It’s worth relinking too to the fair Philly Inquirer piece last week where that Bono quote came from — especially since at least one reader didn’t catch it. Suspect he might not be alone The piece begins:

The question made Sen. Rick Santorum sigh, he had answered it so many times before. Did he really suggest in his book, It Takes a Family, that women with children shouldn’t work? It didn’t matter how many times he listed the stats: More than 50 percent of his senior staff are women. His mother worked full time. His wife, a stay-at-home mother of six, is a lawyer and nurse. He had been pegged as the Pennsylvania senator who chides working mothers. Now Santorum needed to decode Rick Santorum – again. “Nobody reads the few sentences before and finds out who ‘they’ are,” Santorum said at a debate last week. “The ‘they’ I was referring to were weathy families, or upper-income families, who have the opportunity to sacrifice ‘stuff’ to spend time with their kids. “I have nothing, absolutely nothing, against working women,” he added firmly. Exchanges like this have pocked his 16 years in office, first as a U.S. representative from Western Pennsylvania and now as a two-term senator. He rose quickly on the strength of his unvarnished style. It might turn out to be his Achilles’ heel. To some, he is one-dimensional – a conservative caricature who advocates a global war on “Islamic fascism,” flies to the bedside of Terri Schiavo, and wears his Catholic faith on his cuff links. Rather than view his zeal for confronting the most controversial issues of the day as refreshing or even admirable for an elected official, critics see a cheeky ideologue. To others, he is misunderstood, the nuances of his positions lost in a sound-bite culture and the flip side of his profile ignored – the senator who drives alone to the Capitol every morning, grinds away at AIDS and poverty, and skips the cocktail parties at night to see his family. “I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette’s disease – he will always say the most unpopular thing,” said Bono, the U2 lead singer, who has worked with Santorum on debt relief and AIDS since 2001, in an interview Friday. “But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable. . . . He was ready to stand up on Capitol Hill and say, ‘This is important for America.’ “ Boyish-looking and kinetic at 48, Santorum accepts his role as a political piñata. Others do not. “I had a lot of concerns about him running again,” said his wife, Karen. “The hours are tough, just the negative environment. It is extremely difficult to handle.” People wonder why Santorum, facing a tough reelection, didn’t tone it down, talk up something benign, and coast to a third term. But that’s not Rick Santorum. Never has been…

Yesterday at a rally in Philadelphia I was at, First Lady Laura, Bush, too, highlighted Santorum’s leadership on welfare reform and work on AIDS and malaria legislation. Not the stuff one first associates with him. But there’s no reason not to. He’s been hard at work on such fronts.