The Real Santorum - NYTimes.com I don't think I'm giving away trade secrets by revealing that if you're a magazine writer and a subject gives you real access - lets you hang out over the course of several days, lets you see him out in the world, lets you get in all your questions - you are grateful and you might even, on a certain level, be more inclined to like your subject. In 2005, I wrote a cover article for this magazine on Rick Santorum, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania who was viewed by most Democrats as a far-right, overaggressive, abrasive, polarizing force. He was the kid at the playground whom other parents didn't want to see in the game, because if he showed up, someone else was going home with a bloody nose. When I was with Santorum, in Washington and on a campaign swing in Pennsylvania, I observed that his staff didn't call him Senator, as most of the 100 titans in that august body like to be addressed. They called him Boss or Rick. I could ask him pretty much anything, and he would answer. One thing I particularly appreciated was that if I inquired about some seemingly outrageous statement he made in the past, he didn't deny it or try to frame it in some more palatable way; he would actually expand upon it. He had the courage of his convictions. When I was with Santorum, I sometimes thought he was hoping to lose his re-election campaign in Pennsylvania, which he ultimately did. He aggressively backed President Bush's proposal for privatized Social Security accounts, which was political suicide in Pennsylvania, one of the grayest states in the union. Santorum and his wife, Karen, had seven kids - she didn't work outside the home - and they were so strapped for money that their parents sent them occasional checks to help out. If he hoped on some level to lose - so in his post-Senate life he could cash in on K Street - that is exactly what he has done, as The Times and others have documented. They're fine now. No need for those checks. What I did not, in a million years, ever imagine was that Santorum would ever be a serious presidential candidate. And winning three primaries in one night, as he did this week, has to qualify him as that. It says a lot about the Republican Party that his views are close enough to the mainstream - their mainstream - that he is winning states. But I suspect voters are also responding to what I did: Santorum really does have "real-guy" cred in a way that no one else in that field does. When he talks about working people, you feel he actually knows some of them. He has conviction. He says what he thinks, no matter how possibly alarming his views may be, and repeats the same thing the next day and the next. The front-runner Mitt Romney has succeeded, in states where he spent the money, in puncturing Newt Gingrich as a pompous, hypocritical, inside-Washington windbag. He has begun to take on Santorum, and his first line of attack seems to be that his upstart rival is not a real conservative. Somehow, I don't think that's going to work, and he will have to probe for some other weakness. Santorum may be scary real. Or kooky real. But he's real.