Santorum Defends Remarks on Obama and Public Schools

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.”

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Congress Will Auction Public Airwaves to Pay for Benefits

WASHINGTON — The need for revenue to partly cover the extension of the payroll tax cut and long-term unemployment benefits has pushed Congress to embrace a generational shift in the country’s media landscape: the auction of public airwaves now used for television broadcasts to create more wireless Internet systems.

If a compromise bill completed Thursday by Congress is approved as expected by this weekend, the result will eventually be faster connections for smartphones, iPads and other data-hungry mobile devices. Their explosive popularity has overwhelmed the ability, particularly in big cities, for systems to quickly download maps, video games and movies.

The measure would be a rare instance of the government compensating private companies with the proceeds from an auction of public property — broadcast licenses — once given free.

The auctions, which are projected to raise more than $25 billion, would also further the Obama administration’s broadband expansion plans and create a nationwide communications network for emergency workers that would allow police, fire and other responders from different departments and jurisdictions to talk to each other directly.

Public safety officials have wanted such a seamless communications system ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The sweeping changes are even more remarkable because they resulted not from an effort to address communications policy, but from a hard-fought bipartisan compromise to extend a payroll tax holiday and jobless benefits. Republicans insisted that the extension of the unemployment insurance — a cost of roughly $30 billion — be paid for in full, and one area that both sides could agree on was spectrum sales.

The spectrum auctions are at least one to two years away, but most of the programs they pay for would be covered immediately. Consumers are unlikely to see additional charges since the auction would add new spectrum rather than adding to the costs of existing spectrum.

The payroll tax exemption would be extended through the end of this year, providing a worker earning $50,000 annually with $1,000 more in take-home pay over that time. The bill would also prevent a reimbursement cut for doctors who accept Medicare.

The legislation is the result of an unusual degree of cooperation between two parties that have fought bitterly over recent issues, and members of the conference committee that negotiated the deal played to the cameras on Thursday. One by one, members filed into the office of the committee’s chairman, Representative Dave Camp, Republican from Michigan, to sign the papers splayed out neatly on a large table that rested under an ornate chandelier.

Mr. Camp and his chief negotiating partner, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, linked hands for the cameras, as Mr. Baucus said helpfully for anyone who did not get the visual cue: “Working together!”

Not everyone agrees on the ultimate benefit of the new policies. Democrats, telecommunications companies and public safety officials have argued that the auctions of public airwaves will create thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment to build the systems.

But the House speaker, John A. Boehner, was more lukewarm in his enthusiasm for the measure. While saying that the compromise was “one that I support,” he added: “Let’s be honest. This is an economic relief package, not a bill that’s going to grow the economy and create jobs.”

Some members of Mr. Boehner’s party disagreed. Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative Greg Walden of Oregon, who leads a communications subcommittee, said in a joint statement that the bill would be “an economic game-changer.”

“With 13 million Americans still seeking employment, job creation is a driving force behind efforts to expand wireless broadband,” the congressmen said in their statement. “Spectrum auctions are not only good public policy for the communications and technology sector, they will produce meaningful job creation when we need it most.”

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, who for much of the last two years has pushed the idea of reclaiming what he called inefficiently used airwaves from broadcasters, said he was “pleased that Congress has recognized the vital importance of freeing up more spectrum for mobile broadband.”

But he expressed caution about some of the bill’s language, which he said “could limit the F.C.C.’s ability to maximize the amount and benefits of recovered spectrum.”

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