Santorum Says He’s Running to Win

Rick Santorum, whose declaration of candidacy yesterday was largely overshadowed by U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s late afternoon press conference, said that he‘s running to win.

“I’m ready to lead. I’m ready to do what has to be done for the next generation, with the courage to fight for freedom, with the courage to fight for America,” the former two-term senator said in announcing his candidacy Monday morning from the steps of the Somerset County Courthouse in western Pennsylvania.

With a brass band playing in the background and more than 300 supporters cheering and waving signs bearing his new campaign slogan, “The Courage to Fight for America,” Santorum — a favorite among the GOP’s social conservatives — joined an already crowded field of Republican presidential aspirants.

“We’re in it to win,” the 53-year-old Santorum told “Good Morning America” shortly before making his announcement.

Santorum, who’s barely registering in the national polls, has a long road ahead.

“Santorum is one of the darkest of the dark horses,” said political analyst Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. “His candidacy is certainly not a joke — he’s very serious and is a serious person — but it’s still a very long shot.”

Cook won’t get much argument from most pundits. “We can’t imagine the thought process that leads a person to think he can be president when, after several months of campaigning, he has driven his poll numbers up to 2 percent, dead-last among the circus that is the Republican presidential race,” stated an editorial in yesterday’s Philadelphia Daily News, one of Pennsylvania’s largest newspapers.

Then again, the former Pennsylvania lawmaker, who was resoundingly defeated — losing overwhelmingly to Democrat Bob Casey — while seeking a third term in the U.S. Senate in 2006, has a history of sorts as a long shot candidate dating back to 1990 when he came out of nowhere to upset Democratic congressman Doug Walgren.

Walgren, a seven-term House incumbent, had been reelected with nearly 63 percent of the vote only two years before facing the upset-minded Santorum, who was outspent by a nearly three-to-one margin.

While still in his mid-thirties, the young and hyperactive Santorum repeated that feat four years later when he knocked off liberal Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford, defeating the incumbent by 87,000 votes in one of the closest Senate races in the country that year.