Most candidates who emerge from the relative shadows to take the lead in a presidential campaign start to throttle back on the rhetorical thunderbolts and settle into a groove with a winning script full of phrases predigested by pollsters and focus groups.
Not Rick Santorum, apparently.
In recent days, the former Pennsylvania senator has accused President Obama of a "phony theology," suggested that a new federal requirement that insurance companies cover some prenatal testing would increase abortions, and compared Americans' patience with Obama - in the face of what Santorum calls the administration's threat to freedom - to America's initial indifference to Hitler's rise.
Santorum has drawn some heat for his uncompromising stances on social issues, rooted in his Catholic faith. At the same time, those positions have thrilled conservative voters and helped propel him into contention for the Republican presidential nomination. These voters like that Santorum speaks up for his beliefs regardless of their political popularity.
Social issues were not a major point of contention in Wednesday night's nationally televised debate, held just days before the Michigan and Arizona primaries. That was no surprise; the GOP candidates more or less agree on those issues.
The question, analysts say, is whether Santorum's strident tone on everything from contraception to women in the workplace could be seen as too extreme to win a fall campaign - when he would need to attract independent voters and others who hold more moderate or liberal positions.
Already, political opponents have been trolling through the vast Santorum trove of statements and distributing them. On Tuesday, the Drudge Report, a media outlet seen as friendly to Mitt Romney's campaign, unearthed a 2008 speech Santorum gave at Ave Maria University, a conservative Catholic school in Florida, in which he said the United States was at war with Satan.
"Satan is attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that have so deeply rooted in the American tradition," Santorum said in the speech.
Asked this week about the uproar that greeted disclosure of the speech, Santorum was unapologetic. "I'm a person of faith," he said. "I believe in good and evil. I think if somehow or another because you're a person of faith you believe in good and evil is a disqualifier for president, we're going to have a very small pool of candidates who can run for president."
A longtime national leader in the fight against legalized abortion, Santorum has steadfastly opposed the procedure even in cases of rape and incest. He said Sunday that the government should not require health plans to cover amniocentesis, a test for genetic abnormalities in pregnancy, because he said it leads to an increase in abortions.
Santorum has said he was not questioning Obama's Christian faith when he spoke of "phony theology," but rather what he considers the president's secularized approach to government policies.
To be sure, he has hardly been alone in the GOP field arguing that the administration has been hostile to organized religion. On Tuesday in Michigan, Romney said Obama's administration had "fought against religion" and sought to substitute a "secular" agenda for one grounded in faith.
Santorum is a staunch foe of same-sex marriage and is infamous among supporters of gay and lesbian rights for having once equated gay sex to "man on dog" intercourse during an interview in 2003. He also opposes contraception, though he says he does not want to outlaw it. And he argued in his 2006 book, It Takes a Family, that "radical feminism" had weakened the family by convincing women that the only way to find fulfillment was in the workplace.
Strategists say Santorum's edgy rhetoric has helped him in the nomination contest because he can simultaneously draw sharp contrasts with Obama and with Romney, who is mistrusted by many on the right for having changed his positions on social issues.
Santorum "stands out from the pack," said David Patti, president of the Pennsylvania Business Council and a Republican activist. "And people might be so tired of plastic, packaged politicians that they're relishing somebody who's going to tell them what he thinks, without trimming."
Less clear is how his unvarnished words might play in a fall campaign. A poll released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University found that in a hypothetical matchup, there was a gender gap: Santorum led among men, 47 percent to 44 percent, while Obama led among women, 50 percent to 41 percent.
Santorum's social conservatism caught up with him in 2006, when he lost his reelection campaign to now-Sen. Bob Casey by 18 percentage points. According to CNN's exit polls in that race, Santorum lost independents by 44 percent, moderates by 30, and women by 22.
Villanova University political scientist Lara Brown points to 2004, when, amid a record turnout of social conservatives, President George W. Bush did 20 percent better among independents than Santorum did two years later. Bush also won 10 percentage points more support from moderates and 9 percent more from women.
Brown says she thinks it unlikely that Santorum would do as well as Bush did with these groups in a general election.
"Even if moderates, independents, and women aren't turned off to him now," Brown said, "by the end of a general election campaign they would be, for all the same reasons he repulsed them in 2006."
Contact politics writer Thomas Fitzgerald at 215-854-2718 or tfitzgerald@phillynews.com or @tomfitzgerald on Twitter. Read his blog, "The Big Tent," at www.phillynews.com/BigTent.
