January 7, 2012

Rick Santorum’s Senate Buzzwords Chartified

2012 Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum....keepin' it real.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05/6236856670/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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Pointing out that Rick Santorum doesn’t look too kindly on reproductive rights is a lot like saying Lindsay Lohan needs to get fitted with an ankle monitor from time to time. But just how fixated was he on anti-abortion causes during his years in the Senate? Using the Capitol Words app, the Sunlight Foundation produced this handy chart:

According to our analysis, between January 1, 1996 and January 3, 2007 (his last day as a member of the Senate), the then-junior senator from Pennsylvania spoke following words more than anybody else in the Senate: abortion, partial-birth, fetus, fetal, womb. He also uttered the following phrases more than anyone else: “base of the skull,” and “life of the mother.”

And as you soak in those stats, enjoy this clip of a more youthful Santorum debating the issue on the floor of the Senate:

Now, let’s be generous and go ahead and assume that he spent 135 days a year at work during his 12-year tenure in the upper chamber. Sticking with the “abortion” utterances (1014), that gives the senator an average of name-dropping abortion about once every two working days, far outpacing the anti-abortion buzzword-ery of his fellow Senate Republicans.

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