The 34-year-old Indiana native has learning disabilities and endured a childhood of abuse. Relatives say he was thrown through a plate-glass window by his grandmother when he was a teen, leaving him with a permanently numb left hand. Social workers consider him well enough to work, though, and he never qualified for disability benefits.

So, in the past decade Case has scraped by in temporary jobs, never making more than $10 an hour. Now, he’s out of work again. He gets no unemployment benefits; he wasn’t in his last gig long enough. He can’t get Medicaid because he has no dependent children at home. Until October, his only help was $200 a month in food stamps. Because of a paperwork error, the government cut him off. With or without food stamps, he has to scrounge for cash, selling plasma at a blood center twice a week for $30 a pop.

“What’s out there for people like me?” said Case. “There’s nothing.”

The reasons are complex, but it boils down to this: American society has decided that people like Shaun Case, the able-bodied poor, don’t deserve much help. As a result, and despite record spending, a growing number are falling through the gaps in America’s patchwork of welfare programs.

Case is one of 12.2 million adults of working age, with no children at home, who were living below the poverty level in 2011. That’s up nearly double from two decades ago. And of those, 5.6 million received no assistance from any of the major five federal programs, a Reuters analysis of Current Population Survey data found. That’s the highest number since 1992, the first year for which comparable records are available. Then, there were 4.3 million unaided poor adults.

Another 1.4 million able-bodied adults received only food stamps, up from 732,000 in 1992. That program keeps people from going hungry, but doesn’t help pay for other necessities such as rent, heat or dental care.

The population of unassisted poor adults is growing at a time when the United States is grinding through a prolonged stretch of rising poverty and income inequality.

MORE POVERTY, MORE SPENDING

The number of Americans below the federal poverty level – $22,350 a year for a family of four – hit 48 million in 2011, 17 million more than in 1989. Indiana has seen the second-largest increase in poverty of any state in that time, according to a Reuters analysis of Census data. Sixteen percent of the Hoosier State was poor in 2011, up from 11 percent.

The prime reason for the latest surge in the number of poor people has been the weak economy, not a stingy government. Antipoverty spending has actually increased overall.

Nationally, the federal government put a record $506 billion last year into its five major means-tested programs for low-income, able-bodied Americans. Outlays on these programs – food stamps, Medicaid, cash welfare, housing assistance and tax credits – were up more than triple since 1989, adjusted for inflation. The 50 states spend tens of billions more.

If it weren’t for such assistance, the poverty rate would be much worse. Some economists say the rate is somewhat overstated, too, because it doesn’t count non-cash aid such as food vouchers.

Today, the elderly, the disabled and the working poor get most means-tested assistance. Higher Medicaid spending – driven by expanding rolls but also by soaring healthcare costs – eats up a growing piece of the overall budget. Part of this shift toward the elderly and disabled is no doubt due to the aging baby boomer population.

Still, people who don’t fall into favored categories are getting pinched, especially jobless adults such as Case.

Brandi Burnau faced a perverse welfare incentive as she weighed whether to raise her baby daughter in poverty or put her up for adoption. Jobless construction worker Jeremy Toler, befuddled by the system, passed up benefits his large family may be eligible for. Alexsandria Elliott, a former hotel housekeeper, fell so completely through the cracks that she was unable to get treatment for a debilitating dental disease.

INDIANA’S INNOVATIONS

Their home state of Indiana has put in place some particularly stringent limits on poor individuals and families as part of a decades-long effort to revamp welfare.

In 1994, then-Governor Evan Bayh, a conservative Democrat, created work requirements for Hoosiers who received welfare benefits. And if a woman on welfare got pregnant, she’d receive no extra assistance for the newborn.

“The bottom line was trying to make someone self-sufficient,” Bayh said in an interview. “We were trying to achieve two values – one was the notion of community, and also responsibility.”

Two years later, President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich replaced a federal cash program for poor families dating from the 1930s with a new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, that required adult recipients to seek work. Clinton, a Democrat, called the overhaul “ending welfare as we know it.”

Republican Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s current governor, took it a step beyond. He outsourced management of the TANF system and the intake of Medicaid and food-stamp applicants to IBM. He set a strict lifetime limit of 24 months for cash welfare compared with a federal guideline of five years. Enforcement of work requirements was toughened. Recipients who fail to find work in six weeks must perform community service, such as street sweeping.

That provision was designed to shoo people off the rolls, said Mitch Roob, who implemented the changes as head of Indiana’s social-services agency.

“It was so unpleasant,” Roob said in an interview, “that people would think, ‘I’m just going to get a job instead.’”

Daniels tightened in other areas, too. Parents now have to prove they are seeking child support before getting welfare. If the other parent fails to pay $2,000 in child support for more than three months, his or her drivers license is suspended.

CASH AID DRIES UP

Since Indiana began revamping its system, the share of poor Indianans getting cash welfare has plummeted, even as the number of households in poverty grew by more than half.

In 1999, an average of 38,000 families per month received basic cash assistance from the TANF program, according to Indiana’s Family and Social Services Administration. By 2011, just 22,400 did – a 41 percent decrease. The average monthly amount each family gets also dropped, from $253 to $205.

Overall federal and state spending on TANF in Indiana has actually increased 10 percent since 1998, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But only a fraction now goes to cash assistance – $72 million out of $292 million. That is down 50 percent from 1998. The rest goes toward intangible programs like job training or education about marriage and pregnancy-prevention.

It’s a national trend: America has slashed the number of people on cash welfare by two-thirds since 1996, to 1.4 percent of the populace.

Housing aid also hasn’t kept up with the growth in poverty. From 1999 to 2011, the number of Hoosier households in poverty grew by more than half. But in 2011, the number receiving either public housing or federal rent subsidies was just 5 percent higher than a decade earlier. Today, just 16 percent of poor households get federal housing help.

The number of American adults on the most expensive program for the poor, Medicaid, has tripled since 1990. The average amount spent per working-age adult has fallen 12 percent, even as medical costs have soared. States have a say over who is eligible. In Indiana, working parents have to earn less than 24 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify – currently, no more than $5,532 a year for a family of four. That’s the strictest level in the country, along with Alabama. Indiana is one of 41 states that don’t cover childless adults.

CONFLICTED FEELINGS

The food-stamp program also has expanded dramatically, both nationally and in Indiana. In 1999, only half of poor Indiana households got food stamps. By 2011, just under 90 percent of a much-bigger number of impoverished households were covered. Each on average received $300 a month, an amount unchanged since 1999 when adjusted for inflation.

Another growing program is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which increased nearly sixfold amid the welfare-to-work overhauls. But it’s a payment that comes just once a year. And it’s meant to top up the incomes of people with jobs, who make up to twice the poverty level. People without earned income don’t qualify.

As lean as the times are, Americans are conflicted about expanding poverty assistance – even poor Americans.

On a recent Thursday afternoon, Tanya Jones was among a hundred men, women and children waiting for free groceries at a cavernous former printing plant in Indianapolis that’s now one of the largest food pantries in the Midwest. Asked what she would change about public assistance, she said the government should stop benefits from going to those who don’t deserve them.

“You got all these people who can work, who won’t,” said Jones, a 28-year-old mother of two, whose $12.75-an-hour job as a caterer isn’t enough to feed herself, her two children and her mother. “I feel the help should be there for the people who need it, not the people who don’t want to work.”

POLL FINDINGS

That ambivalence about helping the poor is widespread. A Reuters/Ipsos poll of Americans in October and November found that 52 percent of respondents said the government isn’t doing enough to help the poor. Yet 40 percent said that most people who receive aid don’t deserve it, a follow-up survey found.

Respondents overwhelmingly opposed aiding non-disabled adults. Sixty-six percent of respondents felt the elderly deserve cash assistance, and 40 percent said children do. Just 14 percent supported cash help for able-bodied poor adults without dependent kids. (Because these polls are collected online, accuracy is measured using a credibility interval. For these questions, the interval was 1 percent to 1.5 percent.)

Those values are reflected in poverty policy. In a 2011 paper, economists Yonatan Ben-Shalom, Robert Moffitt and John Karl Scholz found that families in which no one is continuously working and which have no elderly or disabled members are the “most underserved” by U.S. antipoverty programs of any group.

Their poverty rate, the authors calculated, was 67 percent after factoring in government aid. For the elderly, it was 9 percent.

That’s because the elderly enjoy the two largest federal entitlement programs, Social Security pensions and Medicare health insurance. These are aimed at all seniors, not just poor ones. The two spent a combined $1.2 trillion last year – more than the entire federal budget aimed specifically at the poor.

“STURDY BEGGARS”

Suspicion of the able-bodied poor runs deep. Policy makers for centuries have gone through phases in which they view welfare through the concept of the “deserving and undeserving poor.” Sheila Suess Kennedy, a professor of law and public policy at Indiana University, said the concept harkens back to 15th-century England, where statutes banned charity for people who appeared able to work. They were called “sturdy beggars.”

The United States is in such a phase now. When President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Poverty” in 1964, the prevailing view was that the poor were victims of circumstances beyond their control. That changed in the 1980s and 1990s. Conservative critiques of the welfare state as a source of debilitating dependency, as well as widespread claims of fraud, eroded support for cash assistance and paved the way for the 1996 overhaul.

Some economists say the effort to incentivize worthiness has created an incoherent system of relief for the poor. Some households get the panoply of means-tested benefits – food stamps, Medicaid, TANF, housing subsidies and tax credits. Others get little or nothing.

“We have a kind of patchwork set of programs,” said Robert Moffitt, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, “where some families fall through the cracks, and some other families get more than maybe they would under a better-designed system.”

Gov. Daniels agrees the system isn’t working. He say it’s “well-intentioned” – but has become convoluted with programs “stacked on top of each other for two generations now.” Smarter spending, not more spending, is the answer. “The money it wastes is the second-biggest problem,” he said in an interview. The first is “the undermining if not destruction of human dignity and the ethic of personal responsibility.”

A DIFFICULT DECISION

Brandi Burnau, a round-faced 22-year-old with brown eyes, said she has been struggling on her own since she aged out of the foster-care system four years ago. Single and unemployed, Burnau recently had a baby daughter, Ava. Eight months ago she made a hard decision: She gave Ava up for adoption.

At the time, she was working in a warehouse outside Indianapolis stocking shelves, and she burst into tears every time she saw baby books. She left work early a couple of times, she said, and was let go. Having been on the job just three months, she was ineligible for unemployment benefits.

Burnau took to sleeping in her car, in homeless shelters and at the homes of strangers she met at the bus stop. Last month, Burnau was asleep in the car, which bore a sign that read “homeless and desperate.” An older woman knocked on the window and gave her food, and invited Burnau to stay at her house for as long as she needs. “We now go to church together,” she said. “She’s helped me a lot.”

But her future is uncertain, and Burnau is mystified by the incentives the welfare system presented her. A simple financial calculus, she said, would favor keeping Ava. She received $3,000 for living and medical expenses from the adoptive family during pregnancy, the cap under state law.

As a single parent, Burnau said, she could have soon received much more than that in additional welfare benefits: TANF cash aid for mothers, more money in food stamps, free Medicaid coverage and preferential treatment at homeless shelters. Today, she said, she gets $180 a month in food stamps, but no other government aid.

“When you’re single, they don’t care,” she said. “If I had kept my baby, I would have benefited, but I didn’t want to be selfish.”

Jeremy Toler, 36, is also puzzled by the welfare state, and he used to work for it.

NAVIGATING THE SYSTEM

After serving in the army reserves and graduating from Ball State University with an associate’s degree, Toler got a state job processing claims in a child-care program for the poor. When the state automated the system, he and the rest of his office were laid off.

Toler then landed a series of construction jobs, working for the past three years at a local demolition and building company. After two marriages that ended in divorce, he now lives with his girlfriend and the five children they’re raising – four from their previous marriages, and one they had together.

In June, he moved to another construction firm, but unhappy there, Toler quit. That was a mistake. Under the federal unemployment insurance system, workers get benefits only if they are laid off, not if they quit. A few weeks later, his girlfriend lost her job.

Since June, Toler said recently, he has applied for dozens of positions without luck. The family lives in a trailer home and gets by on Medicaid, food stamps and donations from local food pantries. Like Case, he also sells plasma twice a week.

Toler has had trouble navigating the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. He believed he and his girlfriend each had to spend a total of 70 to 80 hours a week in resume workshops or actively looking for jobs. He also thought the state provided no childcare. After being told their family would receive $300 per month from TANF, he said, they decided it wasn’t worth applying.

State officials said the program, in fact, provides childcare and requires a combined 55 hours a week for a couple. They said a family of seven – like Toler’s – can receive up to $522 per month.

“A LITTLE HELP”

His troubles are mounting. This summer, Toler’s truck was repossessed. He stopped paying the child support he owes an ex-wife on the child she is raising, and was briefly arrested in October and ordered to appear in court after she reported him. He has also stopped making payments on the $17,000 mortgage on his trailer home and his $1,900 in student loans.

“It seems like the harder you worked in life, the less help you get,” Toler said.

Some fall completely through the gaps. Seven years ago, Alexsandria Elliott, now 37, said she developed hereditary periodontal disease. Last year, the infections grew so severe that a doctor told her she may die if she didn’t have her remaining eight teeth pulled. The extractions would cost $2,300. First she had to find the money.

Elliott, who used to work as a low-wage hotel housekeeper, didn’t have health insurance. She couldn’t get on Medicaid, because working-age Indianans without dependent children aren’t eligible. She didn’t qualify for cash welfare benefits for the same reason – her daughter was over 18.

In February, she had to borrow to have the dental surgery, leaving her with a debt to pay. When she gets a job, she hopes to raise the $800 she said she’ll need to buy dentures. Elliott also isn’t receiving food stamps.

“I tried the (university hospital), I tried the schools, I tried state assistance…. And nothing,” said Elliott. “And I’m suffering to the degree I want to shoot my head right off my shoulders and can’t take it anymore. Why can’t I get a little help to pull a tooth?”

Shaun Case’s problems began long before his difficulties in getting help from the government.

TOUGH START

Case, a short and mild man with a boyish face, favors baggy clothes. The son of a drug-addicted mother and alcoholic father, he – and his three brothers – spent much of childhood in foster care. Case’s mother said she was abused by his father, and she fled when Shaun was a toddler. Shaun’s father repeatedly beat him and his brothers, according to Case, his mother and a sibling. When Case was 14, his grandmother pushed him through a window. He nearly bled to death from the resulting gash in his wrist, relatives say.

“Two major arteries were cut,” said Case, who also suffered nerve damage. “I have no feeling in my left hand.”

Placed in foster care, Case underwent a psychiatric evaluation. He was found to have a learning disability but not bad enough to have him officially declared mentally disabled.

Case’s father couldn’t be reached for comment.

When he was a senior in high school, Case got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of school to try providing for her. She later miscarried but the two eventually married. The couple had two daughters together, but divorced.

His primary source of employment has been temp agencies. He has worked as a janitor, airport security guard, construction worker and in other low-paying roles. He has no substance-abuse problems and no scrapes with the law, relatives say.

But Case’s meager skills and cognitive problems trap him. He has tried to get a high-school equivalency degree but struggles in the classroom. His temporary work assignments have all ended with companies choosing to not permanently hire him.

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE

“It didn’t work out,” Case said, referring to a stint as a supermarket cashier. “I was either giving too much or too less change. The manager was like, ‘Are you serious? What is going on here?’”

Emotional problems hinder him as well. “People will tell him he’s retarded or stupid and it sets him off,” Case’s older brother Joe said in an interview.

Today, Case and his siblings remain mired in poverty. Joe makes $400 to $500 a month as a self-employed computer consultant, and Joe’s wife makes $1,000 a month at a daycare center, with no health benefits. Raising five children together, Joe said, they usually receive Medicaid and $520 a month in food stamps.

As an able-bodied adult without dependent children, Shaun qualified for no help other than food stamps. He has repeatedly applied for disability but been turned down. He applied for free healthcare at a local hospital but missed appointments and was rejected.

When Case falls ill, he goes to hospital emergency rooms. During his divorce, he experienced severe pain in his abdomen, he said. Emergency-room doctors found that he had untreated stomach ulcers.

Case said his biggest goal – and challenge – is finding steady well-paid work.

“When I was 18, you could leave a job and find another one,” Case said, tucking into an omelet at Burt’s Peppy Grill, a diner in eastern Indianapolis. “Every year, it just gets worse.”

A LONG JOURNEY

As in other parts of the country, the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs in Indiana has eroded economic opportunities for people with few skills. Seven out of 10 jobs in Indiana now pay less than $45,000 a year, according to the Indiana Institute for Working Families, a think tank. That’s just a few thousand dollars above the income the institute says a three-member Indianapolis family needs to be self-sufficient.

Case now lives on the living-room couches of Joe and a second brother, Tom.

In October, Case lost his food stamps after a paperwork glitch: The state sent him a letter requesting more documentation, which he said he never got. After he tried and failed to straighten things out, a notification arrived saying he’d been cut off. As of last week, he was still trying to land an appointment with a caseworker to restore his benefits.

Case said his dream is to be an art teacher, something his foster father said is impossible given Shaun’s cognitive and emotional problems. Case said his second choice is to learn a skilled trade such as plumbing or carpentry.

“If you don’t have a good education, you could end up on the street,” said Case. “Five years from now, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

If he finds work, Case will have trouble getting there. His driver’s license has been suspended. With virtually no income, he fell behind on child-support payments, and so the state has frozen his license.

On a recent day, Case set out for the Indianapolis suburbs, where warehouses operated by Amazon and other companies were advertising jobs. He took two buses and then walked 3 miles, a journey of about two-and-a-half hours, to look for work. He had no luck.

(Reporting by Kristina Cooke, David Rohde and Ryan McNeill; additional reporting by Himanshu Ojha; Edited by Michael Williams and Janet Roberts)

In 2006, Gov. Mitch Daniels privatized the management of the welfare-benefits system with a project led by IBM. Two-thirds of Indiana’s social-service agency’s staffers became employees of IBM and its partners. In a process dubbed “welfare modernization,” recipients would apply for benefits online and by phone rather than meeting social workers face to face.

It was, by Daniels’s own admission, a failure. Critics accused him of ignoring the lessons of a failed privatization effort in Texas. People were wrongly denied benefits and documents were lost, according to a lawsuit the state filed against IBM. Daniels canceled the IBM contract in 2009.

Advocates for the poor say the phone- and Internet-based system proved too difficult for many recipients to navigate because they lacked literacy and computer skills. Opponents also accused the governor’s office of steering work to a company owned by a campaign contributor, Affiliated Computer Services, now owned by Xerox. Daniels and Mitch Roob, an executive at Affiliated before becoming social-services chief, denied any quid pro quo.

This July, a Marion County judge awarded $52 million to compensate IBM for cancellation of the contract, castigating the state for “misguided government policy” and IBM for “overzealous corporate ambition.”

In an interview, Daniels said the current, revised system – a public-private hybrid – is a success. He cited statistics showing that timeliness and accuracy of benefits have increased. Some recipients agree that the new system is more efficient than the first revamp. Some remain confused by the process and the eligibility rules, however.

At one privately run Indiana call center where applicants call in to apply for benefits, the target time for handling each case is 12 minutes, according to an employee who spoke on condition of anonymity. The employee said she handles 35 to 50 calls a day.

“Frustrated employees will tell the client anything to just get them off the phone and keep their time down,” the employee said. “We have to take a call, authenticate, find out what they want, answer their questions and wrap up … all within 12 minutes. It’s kind of like a game show. And people who need food stamps or nursing home care, they are losing out.”

A NEGATIVE TAX

Jennifer Wasmer, a spokeswoman for Xerox, which runs the call center, denied there were time targets. She said the average call is 14 minutes, and employees are evaluated primarily on quality, not speed. “The Indiana model is innovative and exemplary,” Wasmer said in a statement. “Things have changed in Indiana for the better.”

Daniels, who leaves office in January, said his broader overhaul effort was stymied by the steep recession and by ineffective federal programs. He advocates a reform even bolder than the ones he implemented: Scrap most federal antipoverty benefits and replace them with a “negative income tax.”

Championed by the late conservative economist Milton Friedman, the negative tax is simple: Set a minimum income for all Americans, and have the Internal Revenue Service give low earners a payment (a negative tax) that raises their incomes to that level. Recipients would choose how they spend their money. The federal government would save on administrative costs. The market would provide food, housing and health insurance.

“I honestly think that something like a negative income tax deserves a closer look,” Daniels said in an interview. “You set a target amount and if a person earns less than that, you top them up.”

Given the big rollback of cash aid for the poor in recent years, the idea seems unlikely to fly.

President Barack Obama’s medical-insurance overhaul would significantly expand one form of aid to working-age adults, by expanding the availability of Medicaid. His re-election means a Republican attempt to kill his changes is likely to fail. But states such as Indiana have the ability to limit their scope.

If Indiana expands Medicaid, an estimated 298,000 to 427,000 additional adults will enroll in the program by 2019. The incoming governor, Mike Pence, said in the campaign he’d support expanding Medicaid only if the state could limit benefits and charge higher premiums to recipients.

“Medicaid expansion feels like the classic gift of a baby elephant,” he said at a meeting of Republican governors last month. “And the federal government says, ‘We’ll pay for all the hay – for the first few years.’”

(Reporting By David Rohde and Kristina Cooke; Edited by Michael Williams)

The 33-year-old divorced mother of five said she makes roughly $25,000 a year and gets child support from her ex-husband. But she can only get by with help from five federal government programs – food stamps, Medicaid for her kids, childcare vouchers, subsidized school lunches and the earned income tax credit.

“By the end of the month, I’m out,” she said. “I usually have to get help with food from my parents.”

Reform advocates argue that cases like Isom’s represent a success, even if they aren’t happily-ever-after stories. One goal was for recipients to begin supporting themselves as much as possible: partial reliance on government is better than full dependency. Today, 41 percent of people who receive food stamps live in households in which at least one person works.

Isom said she’d love to get off public assistance. But she walks such a financial tightrope that she fears taking risks that could eventually make her self-sufficient. She dreams of becoming a dental hygienist, a better paying profession. But getting the training, she said, would require quitting her job, which is beyond her means.

Last year, Isom’s boss offered her a 23-cent-an-hour raise, but she turned it down. Isom calculated that if she accepted the raise it would make her ineligible for the federal programs her family depends on. Overall, she’d lose money.

“I feel kind of stuck,” she said.

The sudden cut-off in benefits imposed when one’s income rises to a certain threshold is known as the “benefits cliff.” It’s one aspect of the system that many conservatives and liberals in Indiana agree should change. There’s no immediate prospect of addressing it yet, however.

(Reporting By David Rohde and Kristina Cooke; Edited by Michael Williams)

“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery.”

- Horace Mann, pioneering American educator, 1848

“In America, education is still the great equalizer.”

- Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011

When Puritan settlers established America’s first public school here in 1635, they planted the seed of a national ideal: that education should serve as the country’s “great equalizer.”

Americans came to believe over time that education could ensure that all children of any class had a shot at success. And if any state should be able to make that belief a reality, it was Massachusetts.

The Bay State is home to America’s oldest school, Boston Latin, and its oldest college, Harvard. It was the first state to appoint an education secretary, Horace Mann, who penned the “equalizer” motto in 1848. Today, Massachusetts has the country’s greatest concentration of elite private colleges, and its students place first in nationwide Department of Education rankings.

Yet over the past 20 years, America’s best-educated state also has experienced the country’s second-biggest increase in income inequality, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Census data. As the gap between rich and poor widens in the world’s richest nation, America’s best-educated state is among those leading the way.

Between 1989 and 2011, the average income of the state’s top fifth of households jumped 17 percent. The middle fifth’s income dropped 2 percent, and the bottom fifth’s fell 9 percent. Massachusetts now has one of the widest chasms between rich and poor in America: It is the seventh-most unequal of the 50 states, according to a Reuters ranking of income inequality. Two decades ago, it placed 23rd.

If the great equalizer’s ability to equalize America is dwindling, it’s not because education is growing less important in the modern economy. Paradoxically, it’s precisely because schooling is now even more important.

One force behind rising inequality, in both America and other advanced economies, is well-known. The decline of manufacturing and the replacement of clerks and secretaries with software mean there are fewer high-paying jobs for low-skilled workers.

The good jobs that do exist increasingly require higher education: Since the recession started in the U.S. in 2007, the number of jobs needing a college degree has risen by 2.2 million, according to a recent Georgetown University study. The number of jobs for mere high-school graduates fell by 5.8 million.

Just to stay even, poorer Americans need to obtain better credentials. But that points to another rich-poor divide in the United States. Educators call it the scholastic “achievement gap.” It has been around forever, but it’s getting wider. Lower-class children are getting better educations than before. But richer kids are outpacing their gains, which in turn is stoking the widening income gap.

Across the country, a Stanford University study found last year, the achievement gap between rich and poor students on standardized tests is 30 to 40 percent wider than it was a quarter-century ago. Because excellent students are more likely to grow rich, the authors argued, income inequality risks becoming more entrenched.

“Now, we’re in a situation where we need to educate everyone at the level of the elite in the past,” said Paul Reville, Massachusetts secretary of education. “We don’t have a system to do that.”

It’s an academic arms race, and it can be seen in the sharply contrasting fortunes of Weston, a booming Boston suburb, and the blue-collar community of Gardner, where a 20-foot-tall chair sits on Elm Street as a monument to the town’s past as a furniture-manufacturing hub.

The percentage of Gardner children bound for four-year colleges has held steady at about half in the past decade, and median incomes have tumbled as furniture makers headed south or overseas. Gardner High School graduate Curtis Dorval dropped out of the University of Massachusetts this year after his father, a Walmart worker, ran short of money. He’s working at a Walmart now, too, and then heading off to the military.

In Weston, hedge-fund managers are tearing down modest homes to build mansions. Per-capita incomes have leaped 161 percent in the past two decades, and the high school is sending 96 percent of its graduates to universities.

Tanner Skenderian, president of the class of 2012, is now at Harvard; in her graduation speech, she told her classmates to “reach for the moon.”

This correlation between educational attainment and financial fortune is clear statewide. In the bottom fifth of Massachusetts households, the average income dropped 9 percent in the past 20 years to $12,000. They fared worse despite a sizable gain in educational attainment: The share of people 25 and older in the group with a bachelor’s degree rose to 18.5 percent from 11 percent.

The same thing happened to the middle fifth. Their average income slipped 2 percent to $63,000. The share of adults with a bachelor’s rose to 43 percent from 29 percent.

But the top fifth saw their average income leap 17 percent, to $217,000, as their education levels soared far higher. Three-quarters had a bachelor’s, up from half. Fully 50 percent had a post-graduate degree, up from a quarter.

Some Massachusetts officials say they fear a vicious cycle is taking hold, in which income inequality and educational inequality feed off each other. Democrats and Republicans agree that the increased disparity is a threat to economic mobility in the state. But as in much of the rest of the United States, they disagree over what to do about it. Democrats argue the solution is more – and earlier – schooling. Republicans believe traditional public schools are part of the problem.

The education gap is just one factor behind growing inequality. The U.S. economy has been so weak that large numbers of graduates are underemployed: In 2010, according to Andy Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, only 59 percent of Massachusetts adults with a bachelor’s degree were in jobs that actually required one.

Long-term changes in marriage patterns matter, too, because they are stoking the educational-attainment gap that in turn feeds the income chasm.

BRAINS AND JOBS

People are increasingly more likely to marry their educational equal, Sum’s research finds, creating well-paid two-income couples at the top. At the bottom fifth, the number of single-parent families has risen 15 percent since 1990. Those parents have lower incomes and less time to devote to their children’s schooling. In a pattern echoed nationwide, 70 percent of Massachusetts families with children in the bottom fifth are headed by a single parent – compared with 7 percent in the top fifth.

“All the evidence shows that children born to two highly educated, high-income people tend to obtain the highest level of academic achievement,” said Sum. “At the bottom, where the mom is not that well-educated and tends to have lower income, children tend to do worse.”

A brainier workforce alone isn’t sufficient to drive growth, though. Even as education levels in the Bay State have risen lately, faster growth hasn’t followed. Between 2000 and 2010, Sum found, Massachusetts ranked just 37th in job creation. In fact, none of the 10 states with the top students placed in the top 10 on payroll growth.

“The best educated states were overwhelmingly mediocre in job creation,” he wrote in a study last year. He urges states to complement education with such steps as tax credits, infrastructure spending and on-the-job training.

Seventy miles northwest of Boston, Gardner once touted itself as the “chair-making capital of the world.” The factories employed thousands of workers who supported large families on single incomes. The first workplace time-recorder was invented here, too; as a result of its adoption, “punching the clock” became part of the vernacular.

Today, the factories have gone south or closed. Gardner still calls itself the furniture capital of New England but because of its outlet stores, not its factories. The biggest employers are a hospital and a community college. Retail jobs at Walmart and other chains have replaced better-paying factory work. Between 1989 and 2009, the town’s per capita income slipped 19 percent to $18,000.

A town of some 20,000 people, Gardner has roughly twice the population of wealthy Weston, but spends just 60 percent as much on education. The town’s high school has had six principals in the past eight years.

Even kids who excel at Gardner High School increasingly face financial hurdles after they graduate, say teachers and students. Mayor Mark Hawke said cost routinely prices high-achieving students out of elite private colleges. “It happens every day,” he said.

David Dorval, 47, was laid off in 2009 after working at an area hospital registering patients for 16 years. Dorval, who has an associate’s degree, struggled to find work, and he and his wife divorced. Today he takes home $1,000 a month at Walmart in Gardner and pays half of his earnings to his ex-wife in child support. He goes to his 79-year-old mother’s house for lunch each day.

“I don’t feel like I am able to do what my parents were able to do,” he said. “My parents were able to support eight kids.”

His son, Curtis Dorval, works at Walmart as well. When he was a senior at Gardner High School, Curtis was class president. He was accepted by Northeastern University, a private school in Boston.

PRICED OUT

But Northeastern cost $50,000 a year, which Curtis, then 17, felt he couldn’t afford. Instead, he enrolled last year at the state-run University of Massachusetts Amherst, studying mechanical engineering. With the help of a scholarship for graduating in the top quarter of his class, Curtis paid $10,200 a year.

He got some help from his father, who had saved up $10,000 in stocks and bonds from his days in the hospital job. This summer, that money ran out and Curtis left UMass to enlist in the Air Force. He will serve as an airman – and hopes to use military benefits to pay for parttime university classes.

“The main reason was I needed a way to pay for college,” he said.

That is the flip side of New England’s excellent universities: They are the most expensive in the country, according to a study by the College Board. A four-year education at a public or private university costs nearly one-fourth more than the national average.

Sticker shock is forcing those who do stay in college to pass up elite private schools for cheaper state ones. That’s also happening in the middle-class town of Leominster, a former plastics-manufacturing center 15 miles east of Gardner.

Among last year’s top students was Eric Marcoux, co-leader of the robotics team and member of the National Honor Society. He was accepted to Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a top private engineering university. WPI offered him a $20,000 annual scholarship – but he and his family still faced taking on roughly $30,000 a year in debt. Marcoux chose the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he’ll have to borrow only half as much.

“It was a lot of going back and forth,” said Marcoux, whose dream is to work for Google. “It was a hard decision but I think it was the right one.”

Trading down can carry a stiff cost: A Harvard study published this year found that students who go to Massachusetts state colleges are less likely to graduate than those who attend Massachusetts private colleges.

The state has tried to help poorer kids. In the early 1990s, Massachusetts sharply increased state funding of local elementary and secondary schools and mandated comprehensive testing. The overhaul was designed to improve student performance and eradicate the achievement gap.

Twenty years later, Massachusetts spends $4.8 billion a year on its public schools, up 83 percent from 1990. Children from lower income families have improved their scores on tests, but their results still lag, as a look at results from the Scholastic Aptitude Tests makes clear.

ENGINEERING A MIDDLE CLASS

In the state’s five wealthiest school districts, students had average scores ranging from 594 to 621 on the 800-point college-admissions test in 2009-2010. In the five poorest districts for which data are available, the SAT scores averaged from 403 to 469.

Reville, the education secretary, wants a redoubled push on childhood education: The 1990s reforms were good but didn’t go far enough. “There is no way for someone who is poorly educated to be self-sufficient,” he said. “It’s in our national interest to do something that we should have done morally anyway.”

What he proposes is sweeping change.

Income depends on educational achievement, and the single best predictor of a child’s likelihood of academic success remains in turn the socio-economic status of his or her mother, said Reville. The solution to erasing the achievement gap involves, in essence, providing low-income students with the advantages their wealthier peers enjoy: pre-school at the age of three, tutors, summer camps, and after-school activities like sports and music lessons. Schools could contract with outside organizations to provide those activities, or lengthen their school day or school year by one-third.

Asked how much such an initiative might cost, Reville responded, “How much would it cost to give every child an upper-middle-class life?”

Such talk makes Massachusetts Republicans blanch. They say they care about income disparities that harm people’s ability to move up the income ladder. Americans are now less likely to move to a higher economic class in their lifetime than Western Europeans or Canadians, according to a number of recent studies.

Republicans argue that the problem is not resources in the public schools: Massachusetts already ranks No. 8 in the amount of money states spend per student, according to the Census Bureau.

“What Reville is suggesting is wraparound social services,” said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank in Boston. “We think decentralized decision-making in the schools makes more sense.”

Instead of spending more, Stergios said, give parents greater choice over which schools their children attend. Expand the use of charter schools, financed by the public but managed independently. Make cities strictly follow the course of study set out by the state. Increase the accountability of teachers by linking pay to student test scores.

CLASS CLUSTERS

“We haven’t closed the (achievement) gap because the Massachusetts curriculum isn’t being taught rigorously enough in the urban areas, principals don’t have enough power and independence, and there’s a cap on charter schools,” said Stergios. “That’s why we haven’t seen the great equalizer working as it should.”

Adding to the complexity of addressing the income and educational gaps is a widening geographical divide in the state.

In Massachusetts, some 230,000 people were unemployed in October, Conference Board data show, and roughly 140,000 unfilled jobs were advertised online. Skilled professions, including software engineers and web developers, topped the list. Nearly seven out of 10 vacancies were in the Boston area.

Harvard economist Ed Glaeser calls this the new reality of a knowledge-based global economy. More than ever, innovation, growth and opportunity are clustered in large cities such as Boston. Let decaying factory towns become ghost towns. Instead of building better transportation links, Glaeser believes their inhabitants should be encouraged to move to the closest economic hub.

“In 1940, you wanted to be in an area with resources for your mill,” he said. “In 2012, you want to be in a cluster of smart people.”

Weston, where Glaeser himself lives, is such a cluster. But it isn’t for everyone. Its house prices and real estate taxes put it out of reach for most Massachusetts residents, which points up a conundrum.

As those who can afford to do so head for the clusters, inequality grows. Across the state, communities are becoming more homogenous by income group, said Ben Forman, research director at think tank MassInc.

“There are definitely more Westons now than there were a couple of decades ago,” Forman said. “What the research shows is that more economic segregation leads to high-income children performing better and better and lower-income children falling behind.”

The Boston suburbs where Weston is located are home to the most-educated workforce in the nation’s best-educated state, according to the Boston Federal Reserve.

DEGREES OF DIFFERENCE

A Reuters analysis of Census and American Community Survey data found that two-thirds of working-age adults in Weston and surrounding towns had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2010. That’s more than double the national average of 28 percent. Just 23 percent of their peers in Gardner and its neighbors had a bachelor’s or better. As earnings fell in Gardner they soared in Weston. In 1990, Weston residents made 3.5 times more than Gardnerites. By 2009, it was 12 to 1.

On a summer Tuesday afternoon, a man was reading a copy of “Horseback Riding for Dummies” outside Bruegger’s Bagels, the sole fast-food chain that Weston has allowed to open as it tries, with mixed success, to preserve its historic character.

One hedge-fund manager built a 22-room mansion with a basketball court, pool and 10-car garage. Another tore down two homes to build a private equestrian center for his wife and daughter with an indoor riding ring.

Town leaders say they are struggling to keep the town from becoming even wealthier. “We have three selectmen who are trying to find ways to diversify our population with affordable housing,” said Michael Harrity, chairman of the board of selectmen. “It’s difficult when lots are selling for $700,000 for teardowns.”

One area where development is warmly welcome is education. This fall, the town opened a new $13 million science wing for Weston High School that includes nine state-of-the art labs and a multimedia conference center.

Weston High is one of the finest public schools in the country. In 2011, 96 percent of its graduates planned to go on to four-year degree programs. In Gardner, only about half did. Nationally, a 2011 University of Michigan study found that the gap in college-completion rates between rich and poor students has grown by about half since the late 1980s.

Those differentials have a long-term impact. An American with a bachelor’s degree earns on average about $1 million more over a lifetime than one with just some college, according to recent studies.

Another advantage Weston kids have is their involved and demanding parents.

SUPER MOMS, SUPER KIDS

Gardner High has no parent-teacher organization. In Weston, parents raised $300,000 last year for additional after-school activities in the public schools. Top scientists living in Weston help with school science fairs. Parental involvement is so intense that three parents sit on the interview panel for every prospective new teacher. Stay-at-home Weston mothers attend meetings of student-body leaders and help students organize events. They’re known as “Grade Moms.”

Liz Hochberger, a recent president of the Weston Parent-Teacher Organization, said the town’s excellent public schools had become a “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Professors from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with the wealthy, move to Weston for its public schools, which further improves test scores and college acceptance rates. “Whenever someone is moving to this area and they research the schools,” Hochberger said, “this is always on the list.”

Tanner Skenderian, president of this year’s Weston High graduating class, joked in a speech about her town’s hyper-competitive students. “Welcome to Weston, where third graders take AP Physics, middle-school students sleep for 42 minutes a night, and the most competitive race run by the 2012 boys state champion track team was the race to get the cookies in the cafeteria,” she said.

Competition in high school was fierce. In one advanced placement physics class, she said, six of the 12 students were the children of professors at MIT, America’s premier science university.

But Tanner thrived there. She also found school to be a source of support after her father died while she was in middle school. This fall, she headed to Harvard, after spending the summer interning at the governor’s office. Given the job market, she said she may apply to business or law school after graduating.

Weston, in short, gave her an education that raises her odds of joining her mother – who owns a marketing and event-planning company – at the top of America’s economic ladder.

“We’re very fortunate that we’re rather affluent,” she said. “We have more opportunities, more technology, more classes and more teachers.”

(Reporting By Kristina Cooke, David Rohde and Himanshu Ojha; Edited by Michael Williams and Janet Roberts)

(Reuters) – Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of secretary, spoke with Reuters about education’s role in income inequality. The questions and answers have been edited for length.

Q: In a commencement speech in December 2011, you said education is still the “great equalizer.” Is that true?

A: It must be the great equalizer. And in some places, education has been … a huge part of the inequity.… I really do believe that a high-quality education for every child in this country has to be at the core of restoring America to being first in the world in terms of economic mobility.

(I)f we’re serious about closing the achievement gap, we have to close the opportunity gap. I don’t think we as a country have been serious enough about closing the opportunity gap for the children and communities who need the most help.

We have invested massively in school-improvement grants … and we have, partly as a result today, 700,000 less children in what we call “drop-out factories.” (But) we have about a million young people who drop out of school each year in this country, and that is obviously economically unsustainable and it is morally unacceptable.

Q: Does Massachusetts show the limits of education as the great equalizer? It has seen one of the biggest increases in inequality in the past 20 years.

A: I think it shows that … this movement towards quality, toward access and toward early-childhood education has to reach every child and every community who needs it. And that is simply not the case yet in Massachusetts and around the country. So it’s not a reason to back off. It’s a reason frankly to double down and to accelerate the pace of change.

What I think you need to give is every child access to a world-class education…. There’s still too many who don’t have access to an elementary or a middle (school) or a high school with the greatest talent and the best resources and the right wrap-around services and a focus on preparing students for college and careers. And there are still too many not just poor but middle-class families who think that college is too expensive and unaffordable for them.

Q: Do you see an education gap based on income in higher education as well in college and universities?

A: No question that … disadvantaged families and more and more middle-class families … think college is for rich folk…. And it’s a huge concern…. (For) the jobs of the future you’ve got to have some form higher education…. If you drop out, there is nothing out there for you. And if you just graduate from high school, very few of the high-wage jobs are there.

Q: Research suggests, and conservatives argue, that just creating a highly educated workforce doesn’t spark economic growth. For example, North Carolina has had better growth than Massachusetts. Do you agree?

A: I think this is a huge piece of the answer and not the exclusive answer.… I think a skills crisis is a significant part of the challenge. So, again, it is just so critically important that we again lead the world in college-graduation rates. I think that would be a huge step forward in strengthening our economy, keeping good jobs in this country rather than going overseas… and reducing unemployment rates.

(Reporting By David Rohde and Kristina Cooke; Edited by Michael Williams)

Enrollment is at a record 12,300 students, but state aid has shrunk from about two-thirds of the budget to about a quarter in the past decade. So, Mount Wachusett raised fees. Over the past four years, the loan burden shouldered by the average student seeking an associate’s degree has doubled to $8,000.

Courses are nonetheless heavily oversubscribed for nurses and lab technicians, who have a clear path to a well-paid job. Five hundred people applied for 98 nursing-course spots this year. Requirements included at least a B-plus in chemistry and some health care experience.

On a Thursday morning in July, Jennifer Forgues attended a clinical technician class with her young daughter in tow. The 27-year-old Massachusetts native had lost her job as an assistant service manager at a car dealership in Ohio when she was seven months pregnant. She moved back in with her mother in the Gardner area.

Forgues had decided not to go to college after high school in nearby Winchendon in 2002. Her parents – an accountant and a plant manager – made too much for her to qualify for financial aid, she said, but not enough to easily afford college. “I felt bad if my parents did scrape enough money together to let me go that I would be wasting the money, because I had no idea what I wanted to be,” she said.

The course work paid off. By October, Forgues had landed a job as a technician in a microbiology lab at a hospital in nearby Worcester, paying $41,000 a year with health benefits. “It’s been a rough few years but I made it out alive,” she said.

PRECARIOUS POSITION

Adult-education successes can come with asterisks. Patrick Armstrong, 41, lost his job as a senior project scientist at an environmental consultancy in 2009. The father of two was accepted into a state training program run out of the Leominster campus. He had to pick carefully: The state would pay for one shot. If he selected the wrong field and failed to find work, he was out of luck.

Armstrong chose a one-year program granting a certificate in biotechnology to augment his associate’s degree in environmental science. He and his wife scaled back, selling one of their two cars and pulling their children out of daycare. After a nerve-wracking search, he got a job as a technician at a large biotech-manufacturing plant in central Massachusetts. It was a 25 percent pay cut to around $50,000. He didn’t care.

“When I got the offer sheet and was walking back to my truck, I just started laughing uncontrollably with relief,” Armstrong said. He plans to stick to his scaled-back, one-car lifestyle. “I know now how precarious a position in the middle class can be. And how difficult it is to get back in.”

The state’s retraining regimens are small in scope. In north central Massachusetts, 116 people were enrolled in the retraining program Armstrong took in the year ending June 30. It’s a drop in the bucket: About 9,700 people were unemployed in the area in July. The cost is substantial: about $8,400 per person.

Democrats say the answer is more and better training. Greg Bialecki, secretary of housing and economic development, said the state has only been “chipping away” at retraining workers due to budgetary constraints. He estimated that “easily 10,000″ of the open jobs in Massachusetts could be filled if unemployed workers received six months of training. A broader effort to build a more skilled workforce would involve $20 million in additional funding to community colleges and job training centers.

“It would be great if we were able to say we could make a big commitment,” he said. “Manufacturing, health care, IT, life sciences, let’s focus on those sectors.”

Massachusetts Republicans also back an increase in vocational training. But additional funding should come through corporate partnerships with community colleges, they say. And vocational schools need to work much more closely with private companies, so that students have the skills businesses actually need.

“Job training programs for adults in Massachusetts are all over the place, because we haven’t crafted coherent measures of success,” said Jim Stergios, head of the Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank. “Yet hundreds of millions get spent on them.”

(Reporting By David Rohde; Edited by Michael Williams)

What Specter meant was that Santorum should stop talking about social issues, according to Adrienne Baker Green, a Specter aide who witnessed the exchange.

Santorum’s outspoken style on issues such as abortion and women in the workplace, which had once made him a star among social conservatives, appeared to be alienating more moderate Pennsylvania voters who would decide his fate in November 2006.

Santorum responded: “I can’t stop. Everyone is listening,” says Baker Green. Specter says he can’t recall the encounter; Santorum’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Santorum lost the 2006 Senate election by 18 percentage points, partly due to a wave of anti-Republican sentiment that year, but also because of his own words, which Democrats used to paint him as too extreme for Pennsylvania voters.

The arc of Santorum’s political career in Pennsylvania, where he first won over a Democratic district, then alienated voters, is beginning to look similar to his rise in the 2012 presidential race. With each advance, Santorum’s support has been partially undermined by his own controversial remarks. Just days before the Michigan primary, Santorum said President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on the separation of church and state made him want to “throw up.”

“I wish I had that particular line back,” he later said.

Santorum often portrays himself as a champion of the blue-collar voter whose experience winning rough-and-tumble elections in Pennsylvania shows he can attract moderates and independents.

A look at his five races in Pennsylvania reveals a candidate who thrives in the role of underdog and fighter. A hard-working door-to-door campaigner, he energized his conservative and evangelical base and won over blue-collar voters by securing federal funds that brought construction jobs.

Santorum also benefited from weak Democratic opponents and national trends that dovetailed with his anti-tax and pro-life message.

Pennsylvanians who worked on those campaigns recall his off-the-cuff style as well as his love of question-and-answer sessions in which he would eagerly talk about a broad range of issues. His advisers say he often came up with the topics of his speeches on the way to the venue.

Republicans in the Keystone State also recall a man who wouldn’t back down in an argument ; often coming across as brash, abrasive and unscripted.

“Every so often, Rick throws the pass you don’t need to throw, to use a football analogy. And he threw a couple he didn’t need to throw,” says Alan Novak, a former Republican Party leader in Pennsylvania who is supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination.

“I always call them unforced errors.”

Graphic showing Santorum’s campaigns:

link.reuters.com/jaw86s

Video on Santorum’s focus heading into Ohio race

link.reuters.com/tyv86s

PENNSYLVANIA’S KEYSTONES

Political consultant James Carville famously described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh “with Alabama in between.” Political operatives there count at least three, and as many as six, mini-states within the state of various political stripes. Pennsylvania has backed the Democratic candidate for president in every race since 1992, while voters tend to be more conservative in statewide races.

In 1990, Rick Santorum, then a 32-year-old attorney, set his sights on a U.S. congressional seat that had been held by Democrat Doug Walgren for 14 years.

Santorum’s political experience up to that point consisted of working as chief of staff for a moderate, pro-choice state senator, Doyle Corman. Republican leaders and friends tried to persuade Santorum to run instead for a relatively safe Pennsylvania house seat in Harrisburg.

Santorum wouldn’t hear of it. He told friends that Walgren was too liberal for the district and that a conservative could win.

Keith Schmidt, who has worked on all of Santorum’s campaigns and is now an adviser on his presidential bid, says one of Santorum’s best political weapons is his intuition. “He just saw an opportunity that I can safely say no one saw that year.”

Santorum went all in. He quit his job and convinced his soon-to-be wife to quit hers and hit the campaign trail.

“We all told him he was crazy,” said State Senator Jake Corman, who took over his father’s seat after Doyle Corman retired from politics. But Santorum, he said, is fiercely competitive by nature, “from board games to public policy.”

Ron Klink, a Pittsburgh television reporter who would later go into politics as a Democrat and would lose the 2000 Senate race to Santorum, remembers Santorum standing on a bridge leading into downtown Pittsburgh, waving his campaign sign at passing cars.

“We referred to him as the Goof on the Bridge,” Klink says.

Schmidt says Santorum was involved in all aspects of campaigning. Santorum’s friends and foes alike agree he is a natural retail campaigner. He wore out three pairs of shoes criss-crossing the congressional district, says Schmidt.

“He personally hit 20,000 doors. That’s just so ridiculous,” he adds. Santorum would often follow up with a hand-written note to voters he had met that day, Schmidt says.

Santorum had a simple message: The incumbent, Walgren, was out of touch with his district because he lived in the Washington area rather than in Pennsylvania. Santorum’s slogan was “Leadership in Touch With You.”

“There were no warning signs at all. We could not find him in polling at the beginning of September,” Walgren says. “Our experience was he was able to leaflet very broadly, essentially knocking on doors, with young pro-life people. Pro-life was really gathering steam … and I was clearly pro-choice.”

Santorum ended up winning the district with just over 51 percent of the vote.

‘THE BEST UNDERDOG’

His next victory — winning re-election in 1992 — owed a lot to Democratic Party’s own troubles, Schmidt says. Two years later, with the district looking likely to turn Democratic in 1994, Schmidt says, Santorum turned his sights on a Senate seat.

Santorum was back in his element as the underdog. At town-hall meetings that year, he would tell voters that putting Santorum bumper stickers on their cars was worth as much as a $500 donation to his campaign.

Santorum packed his wife and young family into an RV and drove across the state to introduce himself to voters, remembers Becky Corman, the wife of his old boss, State Senator Doyle Corman, and Santorum’s 1994 grassroots coordinator.

“I have youth on my side,” Schmidt recalls Santorum telling his campaign staff. “You can schedule me long hours, I’ll give six speeches a day. I want to meet people.”

Santorum’s Democratic opponent that year was Harris Wofford, a former president of Bryn Mawr College and a founder of the Peace Corps. Democratic strategists remember Wofford as a reluctant campaigner, uncomfortable with going on the offensive, even as Santorum hammered him for supporting gun control.

Republican voters, especially pro-life evangelicals who had not been active in previous races, hosted fundraisers in their homes, said Novak, the former Pennsylvania GOP leader. The crowds grew.

“He’s the best underdog you ever saw,” says Novak. “He seems to derive his energy from always having a hill to climb.”

The Republican Revolution was sweeping the country. In Pennsylvania, turnout among conservatives surged. They made up 40 percent of voters in 1994, compared with 26 percent in 1992.

Santorum beat Wofford 49 to 47 percent, with the Christian Coalition and the gun lobby among his most enthusiastic supporters. Among moderates, Santorum trailed Wofford by 15 percentage points.

Six years later, Santorum faced Representative Ron Klink for the Senate seat. Klink had heard Santorum had a temper and hoped to get under his skin during the debates.

“Having been a hard-nosed reporter, and having been in Congress … I was absolutely positive, excuse my French, that I could piss off Rick Santorum and could really get him off of his center,” Klink says. “We had six debates. And I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t get him to lose his cool.”

Santorum was ready. As part of his debate preparation, Schmidt and Santorum’s other advisers would have the candidate stand in front of a mirror, while they took shots at him.

“We would say the awfullest things to him and just get him off his mark – mean-spirited things – literally interrupt him a few times,” Schmidt says.

(PDF version: link.reuters.com/quv86s)

WASHINGTON INSIDER

Following his victory in 2000, and with George W. Bush in the White House, Santorum rose to become the Republican majority’s third-ranking official. He was among the Senate’s most passionate defenders of the Iraq War.

But as his profile rose nationally, trouble was brewing in Pennsylvania.

As the 2006 election approached, Bush’s popularity was reaching its nadir. Santorum’s support for the Iraq War was coming back to haunt him in his core constituencies.

Santorum’s Democratic opponent that year, Bob Casey Jr., was a pro-life, pro-gun moderate who had the same name as his father — a popular former Pennsylvania governor.

“In 2006, we were doubly blessed — we could run against George W. Bush and Rick Santorum,” says Democratic strategist Mary Isenhour, who helped run Casey’s campaign in 2006.

Santorum was also losing the women’s vote.

At dinner parties attended by Republicans that fall, Novak, the former party official, remembers being struck by how many women said they were not planning to support the senator.

Part of the problem was Santorum’s memoir, “It Takes A Family.” Against the advice of several longtime supporters, Santorum published the book the year before the election.

In it, Santorum decried “radical feminism’s misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.” The line has come back to haunt Santorum on the presidential trail. He said recently that his wife, Karen, wrote that passage.

Santorum was also taking heat for comments he made in a 2003 interview with the Associated Press in which he appeared to liken homosexual sex to “man on dog.” Santorum has been asked about the comment repeatedly, and has never denied saying it.

“Nobody could believe he had actually said this,” says Isenhour, the Democratic strategist. “That was about as extreme as we’d ever heard from him, and then it kept getting worse.”

There was also a charge of hypocrisy. In 1990, Santorum won against Walgren in large part by portraying his opponent as a Washington insider who didn’t live in the district. By 2006, Santorum had moved his family to McLean, Virginia, where he was charging his Pennsylvania school district for his children’s education.

By July, with his poll numbers not moving, Santorum’s campaign met with a group of fiscal conservative grassroots activists. The group had backed the conservative Pat Toomey over the more moderate Specter in the 2004 Republican primary for one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seats. They were still furious over Santorum’s endorsement of Specter, who was known disdainfully as a “King of Pork.” Specter would go on to win the election and then switch to the Democratic Party.

The group felt that Santorum had fallen out of touch with the small-government direction of the party. He, too, had gained fame for his ability to bring home the bacon to his Pennsylvania constituents. He had supported an increase in the minimum wage and government programs like No Child Left Behind, a federal program that emphasizes testing and performance standards in schools.

The meeting with the activists, most of them in their mid-20s, had been meant as a reconciliation. Several in attendance challenged Santorum on his support of deficit spending and earmarks. The gathering devolved into a profanity-peppered shouting match, say several people who were present.

“We walked in there, ready to reconcile, and we were just berated,” says Jason High, a conservative political activist. “It was not pretty … Rick just yelled and screamed at us.”

Bob Guzzardi, a real-estate developer who says he gave about $30,000 to the Santorum campaign that year, left the meeting, which dragged on more than 90 minutes, feeling “blown off.”

Ryan Shafik, a Toomey campaign aide who had interned with Santorum in 2000 but had fallen out with the senator, remembers Santorum taking an imperious tone at the meeting. “‘The conservative movement in Pennsylvania starts and ends with me,’” he recalls the senator saying.

Santorum’s campaign manager, Vince Galko, set up the meeting. He denies there was shouting and says that most of those in attendance remained supportive of Santorum’s campaign.

“The fact is that Rick went in there, showed how hard he was willing to fight for every vote and was willing to listen to all sides,” says Galko. “Their intent was, ‘You’ve got to come more to the right.’ His point – ‘I’m losing this race because people think I’m too far to the right.’”

“Keep this in context – you have the third-ranking member of the United States Senate who’s in the fight of his life in an election year, coming to Harrisburg to meet with these folks, he wasn’t going in there to yell at them,” says Galko. “He was going in there to work with them and enlist their support.”

Santorum lost the 2006 race in a landslide. Nearly six in 10 voters backed Casey, including 61 percent of female voters, according to CNN exit polls.

The only voting groups he was able to win convincingly were his base – evangelical and born-again Christians, voters who oppose abortion in all cases, and conservatives who approved of George W. Bush’s presidency, the exit polls showed.

“We were no great geniuses for taking him out,” says T.J. Rooney, a Democratic campaign consultant and a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee. “He was out there shooting his mouth off. He obviously doesn’t take direction very well.”

Jake Corman says the defeat wasn’t Santorum’s fault: “In 2006, people were ready to fire Republicans.”

Today, some GOP campaign managers in Pennsylvania worry that if Santorum wins the nomination, having him atop the ticket could hurt Pennsylvania Republicans in statewide races. Shafik, the Toomey campaign aide, says it could amount to a “Rickpocalypse.”

“The thing that Republican officials will not say publicly, but are saying privately, is that they fear that with Rick Santorum at the top of the ticket there’s going to be a blood bath” for Republicans, says Shafik.

Schmidt, still one of Santorum’s closest aides, said the campaign is betting that just as Santorum and his politics were out of fashion in 2006, nationally they are back in fashion in 2012.

As a precedent, he cites 1994 when Santorum cast himself as the unapologetic conservative against Wofford, the unapologetic liberal. This year, it would be conservative Santorum versus liberal Obama.

“The fact that the president believes in a liberal agenda and has articulated it well we’re going to articulate a conservative agenda,” says Schmidt. “And we’ll have to see where the middle breaks.”

(Reporting By Kristina Cooke and Edith Honan)

What Specter meant was that Santorum should stop talking about social issues, according to Adrienne Baker Green, a Specter aide who witnessed the exchange.

Santorum’s outspoken style on issues such as abortion and women in the workplace, which had once made him a star among social conservatives, appeared to be alienating more moderate Pennsylvania voters who would decide his fate in November 2006.

Santorum responded: “I can’t stop. Everyone is listening,” says Baker Green. Specter says he can’t recall the encounter; Santorum’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Santorum lost the 2006 Senate election by 18 percentage points, partly due to a wave of anti-Republican sentiment that year, but also because of his own words, which Democrats used to paint him as too extreme for Pennsylvania voters.

The arc of Santorum’s political career in Pennsylvania, where he first won over a Democratic district, then alienated voters, is beginning to look similar to his rise in the 2012 presidential race. With each advance, Santorum’s support has been partially undermined by his own controversial remarks. Just days before the Michigan primary, Santorum said President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on the separation of church and state made him want to “throw up.”

“I wish I had that particular line back,” he later said.

Santorum often portrays himself as a champion of the blue-collar voter whose experience winning rough-and-tumble elections in Pennsylvania shows he can attract moderates and independents.

A look at his five races in Pennsylvania reveals a candidate who thrives in the role of underdog and fighter. A hard-working door-to-door campaigner, he energized his conservative and evangelical base and won over blue-collar voters by securing federal funds that brought construction jobs.

Santorum also benefited from weak Democratic opponents and national trends that dovetailed with his anti-tax and pro-life message.

Pennsylvanians who worked on those campaigns recall his off-the-cuff style as well as his love of question-and-answer sessions in which he would eagerly talk about a broad range of issues. His advisers say he often came up with the topics of his speeches on the way to the venue.

Republicans in the Keystone State also recall a man who wouldn’t back down in an argument; often coming across as brash, abrasive and unscripted.

“Every so often, Rick throws the pass you don’t need to throw, to use a football analogy. And he threw a couple he didn’t need to throw,” says Alan Novak, a former Republican Party leader in Pennsylvania who is supporting former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination.

“I always call them unforced errors.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Graphic showing Santorum’s campaigns: link.reuters.com/jaw86s

Video on Santorum’s focus heading into Ohio race: link.reuters.com/tyv86s

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

PENNSYLVANIA’S KEYSTONES

Political consultant James Carville famously described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh “with Alabama in between.” Political operatives there count at least three, and as many as six, mini-states within the state of various political stripes. Pennsylvania has backed the Democratic candidate for president in every race since 1992, while voters tend to be more conservative in statewide races.

In 1990, Rick Santorum, then a 32-year-old attorney, set his sights on a U.S. congressional seat that had been held by Democrat Doug Walgren for 14 years.

Santorum’s political experience up to that point consisted of working as chief of staff for a moderate, pro-choice state senator, Doyle Corman. Republican leaders and friends tried to persuade Santorum to run instead for a relatively safe Pennsylvania house seat in Harrisburg.

Santorum wouldn’t hear of it. He told friends that Walgren was too liberal for the district and that a conservative could win.

Keith Schmidt, who has worked on all of Santorum’s campaigns and is now an adviser on his presidential bid, says one of Santorum’s best political weapons is his intuition. “He just saw an opportunity that I can safely say no one saw that year.”

Santorum went all in. He quit his job and convinced his soon-to-be wife to quit hers and hit the campaign trail.

“We all told him he was crazy,” said State Senator Jake Corman, who took over his father’s seat after Doyle Corman retired from politics. But Santorum, he said, is fiercely competitive by nature, “from board games to public policy.”

Ron Klink, a Pittsburgh television reporter who would later go into politics as a Democrat and would lose the 2000 Senate race to Santorum, remembers Santorum standing on a bridge leading into downtown Pittsburgh, waving his campaign sign at passing cars.

“We referred to him as the Goof on the Bridge,” Klink says.

Schmidt says Santorum was involved in all aspects of campaigning. Santorum’s friends and foes alike agree he is a natural retail campaigner. He wore out three pairs of shoes criss-crossing the congressional district, says Schmidt.

“He personally hit 20,000 doors. That’s just so ridiculous,” he adds. Santorum would often follow up with a hand-written note to voters he had met that day, Schmidt says.

Santorum had a simple message: The incumbent, Walgren, was out of touch with his district because he lived in the Washington area rather than in Pennsylvania. Santorum’s slogan was “Leadership in Touch With You.”

“There were no warning signs at all. We could not find him in polling at the beginning of September,” Walgren says. “Our experience was he was able to leaflet very broadly, essentially knocking on doors, with young pro-life people. Pro-life was really gathering steam … and I was clearly pro-choice.”

Santorum ended up winning the district with just over 51 percent of the vote.

‘THE BEST UNDERDOG’

His next victory — winning re-election in 1992 — owed a lot to Democratic Party’s own troubles, Schmidt says. Two years later, with the district looking likely to turn Democratic in 1994, Schmidt says, Santorum turned his sights on a Senate seat.

Santorum was back in his element as the underdog. At town-hall meetings that year, he would tell voters that putting Santorum bumper stickers on their cars was worth as much as a $500 donation to his campaign.

Santorum packed his wife and young family into an RV and drove across the state to introduce himself to voters, remembers Becky Corman, the wife of his old boss, State Senator Doyle Corman, and Santorum’s 1994 grassroots coordinator.

“I have youth on my side,” Schmidt recalls Santorum telling his campaign staff. “You can schedule me long hours, I’ll give six speeches a day. I want to meet people.”

Santorum’s Democratic opponent that year was Harris Wofford, a former president of Bryn Mawr College and a founder of the Peace Corps. Democratic strategists remember Wofford as a reluctant campaigner, uncomfortable with going on the offensive, even as Santorum hammered him for supporting gun control.

Republican voters, especially pro-life evangelicals who had not been active in previous races, hosted fundraisers in their homes, said Novak, the former Pennsylvania GOP leader. The crowds grew.

“He’s the best underdog you ever saw,” says Novak. “He seems to derive his energy from always having a hill to climb.”

The Republican Revolution was sweeping the country. In Pennsylvania, turnout among conservatives surged. They made up 40 percent of voters in 1994, compared with 26 percent in 1992.

Santorum beat Wofford 49 to 47 percent, with the Christian Coalition and the gun lobby among his most enthusiastic supporters. Among moderates, Santorum trailed Wofford by 15 percentage points.

Six years later, Santorum faced Representative Ron Klink for the Senate seat. Klink had heard Santorum had a temper and hoped to get under his skin during the debates.

“Having been a hard-nosed reporter, and having been in Congress … I was absolutely positive, excuse my French, that I could piss off Rick Santorum and could really get him off of his center,” Klink says. “We had six debates. And I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t get him to lose his cool.”

Santorum was ready. As part of his debate preparation, Schmidt and Santorum’s other advisers would have the candidate stand in front of a mirror, while they took shots at him.

“We would say the awfullest things to him and just get him off his mark – mean-spirited things – literally interrupt him a few times,” Schmidt says.

WASHINGTON INSIDER

Following his victory in 2000, and with George W. Bush in the White House, Santorum rose to become the Republican majority’s third-ranking official. He was among the Senate’s most passionate defenders of the Iraq War.

But as his profile rose nationally, trouble was brewing in Pennsylvania.

As the 2006 election approached, Bush’s popularity was reaching its nadir. Santorum’s support for the Iraq War was coming back to haunt him in his core constituencies.

Santorum’s Democratic opponent that year, Bob Casey Jr., was a pro-life, pro-gun moderate who had the same name as his father — a popular former Pennsylvania governor.

“In 2006, we were doubly blessed — we could run against George W. Bush and Rick Santorum,” says Democratic strategist Mary Isenhour, who helped run Casey’s campaign in 2006.

Santorum was also losing the women’s vote.

At dinner parties attended by Republicans that fall, Novak, the former party official, remembers being struck by how many women said they were not planning to support the senator.

Part of the problem was Santorum’s memoir, “It Takes A Family.” Against the advice of several longtime supporters, Santorum published the book the year before the election.

In it, Santorum decried “radical feminism’s misogynistic crusade to make working outside the home the only marker of social value and self-respect.” The line has come back to haunt Santorum on the presidential trail. He said recently that his wife, Karen, wrote that passage.

Santorum was also taking heat for comments he made in a 2003 interview with the Associated Press in which he appeared to liken homosexual sex to “man on dog.” Santorum has been asked about the comment repeatedly, and has never denied saying it.

“Nobody could believe he had actually said this,” says Isenhour, the Democratic strategist. “That was about as extreme as we’d ever heard from him, and then it kept getting worse.”

There was also a charge of hypocrisy. In 1990, Santorum won against Walgren in large part by portraying his opponent as a Washington insider who didn’t live in the district. By 2006, Santorum had moved his family to McLean, Virginia, where he was charging his Pennsylvania school district for his children’s education.

By July, with his poll numbers not moving, Santorum’s campaign met with a group of fiscal conservative grassroots activists. The group had backed the conservative Pat Toomey over the more moderate Specter in the 2004 Republican primary for one of Pennsylvania’s U.S. Senate seats. They were still furious over Santorum’s endorsement of Specter, who was known disdainfully as a “King of Pork.” Specter would go on to win the election and then switch to the Democratic Party.

The group felt that Santorum had fallen out of touch with the small-government direction of the party. He, too, had gained fame for his ability to bring home the bacon to his Pennsylvania constituents. He had supported an increase in the minimum wage and government programs like No Child Left Behind, a federal program that emphasizes testing and performance standards in schools.

The meeting with the activists, most of them in their mid-20s, had been meant as a reconciliation. Several in attendance challenged Santorum on his support of deficit spending and earmarks. The gathering devolved into a profanity-peppered shouting match, say several people who were present.

“We walked in there, ready to reconcile, and we were just berated,” says Jason High, a conservative political activist. “It was not pretty … Rick just yelled and screamed at us.”

Bob Guzzardi, a real-estate developer who says he gave about $30,000 to the Santorum campaign that year, left the meeting, which dragged on more than 90 minutes, feeling “blown off.”

Ryan Shafik, a Toomey campaign aide who had interned with Santorum in 2000 but had fallen out with the senator, remembers Santorum taking an imperious tone at the meeting. “‘The conservative movement in Pennsylvania starts and ends with me,’” he recalls the senator saying.

Santorum’s campaign manager, Vince Galko, set up the meeting. He denies there was shouting and says that most of those in attendance remained supportive of Santorum’s campaign.

“The fact is that Rick went in there, showed how hard he was willing to fight for every vote and was willing to listen to all sides,” says Galko. “Their intent was, ‘You’ve got to come more to the right.’ His point – ‘I’m losing this race because people think I’m too far to the right.’”

“Keep this in context – you have the third-ranking member of the United States Senate who’s in the fight of his life in an election year, coming to Harrisburg to meet with these folks, he wasn’t going in there to yell at them,” says Galko. “He was going in there to work with them and enlist their support.”

Santorum lost the 2006 race in a landslide. Nearly six in 10 voters backed Casey, including 61 percent of female voters, according to CNN exit polls.

The only voting groups he was able to win convincingly were his base – evangelical and born-again Christians, voters who oppose abortion in all cases, and conservatives who approved of George W. Bush’s presidency, the exit polls showed.

“We were no great geniuses for taking him out,” says T.J. Rooney, a Democratic campaign consultant and a former chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee. “He was out there shooting his mouth off. He obviously doesn’t take direction very well.”

Jake Corman says the defeat wasn’t Santorum’s fault: “In 2006, people were ready to fire Republicans.”

Today, some GOP campaign managers in Pennsylvania worry that if Santorum wins the nomination, having him atop the ticket could hurt Pennsylvania Republicans in statewide races. Shafik, the Toomey campaign aide, says it could amount to a “Rickpocalypse.”

“The thing that Republican officials will not say publicly, but are saying privately, is that they fear that with Rick Santorum at the top of the ticket there’s going to be a blood bath” for Republicans, says Shafik.

Schmidt, still one of Santorum’s closest aides, said the campaign is betting that just as Santorum and his politics were out of fashion in 2006, nationally they are back in fashion in 2012.

As a precedent, he cites 1994 when Santorum cast himself as the unapologetic conservative against Wofford, the unapologetic liberal. This year, it would be conservative Santorum versus liberal Obama.

“The fact that the president believes in a liberal agenda and has articulated it well we’re going to articulate a conservative agenda,” says Schmidt. “And we’ll have to see where the middle breaks.”

(Reporting By Kristina Cooke and Edith Honan)

Did the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints know that members are “leaving in droves?” a woman asked.

“We are aware,” said Jensen, according to a tape recording of his unscripted remarks. “And I’m speaking of the 15 men that are above me in the hierarchy of the church. They really do know and they really care,” he said.

“My own daughter,” he then added, “has come to me and said, ‘Dad, why didn’t you ever tell me that Joseph Smith was a polygamist?’” For the younger generation, Jensen acknowledged, “Everything’s out there for them to consume if they want to Google it.” The manuals used to teach the young church doctrine, meanwhile, are “severely outdated.”

These are tumultuous times for the faith founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, and the rumbling began even before church member Mitt Romney’s presidential bid put the Latter-Day Saints in the spotlight.

Jensen, the church’s official historian, would not provide any figures on the rate of defections, but he told Reuters that attrition has accelerated in the last five or 10 years, reflecting greater secularization of society. Many religions have been suffering similarly, he noted, arguing that Mormonism has never been more vibrant.

“I think we are at a time of challenge, but it isn’t apocalyptic,” he said.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Graphics:

Impact on voters – link.reuters.com/zun36s

Converts to Mormonism – link.reuters.com/wun36s

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The LDS church claims 14 million members worldwide — optimistically including nearly every person baptized. But census data from some foreign countries targeted by clean-cut young missionaries show that the retention rate for their converts is as low as 25 percent. In the U.S., only about half of Mormons are active members of the church, said Washington State University emeritus sociologist Armand Mauss, a leading researcher on Mormons.

Sociologists estimate there are as few as 5 million active members worldwide.

In Africa and Latin America, however, Jensen said that interest in the LDS was so strong that the church has cut back baptisms in order to better care for new members.

THE RESCUE

With defections rising, the church has launched a program to staunch its losses. The head of the church, President Thomas Monson, who is considered a living prophet, has called the campaign “The Rescue” and made it his signature initiative, according to Jensen. The effort includes a new package of materials for pastors and for teaching Mormon youth that address some of the more sensitive aspects of church doctrine. “If they are not revolutionary, they are at least going to be a breath of fresh air across the church,” Jensen told the Utah class.

All this comes as the public profile of America’s Mormons had been raised by two pop-culture hits: the recent TV series “Big Love” and the current Broadway hit, “The Book of Mormon.” The attention, says church spokesman Michael Purdy, is a “double-edged sword.”

It has been an opportunity to educate the public about Mormonism and fight misconceptions. For example, the “I am a Mormon” ad campaign, which features stereotype-busting Mormons who are black or single parents, helped boost chat sessions on the church’s website to more than a million in the last 12 months.

The curious find a family-focused church with socially conservative values that teaches Christian principles and believes Christ appeared to founder Joseph Smith in America, where Smith established the new religion.

Church members are satisfied with their lives, content with their communities, strongly see themselves as Christian and believe acceptance of Mormons is increasing, a recent Pew Research poll of people who describe themselves as Mormon found.

But on Broadway, the church’s gospel and missionary zeal are mocked. And the Web has intensified debate over the truth of the history the church teaches.

Not since a famous troublespot in Mormon history, the 1837 failure of a church bank in Kirtland, Ohio, have so many left the church, Jensen said.

“Maybe since Kirtland, we’ve never had a period of – I’ll call it apostasy, like we’re having now,” he told the group in Logan.

Then he outlined how the church was using the technologies that had loosened its grip on the flock to reverse this trend.

“The church has a very progressive research and information division, with tremendous public opinion surveyors,” he said. Among other steps, it has hired an expert in search-engine optimization to raise the profile of the church’s own views in a web search.

Researchers note a rising tide of questions from church members about the gospel according to Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon, the best known of the Latter-day Saints’ scriptures. Over the years, church literature has largely glossed over some of the more controversial aspects of its history, such as the polygamy practiced by Smith and Brigham Young, who lead the Mormons to Utah.

The church denied the higher priesthood to blacks until 1978 and still bars sexually active homosexuals from its temples. The church’s active role in promoting California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage, drove away some its more liberal members.

Moreover, church leaders have taught that the Book of Mormon is a historical document — not a parable — so the faithful are startled to find articles on the internet using science to contradict it.

For example, the book describes Israelites moving in 600 BC to the Americas, where they had horses and other domesticated animals. But Spaniards introduced horses to the New World many centuries later, and extensive DNA studies have failed to find any genetic link between Israelites and Native Americans, suggesting instead that North America’s indigenous population came across the Bering Strait from Asia many thousands of years ago.

“I think you can find scientific studies coming down on both sides, but the Book of Mormon doesn’t live or die on scientific evidence,” Jensen said.

But Christian Anderson, 41, a non-practicing Mormon in Columbia, South Carolina, for years filed away on a mental “shelf” concerns about the historical veracity of the religion’s central text and its socially conservative views. “It came to a point where the shelf was too heavy,” he said. He quit attending service, telling himself, “Ok, I’m done.”

That’s a common story to PhD student John Dehlin, who conducts conferences nationally for “unorthodox Mormons” wrestling with doubts and has a podcast, mormonstories.org.

“I think this is an epidemic for the church,” said Dehlin. “Most of the people we cater to have been life-long members.”

The church is particularly concerned, however, about its younger members — the ones who are asked to dedicate two years of their life to spreading the Mormon gospel.

“It’s a different generation,” Elder Jensen told the group in Logan. “There’s no sense kidding ourselves, we just need to be very upfront with them and tell them what we know and give answers to what we have and call on their faith like we all do for things we don’t understand.”

REACHING OUT TO GAYS

Certainly the church can change, as it did a generation ago in admitting blacks to the higher priesthood. And it has now reached out, quietly, to the gay community.

LDS support of Prop 8 became a lightning rod both inside and outside the Church. There were demonstrations in Salt Lake City, which is home to the Mormon tabernacle but was also just named the “the gayest city in America” by the Advocate magazine, crediting its numerous gay-friendly bars, book stores and neighborhoods. In the wake of the Prop 8 battle, Brandie Balken, executive director of gay rights group Equality Utah, was one of five gay advocates who met with three LDS officials to ease tensions.

What was supposed to be a half hour or hour meeting stretched to two hours. Participants took turns describing their background. Balken talked about her love of gardening — and the pain infusing the family of her wife, who was the only gay child in a big LDS family.

Most of the church members present said they weren’t aware of anyone they knew being gay, but they had heard from parents whose gay children were no longer speaking to them and who felt caught between their religion and their family.

There was no immediate agreement. But the Church did in 2009 support a job and housing anti-discrimination measure in Salt Lake City, saying that opposing discrimination was a separate issue from same-sex marriage. Now Utah Democratic Senator Ben McAdams and Republican Representative Derek Brown are proposing a similar statewide bill, and the Church’s position on that will be significant.

I have never ever been associated with an organization that changes as fast as the Mormon church,” said former church researcher Ray Briscoe, 79, whose investigations helped spur movement on issues such as the treatment of blacks.

“I don’t think God was ever against blacks in the priesthood. We just had to grow up enough to accept it,” he said. As for gays — “it will get there, in my judgment.”

PRESIDENTIAL ISSUE

This crisis of faith in the LDS church remains largely offstage in the race for the presidency. Mitt Romney’s religion has been less of a prominent issue on the campaign trail this time around than in 2008.

Still, in heavily evangelical South Carolina, Romney won only one-tenth of the vote among those who said a candidate’s religious beliefs mattered to them a great deal.

Many evangelicals say they do not consider the LDS church to be Christian.

And to some voters, Mormonism remains a complete enigma. During the South Carolina primary, one Mormon woman there said an acquaintance was surprised to see her driving a car, confusing Mormons with the Amish.

Individual Mormons are encouraged to participate in public life, including running for office and supporting candidates, but the church officially stays out of electoral politics. It won’t allow its property to be used for polling, unlike many other churches, and has been careful not to run the “I am a Mormon” ads in early primary states.

But that’s not to say church leadership isn’t watching Romney’s campaign with interest.

“There have been discussions at LDS church headquarters about both the positive and negative aspects of Romney’s presidential bid,” a person briefed on the talks said. “One concern is that Romney’s campaign could further energize evangelical antipathy toward the church. Another concern is that he could take positions that would complicate the church’s missionary efforts in the U.S. or other countries such as in Central and South America.”

But on the positive side, the person said, “having a Mormon president could raise the church’s profile and legitimize it in other countries.”

(Reporting By Peter Henderson and Kristina Cooke, editing by Lee Aitken)

Only in recent days have questions emerged about his stand on abortion, his votes in Congress, and his endorsements of Romney over John McCain in 2008, and Senator Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004.

If rival candidates decide to go negative on Santorum – as they have on Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul — they have plenty of material with which to work.

Santorum is beloved among “values voters” for his stand on abortion, gay marriage and other social issues. But his record is rich in polarizing policy positions and questionable associations that support the charge of “Washington insider.”

For example, his million-dollar-plus 2010 income included payments from a lobbying firm, an energy company engaged in controversial “hydrofracking” and a hospital conglomerate that was sued for allegedly defrauding the federal government.

“The spotlight is blinding, and if you squint or stumble even slightly, it gets even more intense,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican campaign consultant who now heads the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at University of Southern California. “Santorum hasn’t faced it yet, but it’s about to hit him in a huge way.”

Santorum says he’s ready. “This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been in tough races,” Santorum said Monday in Iowa. “I’ve had the national media crawling up anywhere they could crawl. … It’s not going to be fun.”

EARMARKS

Texas Governor Rick Perry fired an opening salvo last weekend, charging that Santorum, 53, was a big spender in Congress who voted to raise the debt ceiling and approved such pork-barrel projects as Alaska’s Bridge to Nowhere, a tea pot museum in North Carolina and an indoor rain forest in Iowa. (link.reuters.com/nug85s)

Santorum, a lawyer with working-class roots, was 32 when he was first elected to Congress in 1990 from a western Pennsylvania district. He served two terms in the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate. He served two Senate terms from 1995-2007, before losing his seat in a landslide.

Santorum declined to comment for this article, but on other occasions he has defended his earmarks. “Congress appropriates money,” Santorum told “Good Morning America” this week. “That is what Congress is supposed to do.”

As a senator, Santorum went further, playing a key role in an effort by Republicans in Congress to dictate the hiring practices, and hence the political loyalties, of Washington’s deep-pocketed lobbying firms and trade associations, which had previously been bipartisan.

Dubbed “the K Street Project” for the Washington street that houses most of these groups, the initiative was launched in 1989 by lobbyist Grover Norquist, whose sole aim, he said, was to encourage lobbying firms to “hire people who agree with your worldview, not hire for access.”

But the rubric “K Street Project” came to encompass the entire climate of cozy cooperation between Republicans and lobbyists.

When Republicans won control of the House in 1994, House Majority Leader Tom Delay and others organized regular meetings with lobbyists that reviewed K Street job openings with an eye toward filling them with party loyalists, who would in turn steer support and donations to the members.

By 2001, Sen. Santorum was also holding one-hour breakfast meetings with lobbyists on alternating Tuesday mornings at 8:30 a.m.

In 2004 he denied being involved with Norquist’s effort to staff K Street. But Santorum convened Senate Republicans to discuss the appointment of Democrat Dan Glickman as head the Motion Picture Association, according to Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill.

“Yeah, we had a meeting, and yeah, we talked about making sure that we have fair representation on K Street. I admit that I pay attention to who is hiring, and I think it’s important for leadership to pay attention,” he told the paper at the time.

In 2006, as the influence-peddling scandal that sent lobbyist Jack Abramoff to jail unfolded, Santorum said he was ending the breakfasts in his conference room. However, his staff confirmed to Washington newspapers that they resumed almost immediately, on the same day and at the same time, at a location off the Capitol grounds.

Abramoff never attended Santorum’s breakfasts. “I was focused on the House,” he told Reuters. Yet the mushrooming scandal about Abramoff’s activities cast a harsh light on all aspects of the lobbyist huddles on Capitol Hill.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a liberal government watchdog group, named Santorum among three “most corrupt” senators in 2005 and 2006, accusing him of “using his position as a member of Congress to financially benefit those who have made contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.” (Link to 2006 report: link.reuters.com/wug85s)

LIFE AFTER CONGRESS

The blowback from the K Street Project contributed to Sen. Santorum’s crushing 18-percentage-point defeat in his 2006 reelection bid. His image as a conservative firebrand who made polarizing comments about abortion, gays and single mothers played a role as well, as did Santorum’s full-throated support of the war in Iraq.

A few weeks after he left Congress, although his law license had expired, Santorum landed a job in the Washington office of Pittsburgh-based law firm Eckert Seamans. Lawyers at the firm had given Santorum 45 political contributions totaling $24,400 while he was in Congress, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

As senator, Santorum “was a friend of the firm,” said Timothy Ryan, Eckert Seamans’ chief executive officer. Santorum helped make introductions and did other “relationship work,” including providing Eckert Seamans’ clients with business and strategy counseling, Ryan said.

Since then, thanks to his political contacts, Santorum has cobbled together a comfortable living as a political pundit, policy advocate and corporate consultant. His 2010 financial disclosure form shows that the self-described “grandson of a coal miner” earned at least $900,000 that year.

* Fox News paid him $239,153 to appear as an occasional contributor;

* Radio Salem paid him $83,999 to serve as a guest host on “Bill Bennett’s Morning in America” radio show;

* The Philadelphia Inquirer paid him $23,000 as a freelance columnist.

* The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative advocacy group, paid him $217,385 as a senior fellow.

Santorum also collected a total of $332,500 in consulting fees from three corporations:

* $65,000 from the American Continental Group lobbying firm

* $142,500 from Consol Energy

* $125,000 from the Clapham Group, a Virginia-based corporation started by longtime Santorum staffer Mark Rodgers. On its website, Clapham says its mission is to “influence culture upstream of the political arena.”

“Rick’s been around Washington for quite some time,” American Continental president David Urban said. “When he looks at the tea leaves he may see things differently than others. We’d chat about which way different pieces of legislation might be heading. He is a very bright guy so I paid for his insight, and he’s a friend, someone whose advice I could trust.”

American Continental represents Microsoft, the American Gaming Association, Monsanto and the Association of Mortgage Investors among others.

A spokesperson for Consol Energy said that they “engaged Senator Santorum to provide strategic counsel on a variety of public policy-related issues.”

The most high-profile issue for the company recently has been the gas mining technique called hydrofracking, which critics allege has in some places polluted ground water.

Santorum sang the technique’s praises at a campaign stop in Iowa, saying that in Pennsylvania “we are drilling, baby, drilling.”

In addition, Santorum served on the board of a for-profit hospital chain, Universal Health Services (UHS), where he received $341,000 in compensation from 2007 to 2010.

During Santorum’s four years on the board, UHS’s McAllen, Texas, hospital group was sued for defrauding Medicare through “illegal compensation to doctors in order to induce them to refer patients to hospitals within the group,” according to a Justice Department press release in 2009. The McAllen group agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying $27.5 million.

The next year, the Justice Department sued a Virginia UHS facility that caters to boys ages 11 to 17 alleging that the facility “billed Medicaid for inpatient psychiatric care that was not provided, in violation of federal and state Medicaid requirements, and falsified records to cover up their serious violations.”

When asked about the Virginia case. Santorum told Yahoo News, “Any investigation, you obviously engage and fully cooperate with it, and that’s what we did.. that’s part of the responsibility of directors.”

He resigned from the UHS board in June 2011. During the third quarter of 2011, UHS reached a tentative financial settlement of the Virginia case. Allen Miller, president and CEO of UHS, is a longtime supporter of Santorum, who has contributed $6,850 to his campaigns and $11,000 to his leadership PAC since 1999.

America’s Foundation is a leadership PAC, or political action committee, affiliated with Santorum since 1998. Leadership PACs were created so that congressional leaders could raise money for less senior candidates of their party, and they are not as closely monitored as other PACs by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

Since 1998, America’s Foundation has raised $11.8 million and given $1.1 million – or 9 percent to candidates, according to the Center For Responsive Politics. Most of the money has been spent on direct mail fundraising appeals on various issues.

Also during his 2006 reelection bid, Santorum’s supporters created a different sort of political action group they named Softer Voices. As a “527″ organization under Internal Revenue Service rules, Softer Voices was able to accept unlimited contributions from a small group of wealthy donors.

Because Santorum was struggling with women voters, the group created a website with testimonials from women. The FEC then chided the group for not registering as a political operation, and Softer Voices chose to cease operations.

IT TAKES A FAMILY

A devout Catholic with seven children, Santorum has taken positions on many social issues that may not play well with moderate voters and others that may trouble the conservative base.

He has vowed to reinstate the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military and annul all gay marriages, which are legal in New Hampshire, the site of the next Republican primary.

He opposes legal abortion, yet he supported a bill that allows it in the case of rape or incest or danger to the mother, telling David Gregory on Meet the Press last week that this was a calculated compromise to move toward the greater goal of ending abortion.

Similarly, he endorsed fellow Pennsylvanian, Sen. Arlen Specter, who is pro-choice, over anti-abortion primary challenger Pat Toomey in 2004. That move became even more offensive to conservatives when a victorious Specter went on to switch parties and cast a crucial vote for President Obama’s health care plan.

Santorum has said his was a “political decision” based on his calculations of how to best influence upcoming Supreme Court appointments.

Santorum presents family values as the cornerstone of his political convictions. But here, too, his behavior might alienate as many voters as it attracts.

In 1996, after his wife, Karen, gave birth to a child who lived just two hours, the Santorums brought the dead baby Gabriel home to meet the other children, which Karen subsequently described in a book.

The Santorums are also proud homeschoolers. They moved to a Virginia suburb of Washington DC as soon as he was elected to the Senate in 1995, but still cost their Pennsylvania school district more than $100,000 because their children were enrolled in an online charter school based there from 2001-2005.

The district was required to pay the tuition of students who attended this type of school via the Internet. The state of Pennsylvania eventually covered some of these education costs. Santorum’s defense was that he still owned a house in the district and paid property taxes. But this issue, too, became a factor in his ill-fated 2006 reelection campaign.

In that race, against Democrat Bob Casey, Jr., the attacks were coming so fast and furious that Santorum decided to issue a pamphlet, titled “50 Things You May Not Know About Rick Santorum.” (link.reuters.com/gyg85s)

In an effort to soften his image as a hard-line social conservative, it touted Santorum’s efforts to raise the minimum wage, expand stem-cell research, battle AIDS, guarantee Social Security benefits, protect Food Stamps, and increase funding for the Head Start preschool program. It also advocated passing tough new lobbying laws

The pamphlet no longer appears on any of Santorum’s websites, and its claims often appear at odds with his behavior in Congress – where, for example, he advocated privatizing social security and condemned federal funding for stem cell research.

But in the overheated climate of today’s opposition research, it is likely to provide ammunition to Santorum’s opponents on both his left and his right.

(Editing by Lee Aitken and Derek Caney)