"Rick Santorum’s Appeal to the GOP Base" – by George F. Will, The Washington Post

"In 1994, when Rick Santorum was a second-term Pennsylvania congressman seeking a U.S. Senate seat, a columnist asked him how he was going to win. "Guns," he replied serenely. Pennsylvania's legions of deer hunters do not use assault weapons, which President Bill Clinton was trying to ban, but the hunters suspected that this, like Clinton's wife's health-care plan, reflected a pattern of assaults on liberty. Santorum, then 36, won by 87,210 votes – 87,210 hunters? – out of 3,384,172 cast, becoming the first conservative elected senator from Pennsylvania since 1952. 'Never,' he says today, 'underestimate the power of the social issues.'" – read more here