Conservatives, frustrated by the Republican leadership’s role in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania Senate primary victory of liberal Sen. Arlen Specter, publicly are directing their anger on one of their own — Sen. Rick Santorum.
“The person our members are most infuriated at is Rick Santorum,” said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, which helped lead a conservative crusade in support of Rep. Patrick J. Toomey’s Senate primary bid against Mr. Specter.
In one of the most fiercely contested Republican Senate primaries in recent memory, Mr. Specter eked out a 51 percent to 49 percent victory on Tuesday.
“Santorum undermined fellow conservatives in a really ignoble way, telling people a conservative can’t win. Our members won’t forget that for a long time,” said Mr. Moore, whose national organization contributed $1 million to the Toomey campaign and spent another $1 million in television ads on the candidate’s behalf.
Mr. Santorum campaigned on behalf of his colleague, despite pleas from notable conservative groups. And fueling their anger is the considerable help that the White House and the national Republican leadership gave Mr. Specter, even though during his 24 years in the Senate he often voted with Democrats against Republican-sponsored legislation backed by Republican presidents, including President Bush.
Even in Mr. Santorum’s home state, anger abounds over what some fellow conservatives regard as his apostasy.
“Santorum and his staff are really going to have to work hard to heal the wounds they caused,” said Bob Sevcik, a member of the state party central committee and self-described Reaganite.
Yesterday, the victorious Mr. Specter began his re-election campaign by reminding constituents of his opposition to some of the president’s tax cuts and school vouchers, his labor-union loyalty in working to keep overtime pay for workers and his support of embryonic stem-cell research.
“I intend to retain my independent voice, a voice I have always had,” Mr. Specter said. “The 12 million people of Pennsylvania have not elected me to be a rubber stamp, and I will speak out where I think the necessity calls for it.”
These statements only added to the consternation of many conservatives who see the president as one of their own ideologically. Mr. Bush had campaigned in the state with Mr. Specter, embracing him, calling him a good friend and saying he was needed back in Washington.
But conservatives aren’t ready to direct their ire at Mr. Bush six months before what promises to be another exceedingly close presidential election.
“Had we been able to count on the people who we should have been to count on, Toomey would have been our senator,” said Sandy Usher, a well-known state Republican activist.
“The national party showed us that we are really ’Repubocrats,’” said Mrs. Usher. “I’ve been disgusted for a long time, so this did not surprise me.”
Republican consultant William J. Green, a personal friend of Mr. Santorum’s, said there was no getting around the importance of the senator’s all-out support for Mr. Specter, despite their ideological differences.
“Santorum certainly persuaded people who usually vote for him to go for Arlen over Pat and that gave Arlen the 15,000-vote margin of victory and made a lot of conservatives angry,” said Mr. Green, who added when the dust settles, he doesn’t think “there will be any retribution against Santorum, but he will have to make amends to conservatives, particularly in the western part of the state.”
Mr. Moore, on the other hand, saw a particularly galling irony in Tuesday’s election.
“Look, our donors are Santorum’s donors — a lot of our donors helped Santorum win in the first place,” he said.
Mr. Santorum is not up for re-election until 2006. Mr. Specter will face three-term Democratic Rep. Joseph M. Hoeffel in November.
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