A real Pennsylvanian considers Rick Santorum

This will surprise readers familiar with my liberal leanings, but one of my political heroes is a beloved Republican. He was a common sense U.S. Senator with a southwestern Pennsylvania home not far from my own.

There are three clues in the previous paragraph that ought to make it clear I’m not talking about Rick Santorum.

He’s not beloved, he has no common sense and when he was a U.S. Senator he wasn’t anyone’s Pennsylvania neighbor.

If you love the Republican Party or want it to be a fair counterweight to its Democratic opposites, then I have some good news for you: The Rick Santorum ascendancy peaks today.

I’m confident in this prediction for two reasons: One historic, the other personal.

Historically, it has to do with the current nervous breakdown of the once Grand Old Party.

In the past four months sober majorities of Republicans have momentarily inflated the poll numbers of Michele Bachman, Rick Perry, Donald Trump and Herman Cain to frontrunner status.

Christian conservatives are just continuing their pursuit of the next non-Romney -- and how a voting demographic so enamored with one savior can always be so restlessly seeking another is mystifying.

So the Santorum bubble is on pace to begin deflating today as sensible Republicans, if any remain, understand how toxic he is to independents. He’s like Mel Gibson without any of the fun parts.

He doesn’t believe believe in evolution, contraception, global warming, public education, or the idea of having sex without procreative purposes.

I can appreciate anyone who believes life begins at conception, but I can’t conceive how anyone doesn’t appreciate, by God, what it’s like to do a little living.

The very idea of the federal government telling families what to do about personal health care issues infuriates him. I wonder if that’s what he told Terri Schiavo during his highly publicized 2005 visit to her death bed.

Seven years later it seems Santorum is again engaging in conversation with the brain dead.

Anyone who thinks his smirking brand of self-righteous demagoguery will work on a national level is living in the ‘50s -- the 1850s.

It galls me every time he trots out his alleged southwestern Pennsylvania roots to an audience (his family spent time in both Virginias before settling here).

This is a proud working class region where common sense politics usually prevail over the kind of partisan bitterness Santorum began promoting as a first-term congressman in 1991.

The final straw for most Pennsylvanians came in 2004 when Santorum, by then a full-time Virginia resident, sought to chisel $67,000 in home schooling tuition reimbursements from the Penn Hills School District.

One problem: the home he schooled his kids in wasn’t even in Pennsylvania. It was in Leesburg, Virginia, near where he now lives in a $2 million mansion.

After that even Pennsylvania Republicans stopped defending him. He lost his last election by 18 percent, the largest losing margin for an incumbent Republican senator ever.

Still, Santorum acts like we Pennsylvanians have spent the last 20 years yukking it up with him at the Steeler tailgate parties.

Who does the guy think he is, John Heinz?

That’s the Republican hero previously mentioned. I was a local reporter in March 1991 when Senator Heinz was in town to cover a Gulf War memorial service.

I caught him outside and asked if he had time to answer some questions for the local paper.

“Shoot,” he said.

I shot until my inquisitive reportorial gun went click.

I asked him about the service, the war, George H.W. Bush’s re-election chances, and if he knew anything about the local county commissioner race (he did).

I asked about the Pirates prospects, turnpike fare increases, the new Clint Eastwood movie and if he’d ever seen The Stones play live (he had).

I remember it as one of the most engaging and wide-ranging conversations I’ve ever had. It lasted about 30 minutes, a one-on-one lifetime with a U.S. Senator.

Less than a month later, he was dead. A mid-air collision over a Pennsylvania school yard killed Heinz and seven others, including two first grade girls playing on the ground.

His death changed the arc of Pennsylvania Republican politics for the next 20 years. Had he not died, he’d still be our senator or maybe president.

Who knows?

Maybe it would have prevented the ascendency of someone as vile and divisive as Rick Santorum, a man who doesn’t believe in recreational sex, yet is still finding new ways to screw with millions of unsuspecting strangers.