Last Friday, Rick Santorum raised eyebrows with remarks at the Values Voter summit urging voters to look more closely at who the candidates "lay down with at night." And yes, he meant that quite literally:
“When you look at someone to determine whether they’d be the right person for public office, look at who they lay down with at night and what they believe in. Who is the person at their side who has... the closest counselor to that person? If you want to find out if that person who you are voting for is going to stand tall and stand tough, find out where the spouse of that person is."
I speculated at the time about whom Santorum might be alluding to as an insufficiently staunch in the cause and I mentioned, among others, Anita Perry, whose urging in favor of the mandatory HPV vaccine in Texas was presumably not something Santorum would have approved of. But lo and behold, Anita Perry today gave a barnburner of a speech in South Carolina that suggested that she, for one, is very much making sure her husband is going to "stand tall and stand tough." Check this out:
"It’s been a rough month. We have been brutalized and beaten up and chewed up in the press to where I need this today. We are being brutalized by our opponents, and our own party. So much of that is, I think they look at him, because of his faith. He is the only true conservative – well, there are some true conservatives. And they’re there for good reasons. And they may feel like God called them too. But I truly feel like we are here for that purpose."
Got that, Santorum? You may think you're the true Christian conservative in the field, but God's only betting on one horse, and it ain't you. The early primary season has not lacked its spouses who were ambivalent about a presidential campaign. Anita Thigpen Perry, former drum majorette and daughter of a small-town doctor in Perry's home county of Haskell County, Texas, is most definitely not among the faint-hearted.