[Guest post by Molly Redden]

Today, I wrote about Rick Santorum’s college years, during which he was much less the conservative ideologue than he is today. (Case in point: A friend said he shunned Youth for Reagan as being too “fringe right-wing.”) Instead, according to many of his friends and professors, he was a budding tactician—more interested in making Republican politics “fun” for the non-country-club-going crowd, and in parsing the minutiae of polling data than in proselytizing conservative ideology.

The question then becomes, do his tactical inclinations show up in his political career? I didn’t pursue this question too far into his political career, in part because this 1995 Philadelphia magazine piece by Eric Konigsberg does a pretty good job of it. But Konigsberg’s piece, which was rediscovered by the Huffington Post, has mostly been passed around on account of this Rick Santorum money quote: “I was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress”—which is a shame, because it’s full of other goodies, like the outsized role Newt Gingrich played in launching the young Santorum to prominence. (Whoops.)

Konigsberg also has a good accounting of Santorum’s first political race, his 1990 Congressional run. Santorum, he writes,mailed fliers to thousands of evangelical Christians in the Pittsburgh area, promising to govern in a method that was “derived from my religious commitment.” The move yielded widespread support among local, conservative religious leaders, and up to 1,000 extra canvassers.

Charlie Kelly, a colleague from Santorum’s years at the law firm Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, told me Santorum’s deliberately pandered to the right to gain those volunteers. “Most people around here who watched that first campaign think his move to the right was fortuitous. It gave him foot soldiers in a door-to-door effort that was essential for him in this race,” Kelly said. “He’s known since his very first campaign how ardent and devoted that sector could be.” Yet the candidate’s courtship of the religious demographic was purely rhetorical: Santorum did not even campaign on any particular religious issue that cycle.