't fight for those values around the world we will lose around the world, and they will end up here causing us problems.

I want to thank you.  First Bob Vander Plaats, who by the way is joining me on that trip to Israel.  I want to thank all of you for being here today.  You've heard me give many talks I'm sure and talk about how important it is to engage in the fight. 

America is in a crisis.  This election is critical.  This race in Iowa for the Senate is one of the most important in the country.  We, if we don't win the Senate in 2014, we will not win it in 2016.  I don't care how big of a landslide we may have in 2016, there just aren't the seats open for us to do it.  We already hold almost all the seats up in 2016.  Our chance to win the Senate is now, and it goes away.  Iowa you know how important you are--you're always told how important you are and you are when it comes to presidential races, but you're also really important on this Senate race.  And so please give, give with your time, give with your energy, give with your money.  Make a difference Iowa, you always have.  Thank you and God bless.

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Transcript © 2014 Democracy in Action