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"I couldn't believe my ears: Rick Santorum was criticizing Ronald Reagan yesterday in front of a crowd in a quaint barn in Hollis, New Hampshire. \"Who changed retirement age from 65 to 67? Reagan,\" said the former Pennsylvania senator, who's taken to inexplicably donning cowboy boots with his khakis. \"Why does nobody know that?\"\n\nRick Santorum has been a first-tier candidate for five days now and, unless Huntsman or Newt's fortunes radically change, perhaps the only viable anti-Romney left in the race. He's been getting a lot of credit for his shoe-leather effort and working class appeal\u2014but he's also now facing the brunt of a lot of his opponents' attacks for the first time since he announced his candidacy. In the New Hampshire double-header debates, opponents tried to portray him as \"corrupt\" and a \"big government\" conservative for seeking earmarks for Pennsylvania. Debate moderators and town hall attendees have tried to trip him up on gay marriage, too. But no one's asked about his Reagan criticism, an apostasy in the Republican party.\n\nThe comment in Hollis wasn't just an unfortunate professorial tangent either\u2014though the candidate sometimes comes off as more high school civics teacher than aspirant for higher office. He also brought it up a few days ago in Brentwood. The Daily Caller has his quotes: \"If Rick Santorum gets elected and we do what I said that we need to do,\n\n which is to deal with the entitlement programs now, not 10 to 20 years from now,\" he said. \"You'll know\u2014unlikeRonald Reagan who maybe was a better politician than me\u2014you'll know that it was Rick Santorum that worked together and got the American public to gather together to fix this problem. Why? Because it is our problem.\" (I'll also be on the lookout for more examples of Santorum referring to himself in the third person; he's pretty weird on the stump.)\n\n\"They were absolutely brilliant,\" he said, referring to a deal Reagan brokered with Congress in the '80s. \"They passed a bill that didn't take effect for 20 years so nobody blames them. It was brilliant. They increased the Social Security age by two years back in1983 and it didn't start phasing in, it doesn't fully phase in for almost 40 years,\" he said. \"And so Ronald Reagan did that. Most people have no idea\u2014no one associates Ronald Reagan with raising the retirement age. Why? Because all of the people it affected were nowhere near retirement and they didn't know about it,\" Santorum said.\n\nIn a primary where the candidates seem to be running as potential veep candidates to Zombie Ronald Reagan, shouldn't this be the death of Rick Santorum? Shouldn't one of his opponents be hammering on him for Gipper-bashing? Do they not even know? Apparently some young campaign tracker isn't doing his or her job."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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