Do you really believe those lists are an accurate representation of what he would do as President?
I think people forget what governing means, and how legislation is done. They don’t understand enough about bills to know that you can pretty much take any vote and make it sound evil.
The meme this week is that Santorum is a master of illusion, managing to fool an entire media hoarde into calling him conservative for 15 years, earning a Hard Core Conservative ranking from “OnTheIssues” (combined score 20 points better than Newt Gingrich - 90/0 vs 90/20).
When Gingrich retired, he had a lifetime 90 ACU rating. When Santorum retired, he had a lifetime 88.1 ACU rating. His last year was a 96, btw, while Gingrich’s last year was a 100.
These are so close to the same that the Gingrich folks instead like to compare the year “1998”, as if the world stopped then.
When one considers that Gingrich was a representative from a safe conservative district, and Santorum was a senator from a purple state, the only shocking thing about the disparity between their ACU ratings is how low Newt's is in comparison to Ricks. One would expect it to have been far more than 1.9% higher.