Back Channels: For Santorum, the cornerstone of the nation is family, marriage

It's always encouraging to see people go from newspaper work to bigger and better things, like come within eight votes of winning the Iowa caucus.

He may not be touting this in conservative circles, but Rick Santorum wrote a weekly column for The Inquirer from October 2007 to July 2010. The pieces were often followed by letters to the editor that began, "How dare you publish. . . ." Santorum knows how to get a conversation going.

Listening to his eloquent and emotional almost-victory speech last week, I wished we could take credit for honing his communications skills. But the truth is, when it comes to issues of life, family, and lifting people out of poverty, Santorum has usually been more than able to get his message across.

OK, not always. Sometimes, what comes out is more passion than well-formed thought, and as a conservative, he seldom gets the benefit of the doubt. Such comments prompted antipoverty crusader and U2 singer Bono, who had worked with Santorum on debt relief and AIDS issues for years, to tell then-Inquirer political reporter Carrie Budoff in 2006:

"I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette's disease - he will always say the most unpopular thing. 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.' "

Not everyone has been so generous. Over the years, Santorum has been vilified as anti-poor, antiblack, antiwomen, antigay, and many other things. His family, his values, even his very name, have come under assault. And those attacks will be revived and will increase this year as his profile grows. He couldn't have missed all that since he left the Senate. Yet he was willing to dredge it up again. And not because of what he is against, but because he is driven by what he is staunchly and unapologetically for: family. Santorum sees family as the cornerstone of healthy neighborhoods, nations, and even economies. Undermine families, and you threaten the common good.

Here's how he put it in his book, It Takes a Family: