Former senator Rick Santorum officially announced Monday that he will run for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race. In a speech in Somerset, Penn., he declared himself "ready to lead" and ripped into President Barack Obama's record, focusing on entitlement programs. 

Rick Santorum at CPAC (Creative Commons)

As Politico reported, he ridiculed Obama's support of entitlement programs such as Medicare, which have been the subject of reform talks in debates over what to do about the U.S.'s chronic budget deficit:

“They want to hook you,” he declared. “They don’t want to free you. They don’t want to give you freedom. They don’t believe in you. They believe in themselves, the smart people, the planners.”

Santorum’s half hour speech to about 300 supporters — interrupted briefly when an elderly woman fainted in the heat and had to be carried away — touched on both economic and social issues in its withering indictment of Obama’s first term.

The latest Gallup poll shows him trailing with 2 percent of the likely Republican vote, behind Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. He was defeated by 18 percent in his last Pennsylvania senate race.  

Santorum is famous for his often inflammatory stances on social issues (he has called homosexuality a "threat" to American families), but like the rest of the Republican 2012 pack, he is focusing much more on fiscal debates, such as the federal budget. Even at a recent conference of social conservatives, attendees and speakers reportedly seemed more interested in talking about the national debt than abortion and gay marriage.

In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, he declared that he would be tougher than Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan on budget issues. Ryan's budget plan includes moves that would privatize Medicare. Santorum has said he would cut the plan further. He also said he would apply this austerity philosophy to Social Security. "Not even Paul Ryan in his budget, in the face of trillions of dollars of deficits currently, had the temerity to step forward and say we need to do Social Security," he said.

The federal deficit currently stands at about $1.4 trillion. The national debt recently hit its limit of about $14.3 trillion.

Ryan is seen as a hero to fiscal conservatives. When Newt Gingrich questioned Ryan's budget plan as "social engineering," he was seen as torpedoing his own campaign.

The Christian Science Monitor has a thorough breakdown of Santorum and what lies ahead in his campaign, analyzing his electability, his strengths, his weaknesses and his war chest. One sticking point for voters will likely be his stance on foreign policy. He has called Obama weak on terrorism despite the killing of Osama Bin Laden. On Good Morning America, he called Obama a "paper tiger" on the issue of Iran's nuclear program.

His views are seen as extreme even in the Republican party. The conservative blog Redstate.com asks, "If Rick Santorum fell in a forest..." would Republicans notice? But, as the National Review put it in a blog post, conservatives see the state of the nation in such a negative light that they may be willing to try just about anything.

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