IS SANTORUM NUTS? NOT COMPLETELY

I'll explain why below:

Add former Sen. Rick Santorum to the list of potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates.

POLITICO has learned Santorum will visit first-in-the-nation Iowa this fall for a series of appearances before the sort of conservative activists who dominate the state GOP’s key presidential caucuses.

The Pennsylvanian, who lost his 2006 reelection bid, will visit Iowa on October 1, appearing on a Des Moines radio talk show and speaking to a luncheon and workshop of Iowa's Right to Life group before heading east to Dubuque, where he'll headline a fundraiser for the conservative America’s Future Fund PAC and then speak about the future of the GOP to a public audience in the Mississippi River city.

“Your voice becomes more amplified when you go to a place like Iowa or New Hampshire,” Santorum explained in an interview Tuesday about the visit....

Could he win the election? I doubt it -- obviously, he got trounced in '06 in a classic swing state. But the GOP nomination? He might in a great position to win that.

Think about it: the GOP is wallowing in a sense of victimization right now. It considers even unquestionably fair election results, like those of the 2008 presidential contest, to be evidence that the country is being stolen from its rightful owners.

Who better to capitalize on that wounded, whiny sense of injustice than a guy who lost an election fair and square? No, don't answer that -- I know who better: Sarah Palin, who quit all on her own and yet has persuaded her followers that she's a victim of the left.

But if Palin doesn't run? If she finds some other way to gratify her ego? Santorum could seize the victim mantle. Hell, he can even claim sexual victimhood, just like Palin after the Letterman jokes about her daughter -- he'll probably boast about being subject to sneering for his 2003 "man on dog" remark as well as about the fact that his name has been turned into a sexual joke.

And he's a substitute Palin in another way as well: Palin uses her Down Syndrome baby as a political prop, while Santorum does the same with his stillborn son:

In his Senate office, on a shelf next to an autographed baseball, Sen. Rick Santorum keeps a framed photo of his son Gabriel Michael, the fourth of his seven children. Named for two archangels, Gabriel Michael was born prematurely, at 20 weeks, on Oct. 11, 1996, and lived two hours outside the womb.

Upon their son's death, Rick and Karen Santorum opted not to bring his body to a funeral home. Instead, they bundled him in a blanket and drove him to Karen's parents' home in Pittsburgh. There, they spent several hours kissing and cuddling Gabriel with his three siblings, ages 6, 4 and 1 1/2. They took photos, sang lullabies in his ear and held a private Mass.

"That's my little guy," Santorum says, pointing to the photo of Gabriel, in which his tiny physique is framed by his father's hand. The senator often speaks of his late son in the present tense. It is a rare instance in which he talks softly.

He and Karen brought Gabriel's body home so their children could "absorb and understand that they had a brother," Santorum says. "We wanted them to see that he was real," not an abstraction, he says. Not a "fetus," either, as Rick and Karen were appalled to see him described -- "a 20-week-old fetus" -- on a hospital form. They changed the form to read "20-week-old baby."

Nice how he pointed this out to a Washington Post reporter.

(And on the subject of making sure that the press knows what a moral guy he is, read this, in which we learn how careful Santorum was in 2006 to get out the message that he prayed every day for the Senate opponent who was in the process of defeating him.)

I think he could be the ideal candidate in a party in which the #1 organizing idea is feeling sorry for yourself, as you pat yourself on the back for being the embodiment of virtue.