Rick Santorum Candidate Profile

Reason has profiled the major Republican presidential hopefuls and devised a scientific* survey to help readers find true love among the 10 top contenders (Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Gary Johnson, Sarah Palin, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul). 

Click here to take an eight-question quiz and find the candidate of your dreams.

* We're using "scientific" in the Republican sense of the word. So we really mean "made up."

Name: Rick Santorum (b. Richard John Santorum)

DOB: May 10, 1958 (Shares a birthday with Bono, Young MC, Jerome Williams)

Aliases: The Scold, Ol' Man-on-Dog, Frothy Mixture

Experience: Represented Pennsylvania's 18th district from 1991 to 1995, then served in the Senate from 1995 to 2007. After losing his last election by 18 percentage points, he joined the law firm Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC.

Hangups: gays, Griswold, Google searches

Spending/Size of government/entitlement reform: A longtime supporter of Social Security reform, Santorum has endorsed the idea of personal retirement accounts, saying the only other alternatives are to "raise taxes or cut benefits or push back the retirement age." He has also complained about the level of government expenditures in general, arguing that "we're in a severe crisis, and it's a crisis of spending." While he was in office, however, his record was, in the Club for Growth's words, "plagued by the big-spending habits that Republicans adopted during the Bush years of 2001-2006." He was a strong supporter of dairy subsidies, voted for Medicare Part D and the 2005 highway bill, and was responsible for a host of earmarks. Both in and out of office, his support for spending cuts dims when the military budget is on the table.

Economic Policy: Santorum has called for reducing taxes, repealing Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley, and rolling back regulations at the EPA, FDA, and NLRB. He has also condemned the bank and auto bailouts and the 2009 stimulus package. Here again, there are differences between Santorum's rhetoric today and his record in office. Sen. Santorum voted for the Sarbanes-Oxley law that he now wants to repeal. He also backed steel tariffs and was a player in the GOP's corporatist K Street Project. After initial opposition to the program, he became a big AmeriCorps booster.

Foreign policy: Santorum's campaign website says that he "refuses to call this a War on Terror, because, like Blitzkrieg, terror is a tactic. Rick believes our nation's leaders must be honest with the American people and call this war what it is, a War with Radical Islam." Santorum strongly supports the war in Iraq, and in an August presidential debate criticized Ron Paul harshly for Paul's dovish stance on Iran, claiming that "Iran is a country that has been at war against us since 1979." Santorum thinks the U.S. should insert itself into the conflict in Syria, and he criticized the president for "dithering" over Libya. In June he declared: "We must be squarely focused on succeeding in Afghanistan rather than on politically motivated troop withdrawals."

Drug war: Santorum has admitted to smoking marijuana in college, but he hasn't let that get in the way of supporting the drug war since then.

Personal Freedom: "Laws reflect the collective morality of our people," Santorum has said. "This idea that people should be able to go and do whatever they want and it doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't hurt anybody, that's not our founders' view of freedom." Santorum has defended sodomy laws and denounced Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1966 Supreme Court decision that found a right to privacy in the Constitution. He joined Hillary Clinton's crusade against violent video games, used campaign finance regulations to threaten critics' freedom of speech, and favors a porn crackdown. A fierce opponent of gay marriage, he told the AP in 2003 that "in every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be." In the same interview he struck a federalist note, saying: "If New York doesn't want sodomy laws, if the people of New York want abortion, fine. I mean, I wouldn't agree with it, but that's their right." More recently, though, he has warned against "the 10th amendment run amok," specifically citing gay marriage as an area where "moral laws" should trump decentralization.

Immigration: Santorum supports a border wall, beefing up the border patrol, "temporarily increasing the presence of our National Guard at the border," and making English the official national language. He's for English-only sandwiches too.

Education: Santorum has a history of supporting school choice. But not too much choice: He also has a history of supporting national schooling standards. He voted for the No Child Left Behind bill in 2001.

Energy: Santorum favors a "comprehensive all-of-the-above energy strategy" aimed at "advancing not just energy independence, but energy security." He currently stresses the deregulatory aspects of that agenda—he wants to "reduce the regulatory barriers that are hindering oil, gas, and coal industries"—but he has an on-again, off-again history of support for energy subsidies as well. In 2008 he called for Washington to "mandate that all cars sold in the United States…be 'flex-fuel vehicles'—that is, they should be able to run on a blend that is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline."

Religious? Very. A Catholic who's fond of fusing his faith with his politics, Santorum says he's "appalled" at John F. Kennedy's endorsement of "an America where the separation of church and state is absolute," calling the comment a "radical statement" that did "great damage." He has also claimed that the Founders believed that religion "was not just an essential element, but the essence of civilization and the inspiration of culture." He once told National Public Radio, "If Darwin is right, I have organized my life around an illusion. We have no moral demands if we are evolved."

Horoscope for 2011: "If the past few years have been difficult, Taurus, you'll be relieved to know that 2011 is going to be better than previous years," reports Horoscope.com. "The tension you've experienced will definitely lighten up!"

Campaign site: www.ricksantorum.com

Reason on Santorum:

• "Erasing the 'I' from Marriage," by Shikha Dalmia, July 19, 2011
• "Conservatives and 'Personal Autonomy'," by Michael C. Moynihan, December 10, 2009
• "The Myth of the 'Values Voters,'" by David Weigel, January 2007
• "The Audacity of a Dope, by David Weigel, November 13, 2006
• "Penn Statists," by David Weigel, November 2006
• "Rick Santorum's Convictions," by Jacob Sullum, October 31, 2006
• "It's Not, You Know, Man on Elf, Man on Orc, Or Whatever the Case May Be," by David Weigel, October 18, 2006
• "Rick Santorum Debates Invisible Man, by David Weigel, September 25, 2006
• "Rick Santorum, Nader Raider," by David Weigel, August 2, 2006
• "Rick Santorum and the Right to Privacy," by David Weigel, May 23, 2006
• "Santorum and Intelligent Design," by Jeff Taylor, December 22, 2005
• "Goodbye to Goldwater," by Jonathan Rauch, December 2005
• "That Frothy Mix of Statism and the GOP," by Matt Welch, August 4, 2005
• "Two Senaters Who Make You Say 'Pew,'" by Tim Cavanaugh, July 14, 2005
• "K Street Cred," by Julian Sanchez, September 16, 2003
• "In the Bedroom," by Jacob Sullum, May 2, 2003
• "This Is My Private Life," by Cathy Young, April 29, 2003
• "Private Parts," by Ronald Bailey, April 23, 2003
• "Michael and Me," by Mike Lynch, February 1999