Just adding some perspective. He tries to pawn himself off with this suspiciously vague narrative about him being a working class man who understands blue-collar needs, when he himself has never been anything of the sort.
His parents had the benefit of education and respectable jobs, but that is hardly the upper class. His father, IIRC, was a clinical psychologist for the Veterans Administration. Nurses are not at the top of anyone’s grade scale.
But, more important is the influence of his grandfather and the family’s recent immigrant history. Despite the benefit of education his parents enjoyed, at enormous sacrifice to their families, you can bet they identified as working class.
Aren’t we all kvetching now that for the first time in American history we are looking at an upcoming generation that will not have better opportunities than their parents? Isn’t that the American Dream? Santorum achieved that dream, but seems not to have forgotten exactly where he came from.... a steel town in Western Pennsylvania, where people got dirty when they put in a hard day’s work.