Rick Santorum’s eye-raising comments this weekend, about prenatal testing and World War II, highlight just how difficult it will be for the candidate to maneuver from his few primary victories to the White House.

The unlikely contender for the GOP nomination is currently walking a thin line: he’s become the frontrunner by appealing to Republican voters wary of Romney’s convenient conservatism, but the more dramatically he distinguishes himself from his rival, the greater the risk he runs in alienating mainstream voters.

Santorum waded into these waters this weekend, telling both CBS’ “Face the Nation” and the Christian Alliance audience that the prenatal testing, which would be covered under the Affordable Care Act, is a eugenics-esque plot to weed out potentially disabled people by aborting them.

“One of the things that you don't know about ObamaCare in one of the mandates is they require free prenatal testing,” Santorum said, “Why? Because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and, therefore, less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

This would be known as “pulling a Palin,” if anybody still cared about Sarah Palin. The former Alaskan governor sideswiped the ACA in 2010 by taking a provision out of context and labeling it a “death panel;” an attempt by the government to thin the population through euthanasia and abortion to save money on health care. Here, Santorum takes amniocentesis, a test that can identify severe problems with a fetus, and characterizes it as an abortion shortcut intended to reduce health costs by not carrying potentially disabled lives to term.

There is, of course, absolutely no evidence that this is even remotely true, as there was no evidence for the death panels. But the reframing neatly dovetails with the fabricated narrative of Obama’s elitist* restructuring of society.

(*or socialist, or Muslim, or Kenyan, or Hawaiian, or whatever).

“That too is part of ObamaCare,” Santorum said of the policy’s supposed intent to remove undesireables from the population, “another hidden message as to what president Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country.”

Or not: “That ugly meme is completely made up,” Harold Pollack, Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, wrote on Same Facts. “By any reasonable measure, the proliferation of genetic diagnostic technologies coincides with great progress in public acceptance and support for people with disabilities.”

Pollack goes on to note that Santorum’s sudden fascination with helping the disabled seems a Romney-level change of heart, noting not only that liberals apportion more for disability services, but that “most of the major disability organizations supported ACA for the obvious reasons. Preexisting condition clauses, essential health benefits, health insurance for young adults, etc. are specifically pertinent for people living with physical and mental disabilities.”

Now on to World War II. At a speech in Georgia, Santorum posed the challenge facing contemporary America as similar to that in the early days of the second World War, but argued that there was no cataclysmic event in this case to make the stakes obvious.

“It’s not as clear a challenge,” Santorum said, before speaking my favorite line of the weekend: “Obviously, World War II was pretty obvious. At some point, they knew. But remember, the Greatest Generation, for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness… Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, ‘Well, you know, he’ll get better. You know, he’s a nice guy….’ Oh yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy, and after a while, you found out things about this guy over in Europe, and he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems.”

(Note the “Why?” in both the prenatal testing and World War II speeches. Why? Slate magazine columnist Dave Weigel has your answer.)

Obviously, World War II was not pretty obvious; Santorum’s recounting is simplistic at best, and revisionist at worst. The American Conservative takes Santorum to task for mistaking America’s opposition to war with naiveté; not wanting to go to war with Hitler was different than thinking he was a “nice guy.” More to the point, Santorum views the multitude of events between 1933 and 1945, and everything we’ve subsequently learned about those events, through a reductive, contemporary lens, which is something history students learn not to do, oh, sometime during freshman year. (Then again, Santorum’s not the historian in the race.) Collapsing the entire Second World War to America = Good, Japan/Hitler = Bad makes a caricature one of the most morally complicated events in human history.

Right now, Santorum has all the reason in the world to denounce prenatal testing and 1930s Germany. The stuff is catnip for the conservative base, and does for Santorum’s campaign what only $5 million in ads can do for Romney’s. But each step Santorum makes to the right of Romney is also a step away from the moderate and independent voters who factor into swing states in the fall. While Santorum’s social conservative bona fides could potentially win him the nomination, even conservatives fear he’s too far to the right of most of the general electorate when it comes to social issues.

And while foreign policy ain’t exactly Santorum’s thing, he’s been leveraging his gung-ho interventionism to put Ron Paul down debate after debate, easily claiming the not-Romney vote from the isolationist Paul. But few voters are likely to be angling for a war with Iran after concluding two in Iraq and Libya and experiencing the drawn out drama over Afghanistan. Santorum’s moral reductivism may make for a good primary stump speech, but it’s unlikely he’ll get any votes in 2012 by arguing that we should have gone into Germany in 1939. 

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