Santorum

Now that he has become an issue in NH, if only because of his strong finish in Iowa, I will weigh in on Rick Santorum.

He is a Big Government Conservative, rather like Gingrich.  If socially conservative issues are your focus, Santorum is your guy, more than Perry, Gingrich, or Paul.  But for hands-off government, Santorum's statements and actions over the years suggest he likes "requiring all schoolchildren to have basic personal economics lessons in school," national service, pro-family teaching (whatever that is), and other nanny-state interventions.  It's just this time, the nanny is a Baptist instead of a Unitarian.

These types of programs are a drop in the bucket in terms of cost, and children don't tend to learn what we force on them anyway, so you may be comfortable with that.  Heck, a really shrewd liberal might be fine with that, reasoning that these showcase legislations are often more symbolic than effective, and it signals a guy they can do business with, trading support for, I don't know, paying schoolkids to learn Arabic* or Chinese* because we're going to need it, or setting up IRA's for five-year-olds, or funding a Motown museum or whatever. 

If Santorum finds a way to cut entitlements, reduce our medical-insurance promises, or wastefraudandabuse, then I suppose all this nanny-state clutter won't matter much.  And truth be told, a lot of it would still happen under Romney or even Ron Paul.  That Washington barge only turns by degrees.  Yet better to have less of this than more.

*And then complaining that it was mostly kids who already had these as family languages, who weren't any more likely to be doing this for patriotic interest as we thought when we envisioned Nebraskan Lutherans populating the State Department in 2025.