But a number of his statements over the weekend drew criticism, illustrating one of the perils of political success: the same acclaim that brings confidence also brings greatly increased scrutiny. Mr. Santorum, who is surging in national polls, accused President Obama of “a phony theology,” likened public schools to “factories” and criticized prenatal testing as a way of encouraging society to “cull the ranks of the disabled.” As he emerges as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Santorum is moving from a generic alternative to Mitt Romney to a specific brand of conservative who will be known and judged by his own views. All weekend, he was forced to explain and defend his more provocative remarks, maintaining that some were distorted in the echo chamber of the Internet and the news media. Keith Nahigian, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, another candidate whose provocative remarks drew scrutiny when she was briefly atop the polls, said Mr. Santorum now stood to have his statements parsed far more closely and to become fodder for other Republicans, as well as for Democrats. If Mr. Santorum were to win the Michigan primary on Feb. 28 and Ohio on March 6 — two states where polls suggest that he has a chance of defeating Mr. Romney — “he could very easily have a path to the nomination,” Mr. Nahigian said. “Here we are in the ninth inning, and people don’t know who he is.” Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist not affiliated with any of the candidates, said, “Santorum is now being tested — not just his position on issues, it’s his stability, his maturity that is being tested.” On Saturday in Ohio, Mr. Santorum described the “president’s agenda” as being “about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.” After a spokesman for the Obama campaign called it “the latest low,” Mr. Santorum told reporters he was not suggesting that Mr. Obama was not a Christian. “Obviously, as we all know in the Christian church, there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity,” Mr. Santorum said. “I’m just saying he’s imposing his values on the church, and I think that’s wrong.” Questioned further about the remark on Sunday, Mr. Santorum said he had meant that Mr. Obama’s worldview placed care of the earth and natural resources above human needs. “The earth is not the objective,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News. “Man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.” At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the government’s role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their children. The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose “when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.” Education reformers on both the left and right criticize the uniformity of instruction that dates from mass public education. But Mr. Santorum, who home-schooled some of his own children, makes many education advocates nervous because he seems to want to substantially scale back or cancel federal and state guidelines on standards and equality of access. Mr. Santorum also criticized Mr. Obama’s health care law over the weekend, in part because it requires insurance plans to offer free prenatal testing. “Free prenatal testing,” he said, “ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.” “That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Mr. Santorum said. The remarks might win Mr. Santorum further support from evangelical Christians and Catholics who have been galvanized by the Catholic Church’s opposition to the president’s insistence that religious-affiliated hospitals and schools offer health plans with free contraception. But the issue also risks pushing away voters, especially women, who find in such stances an assault on women’s control over their own health decisions. Mr. Santorum has said that as a Catholic, he opposes contraception. On Sunday, Mr. Santorum spoke to more than 3,000 people at First Redeemer Church here, and offered another statement that could prove controversial. In a long analogy, he compared the threat to Americans’ freedom under Mr. Obama to the “great peril” of World War II and likened the present moment to the isolationist period when Americans were complacent about “this guy over in Europe.” Unlike the challenge for the “greatest generation,” Mr. Santorum said, there is no “cataclysmic event” to rally around. In his string of provocative remarks, some strategists see calibration. “Santorum knows exactly what he is saying and doing it for a reason,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a strategist for President George W. Bush’s campaigns. “Santorum is too smart and too disciplined for his comments to be mistakes.” His statements also might work by further eclipsing Newt Gingrich, his main rival for conservatives seeking an alternative to Mr. Romney. But some say there is a risk for him in the new scrutiny. “You get under the glare of that light,” Mr. Castellanos said, and “a lot of people catch on fire.”
