Life After the Senate for Rick Santorum

From National Review Online:

Rick Santorum has gone from junior senator to senior fellow: As of today, the Pennsylvania Republican is an employee of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank. “I want to contribute to the world of ideas,” he says.

After 16 years in Congress — four in the House, 12 in the Senate — Santorum lost his bid for reelection in November.

Yet he hopes to remain in the public spotlight as director of the EPPC’s brand-new America’s Enemies program.

“It’s a stark name,” says Santorum. “But we wanted to be candid about the fact that America really does have enemies and to point out that the nature of these enemies is much more complex than what people realize. It’s not just Islamic fascism, but also Venezuela, North Korea, and, increasingly in my opinion, Russia.”

This new endeavor will expand on a theme that Santorum developed toward the end of his campaign, when he focused almost exclusively on foreign threats.

“Maybe that wasn’t the smartest political strategy, spending the last few months running purely on national security,” he says. “I was even more hawkish than the president.” In October, Santorum was delivering what became known as his “Gathering Storm” speech — a reference to how Winston Churchill described Europe in the 1930s.

At EPPC, Santorum joins a roster of established conservative thinkers, such as president M. Edward Whelan III (a contributor to NRO’s Bench Memos) and papal biographer George Weigel. Two other recent EPPC hires are Stanley Kurtz (an NRO regular) and Yuval Levin, who most recently served in the Bush administration.

“We’re delighted that he’s coming on board,” says Whelan. “This won’t be him hanging his hat somewhere, but a prime focus of his activity.”

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My Comments:
I'm not sure a program entitled "America's Enemies" is an appopriate addition to an organization like the Ethics and Public Policy Center. I had rather hoped Santorum would focus his efforts on activities more closely aligned to the ideas he presented in his book It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good.