Santorum is killing it nationally among Tea Party voters, evangelicals and the "very conservative." Gene Healy is puzzled:
The Tea Party movement was supposed to represent an end to this sort of moralistic Big Government conservatism. Animated by "fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets," as the Tea Party Patriots' credo put it, the movement had supposedly put social issues on the back burner to focus on the crisis of government growth. At one time, Santorum seemed to share this view of the Tea Party — and it troubled him. In that same talk in Harrisburg, he said, "I've got some real concerns about this movement within the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement to sort of refashion conservatism and I will vocally and publicly oppose it."
Philip Klein laments the former senator's "big government parochialism":
The problem is that one of the biggest obstacles to shrinking government is politicians protecting their home state interests – such as farm state representatives fighting to maintain agricultural subsidies that analysts from across the political specture acknowledge are terrible policy. Even if Santorum pledges to be a limited government president, if everybody in Congress followed his example, we’d never be able to shrink government.
The Dish 