After announcing his second run for the presidential election. Senator Rick Santorum made his first stop during a statewide tour in Florence County on Saturday where he addressed the need to revitalize and rebuild the manufacturing sector.
The former Pennsylvania Senator shook hands, posed for pictures and tested out different types of technology inside the Southeastern Institute of Manufacturing and Technology.
“America is a great country to make things and it’s hard to make things without your hands,”says Santorum as he ended his speech.
Santorum says South Carolina will be one of the top states that will benefit from his campaign.
“You’ve got the infrastructure in place. You have the educational institutions and the state programs that work with your manufacturers. This could be a huge boom to the state of South Carolina,” said Santorum.
He says that American workers need assurance that job promises are kept.
“If you can create the proper environment, people will come, create jobs and they will be skilled and semi-skilled jobs,”he adds.
Santorum says that jobs and national security is what sets him apart from other republican candidates.
“Working Americans and the ability for them to get good paying jobs in rise is number one. Number two is experience in national security. With the exception of Senator Graham, there really isn’t anyone else in this field that has any national security experience,” says Santorum.
Those in attendance say it’s good to see the manufacturing industry being one of Santorum’s biggest concerns.
“It’s really a privilege to have a presidential candidate come here and highlight all those technologies that we have such as the 3D printing that we offer and all of the different type of machines,” said Ashley Dingle, Manager of the SIMT Gould Incubator.
“Some of his reforms and some of his ideas that he have involving manufacturing and technology are a plus I would say, for the type of work that we do and the type of things we wake up to every morning,” mentioned Michael Cameron.
All things folks in the Pee Dee want the next person in the white house to focus on.
“He is working with people that agree with the same things they want for America and it doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat. That’s very strong I think and I hope people listen to that,” says Allicyn Steverson.
Santorum will be making his way to Fort Mill for two events Saturday. Then he will make stops in Greenville and Travelers Rest on Sunday.