RUTHFULLY YOURS

These have been good days for Rick Santorum, buoyed as he campaigns by conservative Republicans cheering their newly anointed hope. Still, it will occur to at least some of his supporters that their hope is destined to be short-lived, that their candidate’s particular baggage would sink any presidential candidacy. Especially his.

It’s not only that a certain body of Santorum pronouncements on social issues exists, and that they’re of a sort that large sectors of the American electorate find unpalatable, to put it mildly. Or that he continues to add to them.

By the time Democratic researchers apply themselves to this compendium of Mr. Santorum’s views—in the unlikely event that he becomes the Republican nominee—it’s size will have doubled, at the least. The Republicans have already provided President Obama with high-value gifts this election year, but none nearly as delectable as the prospect of a run against Mr. Santorum.

Among the candidate’s noteworthy declarations, we can count his address to a New Hampshire audience last October, in which he described his upset after reading the text of John F. Kennedy’s landmark 1960 speech dedicated to the separation of church and state. “I almost threw up,” he told his listeners. Kennedy, he announced, “threw his faith under the bus in that speech.”

That an American candidate’s commitment to the separation of church and state made Mr. Santorum want to vomit—and that this fact was something in which he took pride, and wanted to share with an audience—is telling. What it tells isn’t something the citizenry tends to find endearing.

Also noteworthy, and rapidly getting around, is his promise last October to “talk about things no president has talked about,” like contraception. “It’s not okay,” Mr. Santorum declared, because “it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is contrary to how things are supposed to be.” Earlier, in his 2005 book, “It Takes a Family,” he opined that contraception is “harmful to women.”

Mr. Santorum’s views of license in the sexual realm can be interestingly detailed. In 2002, he blamed Boston and its culture for the sex-abuse scandal involving Catholic priests. It is, he wrote in a piece for Catholic Online, “no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.” He would also tell the Associated Press a year later, “I have no problem with homosexuality. I have a problem with homosexual acts.” A remark that will require some translation in a campaign year. Good luck with that.

In Ohio on Saturday, Mr. Santorum proclaimed the American public school system an anachronism made up of “big factories” that were the product of the industrial revolution and don’t give children what they need, which is a customized education. An education, he argues, that should be run largely by parents—as in home-schooling. As most of the civilized world by now knows, thanks to an unstinting flow of reminders, Mr. Santorum is the father of seven children and they’re all being home-schooled.

It will come as news to the countless millions educated in America’s public schools—those places in which generations of Americans, the children of impoverished immigrants not least among them, learned to read and write, and which rescued them from ignorance and introduced them to books—that they were merely “big factories.”

Some who have followed his history may recall the difficulties that arose over the schooling of Mr. Santorum’s own children. They take on a certain flavor in light of candidate Santorum’s charges, made again last weekend, that schools today are too concerned with academics (one of those high-class problems countless parents would give a lot to have) and not enough with the teaching of right and wrong.

In November 2004, the local press discovered that since 2001 five of Mr. Santorum’s children had been enrolled in an online charter school in Beaver County, Pa. The trouble was that the Santorums had throughout this period been living in Virginia while claiming residency in Pennsylvania. This led to a scandal because Pennsylvania taxpayers had been left to foot the bill, including costs for expensive Internet fees—$100,000, according to the local school board.

But it is that compendium of pronouncements on religious and social issues that testifies to a profound tone-deafness and haunts him now. To be sure, there’s another side to him—his incisive grasp of foreign policy, defense issues, and other strengths vital in a leader. But that side doesn’t stand much of a chance against the claims of the moral warrior in him—the side even now showing up to object to insurance coverage for prenatal tests like amniocentesis. The reason? His conviction that such testing results in more abortions.

That Mr. Santorum is nonetheless now threatening Mitt Romney, the choice of the GOP establishment, poses no mystery. It’s the outcome of the extraordinarily poisonous nomination battle—one of those high-value gifts the Republican establishment has bestowed on President Obama this election year.

They did this first by doing everything possible to tarnish Newt Gingrich, Gov. Romney’s most formidable challenger and the most gifted of all the candidates. The great parade of Republican heavies who turned out every day to deliver mothballed memories and complaints about Mr. Gingrich marched on for months, and they didn’t march alone. It was a fitting testament to the absurdity of this spectacle when finally President John Tyler’s 84-year-old grandson weighed in (just after Bob Dole) to tell a reporter that “Gingrich is a big jerk.”

But it was the attack ads that would, of course, make the difference. Mr. Romney’s nonstop ad assault, begun in Iowa, where Speaker Gingrich had been leading, ramped up in Florida. Having flattened Mr. Gingrich there, Mr. Romney found himself confronted by an unflattened, untargeted Rick Santorum. One who now had the advantage of a defiant mood among primary voters not enthralled by a supposed front-runner whose capacity for militance and energy seemed to show itself mainly in the demolition of his competitors.

So things stand today—Mr. Gingrich off marshaling his forces, Mr. Santorum for now ahead of the pack, and Mr. Romney evidently in trouble. It’s hard not to feel a certain sympathy for Mr. Romney, told every day that he’s missing some center, some fire or music.

Things change, of course. Mr. Romney, in good form at Wednesday night’s debate, may recover his standing. Mr. Gingrich, also strong at the debate, may yet rise again. And Mr. Santorum may come perilously close to winning the nomination—in which case all hell will break loose and a great hopelessness will settle in on Republicans, all of it entirely justified.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.