February 16, 2012--Rick Santorum's Blue Collar

As Rick Santorum soars in the polls, a self-proclaimed narrative about him is emerging--that he pulled himself up from his blue-collar roots and thus can relate better than either Mitt Romney and Barack Obama to Americans from similar hardscrabble backgrounds. He is from the 99 percent, he never fails to remind us, while Romney is obviously the poster child for the i percent; and Obama, well, he went to Columbia and Harvard.

A quick look at Rick Santorum's actual background tell a substantially different story. While his grandfather may have been an immigrant coal miner (Rick at every rally vividly describes his calloused, coal-dust-stained hands), by the time Rick Santorum arrived his family had moved on up to relative professional affluence.

He grew up solid middle class, with a clinical psychologist for a father and a nurse for a mother--both lifelong Veterans Administration government employees, by the way--so Rick lived off of the tax payers from the day he was born. His "blue-collar" Pennsylvania upbringing was spent in Butler County, a 98 percent white and reasonably well-off exurb of Pittsburg.

He started off in the county's excellent public schools and finished at Carmel High School, a private, Catholic school outside of Chicago. From there he did his undergraduate studies at Penn State, got an MBA at the University of Pittsburgh and a JD at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law.

Four years as a lawyer (largely as a lobbyist arguing to allow World Wrestling Federation performers to be exempt from steroid laws) were the sum total of his private sector experience before being elected to the House, then the Senate. And after being defeated for a third term he was a very well paid lobbyist for companies he had gained tax loopholes and such for while in the Senate.

Very little of this sounds all that blue-collar to me.