The question made Sen. Rick Santorum sigh, he had answered it so many times before.
Did he really suggest in his book, It Takes a Family, that women with children shouldn't work?
It didn't matter how many times he listed the stats: More than 50 percent of his senior staff are women. His mother worked full time. His wife, a stay-at-home mother of six, is a lawyer and nurse.
He had been pegged as the Pennsylvania senator who chides working mothers.
Now Santorum needed to decode Rick Santorum - again.
"Nobody reads the few sentences before and finds out who 'they' are," Santorum said at a debate last week. "The 'they' I was referring to were weathy families, or upper-income families, who have the opportunity to sacrifice 'stuff' to spend time with their kids.
"I have nothing, absolutely nothing, against working women," he added firmly.
Exchanges like this have pocked his 16 years in office, first as a U.S. representative from Western Pennsylvania and now as a two-term senator. He rose quickly on the strength of his unvarnished style. It might turn out to be his Achilles' heel.
To some, he is one-dimensional - a conservative caricature who advocates a global war on "Islamic fascism," flies to the bedside of Terri Schiavo, and wears his Catholic faith on his cuff links. Rather than view his zeal for confronting the most controversial issues of the day as refreshing or even admirable for an elected official, critics see a cheeky ideologue.
To others, he is misunderstood, the nuances of his positions lost in a sound-bite culture and the flip side of his profile ignored - the senator who drives alone to the Capitol every morning, grinds away at AIDS and poverty, and skips the cocktail parties at night to see his family.
"I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette's disease - he will always say the most unpopular thing," said Bono, the U2 lead singer, who has worked with Santorum on debt relief and AIDS since 2001, in an interview Friday. "But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable. . . . He was ready to stand up on Capitol Hill and say, 'This is important for America.' "
Boyish-looking and kinetic at 48, Santorum accepts his role as a political piata. Others do not.
"I had a lot of concerns about him running again," said his wife, Karen. "The hours are tough, just the negative environment. It is extremely difficult to handle."
People wonder why Santorum, facing a tough reelection, didn't tone it down, talk up something benign, and coast to a third term.
But that's not Rick Santorum. Never has been.
Middle-class background
He grew up middle-class and precocious, in a two-income household in Butler, Pa. His mother worked as a nurse for the Veterans Administration, where she met Aldo Santorum, an immigrant and psychologist who talked more than he listened.
"Typical Italian dad," Santorum said. "He will tell you right out. I am sure I get it from him."
The Santorums ate together every night. They never missed Sunday Mass, but were not particularly devout - "cultural Catholics," Santorum said.
They lived sports, not politics, although Santorum did make a run at eighth-grade vice president and lost to a cheerleader.
"I don't take defeat well," he said.
His political ambition seemed to end there. Then as a freshman at Pennsylvania State University, he enrolled in a political-science course that required him to read the newspaper or volunteer for a campaign. He picked the latter.
It was 1976. He became a Republican foot soldier, organizing students for John Heinz's first U.S. Senate race and gaining notice.
"He was the person we heard about," said U.S. Rep. Phil English (R., Pa.), who recruited Santorum into the state College Republicans. "He was a Greek, a frat activist, very engaged on campus. He was a real ball of fire."
Santorum graduated from college, then business school. He drifted back to politics when State Sen. Doyle Corman hired him - at 23 - to serve as chief of staff.
Santorum earned a law degree at night, and returned to Pittsburgh for a corporate law firm job, where he lobbied for the World Wrestling Federation and muddled through bond deals, but also did pro bono work on children's issues.
In 1988, he met Karen Garver, a neonatal nurse fresh out of law school, as she interviewed at the firm where Santorum worked. He made her laugh, and she was smitten.
"I was a very, very headstrong career woman. I just thought love at first sight can't exist," she said. "I'm an avid diary keeper. I went home and wrote, 'I met the man I am going to marry.' "
Santorum began weighing a run for office. He wanted the seat of seven-term Democratic U.S. Rep. Doug Walgren.
"I've done the Harrisburg scene," Santorum told Corman, enlisted by GOP leaders to persuade him to run for the statehouse. "If I can't beat Doug Walgren, I will still live. But I think I will beat him."
His wife, who later would work for a campaign consulting firm, didn't give it a second thought.
"If you want to make a difference, you just do whatever it takes to get to the goal," she said.
'Man in a hurry'
At first, he was "a man in a hurry," driven more by ambition than faith.
Only a few months after winning a second House term in 1992, Santorum looked at the Senate. Again, the GOP advised against it - and again he won, toppling Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford in the 1994 "Republican Revolution."
Under Newt Gingrich, Republicans found a voice, an antigovernment, tough-on-crime, teeth-clenched kind of voice. Brash and conservative, Santorum was a man for the moment.
Freed from the two-year House campaign cycle, Santorum reevaluated.
"I can stop and actually try to figure out why I have been doing all this," Santorum said, recalling his personal evolution, during a 2004 National Prayer Breakfast speech in Washington.
Oklahoma Republican Sen. Don Nickles invited Santorum to his first Bible study in 1995, and Santorum found it "actually pretty interesting."
"I can honestly say that my wife Karen's relationship with the Lord was pretty much the same as mine - sort of over there, part of it, but not really who we are," he said in the speech. "She began to grow in her spiritual life, and so together we just sort of fed off each other."
Later that year, while pulling out their children's winter pajamas, Santorum remarked to his wife that he had never seen one pair belonging to their oldest son. She said he wore it every night.
"That put my life in perspective in a heck of a hurry," Santorum said in the speech. "I recommitted myself to my family. I recommitted myself to following God's call - I was doing the Lord's work."
A year later, their fourth baby, Gabriel, died from a birth defect after 20 weeks in the womb.
Family became the core of "what I believe I am called to do here, whether to fight the battles of partial-birth abortion, to stand up for his [God's] culture of life, to stand up for traditional marriage and the family - all of those things, and I could go on and on," he said in the speech. "I thought long and hard, after Gabriel, about God's call in my life."
This is the fodder for national headlines and, lately, Comedy Central. In the last three years alone, Santorum has argued that legalizing gay marriage might pave the way for polygamy and bestiality. He pushed Congress to intervene in the Schiavo case, and published a 449-page book that left few hot buttons untouched.
The flip side of his record gets obscured, by comparison.
Santorum branded himself a "compassionate conservative" years before President Bush popularized the term. He learned of the philosophy in 1993 from tapes produced by Gingrich's political action committee.
The approach of government as a silent partner, aiding rather than mandating, influenced the scope of his agenda - welfare reform, faith-based initiatives, poverty. Defying characterizations of partisanship, Santorum has worked with Senate Democrats and Bono on debt relief and AIDS.
Santorum and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) have helped deliver $2 billion - double the White House's request - to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS since 2002. It drew the scorn of conservative leader James Dobson, who termed it a "wicked, wicked fund."
Santorum and Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware engineered a late-night agreement in 2003 with the White House and House to boost debt relief for countries hardest hit by AIDS.
If Santorum loses, "it will be hard to find someone with this amount of resolve on our issues," said Bono, cofounder of the group DATA (debt AIDS trade Africa), which works with both parties.
'Put your neck out'
Fiercely protective of her family, and the time they spend together - playing board games or working in their organic garden - Karen Santorum needed convincing on a third Senate term.
She came around, and now looks at it as a civics lesson for her children, who are home-schooled.
"There are a lot of times where you will have to put up with the tough schedule and put your neck out and go fight the good fight to make a difference in the world," she said.
Another term would give Santorum an even bigger platform, possibly jumping one notch to the No. 2 leadership post.
First, he must face voters.
Driving to a Western Pennsylvania campaign stop in August, between commentary on Frosty Freeze and bison burgers, Santorum said he didn't think about losing.
Either way, he added, life will go on.
"I have never had more of a peace in a race than I've had at this time. It's in his hands," Santorum said, referring to God, "and I'm very happy that it's there."
Contact staff writer Carrie Budoff at 610-313-8211 or cbudoff@phillynews.com.
