Santorum Hospitalized: Rick Santorum Misses Iowa Trip With Gastrointestinal Illness (VIDEO)
Rick Santorum has been hospitalized over the weekend, suffering from reported dehydration and a gastrointestinal illness.
The development means that the former Pennsylvania Senator and Republican presidential candidate will be forced to cancel his planned visit to Iowa this week. He was scheduled to offer a keynote address at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition's Annual Spring Kickoff on Monday, and was set to focus on the ways that the Republican Party can focus on social and economic issues in the future.
Virginia Davis, a spokesperson for Santorum's political action committee Patriot Voices, said in a statement: "While traveling in South Carolina on Saturday, Rick Santorum became ill and was admitted to the hospital for a gastrointestinal illness and dehydration. He is feeling better today but remains in the hospital … He is expected to resume a full schedule later this week and looks forward to returning to Iowa soon."
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Santorum missed out on becoming the Republican presidential nominee last year to Mitt Romney, who ultimately lost the presidential election to President Barack Obama. However, some have recently touted that Santorum could be looking to another run at the nomination in 2016, and that this trip to Iowa could be part of an early testing of the waters over how much support he could rally.
Santorum won the Iowa caucus in January 2012 and is popular in the state. However, he has remained tight-lipped on whether he is planning a presidential run. Earlier this month he did speak to Newsmax and explained, "I'm certainly leaving the door open for that. I'm making no commitments at this point, but we're not doing anything inconsistent with running in 2016."
Santorum was elected as a United States Senator for Pennsylvania in 1994. He served two terms until losing his re-election bid in 2006. Santorum holds socially conservative positions, and is particularly known for his opposition to same-sex marriage and birth control.
Speaking to the Des Moines Register recently, he suggested that the acceptance of gay marriage would be "suicide." He said, "I think you'll see, hopefully, a chastened Supreme Court is not going to make the same mistake in the (current) cases as they did in Roe v. Wade. I'm hopeful the Supreme Court learned its lesson about trying to predict where the American public is going on issues and trying to find rights in the Constitution that sit with the fancy of the day."
Here is a video news report on Rick Santorum:
