HARRISBURG Santorum gets busy for Bush re-election

The president tapped the senator as his Pennsylvania campaign chairman.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, named Tuesday as the Pennsylvania chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign, didn't skip a beat when asked what Bush needs to do differently to win this battleground state in 2004.
"He's already done it," Santorum said. "He's committed time here. He didn't really do that in 2000," when Democratic nominee Al Gore claimed Pennsylvania's hefty chunk of electoral votes.
Ken Mehlman, the president's national campaign manager, who led the downtown news conference where Bush-Cheney '04's state leadership team was announced, gave a similar answer when separately asked the same question.
"The people of Pennsylvania know this president in a way they didn't know him in 2000," he said, vowing to strengthen voter-registration drives and other grassroots activities next year in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans but the GOP controls two of the three branches of state government.
"There's a huge level of support for this president in Pennsylvania," Mehlman said, citing the popularity of Bush's tax cuts and anti-terrorism and education initiatives. "We want to try to create the grassroots structures to harness that support."
Bush has visited Pennsylvania 22 times since taking office in January 2001, which Santorum said is more than any other state except his home state of Texas, and more visits are anticipated.
Steel tariffs
Santorum, commenting on a potentially explosive campaign issue in Pennsylvania, said he expects Bush will reduce and reshuffle tariffs on imported steel that he imposed in 2002 to give the U.S. steel industry temporary protection from foreign competition so it could regroup and consolidate.
"I think you're going to see somewhat of a mixed bag. He'll probably pull some [steel tariffs] and leave others in place," Santorum said, adding that he would support that approach.
"That would be reasonable," he said.
Bush's advisers are divided over whether he should continue the tariffs, which violate World Trade Organization rules and could result in retaliatory action by the European Union. His political advisers fear that dropping the tariffs before their scheduled expiration in 2005 would hurt Bush in key Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio.
While stressing that he opposes any wholesale lifting of the tariffs, Santorum said the tariffs decline in each of the three years they are in effect and that the first year was most crucial.
"It provided a window of opportunity for the steel industry to restructure ... and also negotiate a new labor contract to improve efficiencies. Both of those things have happened," he said. "Whether the [tariffs] continue or not from my perspective is not as important as the fact that he put them in place and gave the window of opportunity for restructuring."
Mehlman, who had been White House political director until a few months ago, declined to discuss the status of the tariffs.
"I'm not in the White House now and I'm not part of those discussions," he said.
Santorum's role
In being named Bush's campaign chairman, Santorum will play the same role in the re-election campaign that then-Gov. Tom Ridge played in the president's 2000 campaign. Bush later appointed Ridge as his homeland-security secretary.
Sen. Arlen Specter, who faces a re-election campaign of his own next year, and Philadelphia lawyer David Girard-diCarlo were named as Pennsylvania co-chairmen of Bush-Cheney '04.
The two ranking Republicans in the state General Assembly -- House Speaker John Perzel of Philadelphia and Senate President Pro Tempore Robert Jubelirer of Blair County -- were named as eastern and western Pennsylvania co-chairmen.
Leslie Gromis, who worked as a fund-raiser for Bush and Ridge, was named regional chairwoman in charge of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware.