Santorum has almost caught Romney in the national poll of polls:
PPP's poll from over the weekend puts Santorum ahead 38 to 23:
Part of the reason for Santorum's surge is his own high level of popularity. 64% of voters see him favorably to only 22% with a negative one. But the other, and maybe more important, reason is that Republicans are significantly souring on both Romney and Gingrich. Romney's favorability is barely above water at 44/43, representing a 23 point net decline from our December national poll when he was +24 (55/31). Gingrich has fallen even further. A 44% plurality of GOP voters now hold a negative opinion of him to only 42% with a positive one. That's a 34 point drop from 2 months ago when he was at +32 (60/28).
Mataconis is skeptical of PPP. Jesse Singal wonders how effective Romney's inevitable attacks on Santorum will be:
[A] lot of the old Santorum stuff about to get churned up, the most infamous of it his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, is unlikely to bother conservative voters all that much. His views on social issues could make him a semi-poisonous general-election candidate, but in a primary — particularly a primary currently starring Romney? Less so.
Pete Spiliakos, who likes Santorum quite a bit, worries about his chances in the general election:
Take the whole women in combat thing. His point about group dynamics isn’t crazy, but he is just off. He just isn’t quick enough or disciplined enough to deflect these kinds of questions or make his point in an unalienating way. I don’t think the women in combat thing hurts him, but it is a warning. If Santorum is somehow the Republican nominee, he is going to get suckered into these kinds of culture war fights every couple of weeks. And this is Santorum being good. He isn’t that bright, he isn’t that articulate, and he can’t be fixed.
I've studied Santorum for years, read his alarming book, It Takes A Family, and if you'll forgive the plug, you'll find my review and analysis of it in the chapter in The Conservative Soul in the chapter about the "The Theocon Project."
He is easily the politician most hostile to individual liberty on the right. He believes states have every right to ban contraception, all abortion, and any legal protections for gay couples. He disavows any secular, Enlightenent view of America's founding. For him, freedom only counts if you adhere to the current fundamentalist rigidity of the Benedict XVI church. I've cited this before, but here he is on freedom:
This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
Notice he explicitly cites the bedroom as the place where big government can intervene. If you are not reproducing as the Vatican demands, legal penalties are in principle possible. There is no public-private distinction. His mentor, Robbie George, takes the view that in principle, the state also has the right to penalize masturbation with criminal penalties, a position flushed out of him in the Prop 2 trial in Colorado. The only reason the two would not actively prosecute gay couples for having sex or straight couples for using condoms is for prudential reasons: it's not practical. But in theory, they'd have the Catholic church's most reactionary elements dictating your freedoms.
If you believe in individual freedom, this country has no greater opponent than Rick Santorum. And for three years, the GOP has tried to tell us that the Tea Party was about extending freedom and ending debt rather than extending the power of Christianist Big Government. We know better now.
The Dish 