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Presidential Announcement: Santorum Staff Reunion

By Keegan Gibson, Managing Editor

Amid the red, white and blue balloons, the patriotic music and campaign fanfare, at least 30 of Rick Santorum’s Senate staffers were helping to organize and execute their former boss’s presidential announcement.

Schmidt walks Santorum through a crowd of supporters

From former State Director Keith Schmidt, who was the lead organizer for the entire event, to former Chief of Staff Mark Rodgers, a large chunk of the Santorum alumni network helped to prepare the event and was on hand Monday.

“He’s a great man. I’m loyal to him; whatever he needs,” said Patti Bowman. She managed Community and Economic Development for the Senator along the northern tier. She guess there were about 30 former staffers.

“All of our state offices were represented here.”

Julia Bowser was an Economic Development Coordinator in Santorum’s Altoona office. She said she had been with her former boss in Somerset a number of times – – it was in her area – including after the Flight 93 crash and the Quecreek mine rescue.  She’s never seen such a large crowd there, and hadn’t seen so many of her colleagues since the last campaign.

“There are people that I haven’t seen since 2006,” said Bowser. “They were coming from all over the state, and some of them from Maryland and the D.C. area. Maybe 30 or 40.”

Scaringi talks with his former boss.

“The crowd was bigger than we expected. The Senator always delivers a great speech, and what I love about it is that he speaks from his heart. He doesn’t have to practice what he’s gonna say.”

Sara Holcombe worked in Santorum’s Philly office

“It’s kind of like old home day today. I’ve bumped into a bunch of people I haven’t seen since 2006. It shows the loyalty that everyone has toward Rick and that he shows towards us.”

She said she’d seen more than 20 former staffers.

Marc Scaringi is running against Bob Casey for Santorum’s former seat, seeking to avenge the steep 2006 loss that divided the Santorum team. He served as the Senator’s Legislative Correspondent in the 1990s.

“I think it’s a very positive development. I think Santorum will do a great job if elected President of the United States.”

“I was inspired a young, aggressive, hard-charging, conservative Rick Santorum who was a reformer, who wanted to go to Washington and shake things up. And so I joined his campaign in 1994 and traveled all over Pennsylvania helping him to get elected to the U.S. Senate.”

3 Responses

  1. Can’t imagine any of these people being much better than the person they worked for. Yech.

  2. Anthony Weiner has a better chance of winning the GOP Presidential nomination.

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