[Illustrations by ALEX FINE]
DAILY MAIL: As Rick Santorum continues his surprise climb up the polls, he has received support from an unexpected quarter – media mogul Rupert Murdoch.The day before the Iowa caucuses, the News Corporation boss wrote on Twitter that ‘all Iowans’ should ‘think about’ supporting Mr Santorum in the Republican race. While Mr Murdoch’s endorsement may not count for quite as much since the phone-hacking scandal engulfed his company, it is still a rare accolade coming from one of the world’s most powerful political figures. Mr Santorum’s campaign may welcome the news as evidence that their candidate can reach out beyond his conservative evangelical base and capture the more moderate voters whose support will be vital if he is to have a chance of winning the Republican nomination and the race for the White House. There is one prior link between the candidate and the mogul, however: Mr Santorum worked for a time as a political analyst on Fox News, which is owned by News Corp, but left the station in order to launch his political campaign. Mr Santorum is not the only politician to have attracted warm words from Mr Murdoch since he opened his Twitter account on New Year’s Eve, and for the first time provided an unfiltered look at his personal opinions. Mr Murdoch described Michael Bloomberg as ‘New York’s best mayor in memory’, praised Scottish Nationalist party leader Alex Salmond, and even described Barack Obama as ‘very courageous’ for signing a bill to allow terror suspects to be detained indefinitely. MORE
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RELATED: Santorum was just a side-show in Polk City, though. That’s because the Duggars showed up. That would be the Duggars of 19 Kids and Counting fame, a conservative Christian family from Arkansas. Twelve of the 19 Duggar children are with their dad Jim Bob in Iowa campaigning for Santorum, all dressed in their Sunday best—the girls in ankle-length skirts and the boys with shirts-and-ties. Everyone knows who Jim Bob Duggar is, but he introduces himself to everyone who walks up to him nonetheless: “I’m Jim Bob Duggar, and we have a show called 19 Kids and Counting.” The Duggars duck into a boutique shop next door to the Santorum event and the whole gang takes turns posing for photos with Santorum volunteers and fans. “There’s Josiah, he’s got a gray jacket!” a woman says, pointing at one of the older Duggar boys. “I watch that show all the time. They’re really strong Christians. I love them,” says another. Meanwhile, Jim Bob holds court. “Rick Santorum is someone with a proven track record to stand up for what’s right, for lower 
taxes, less government intervention in our lives. He’s always been an advocate for the unborn. He’s somebody that he authored the bill that banned partial birth abortion. That’s something that nobody else can say. Whereas Mitt Romney, when he was governor of Massachusetts, he set up a Romneycare program, and included a program where any girl could go in and get an abortion for $50.” […] The Duggars represent a unique form of micro-targeting that’s perfect in Iowa. Like Santorums—and a disproportionately high number of Iowa conservatives—the Duggars home-school their kids in order to provide them with an education based on Christian principles. MORE
PREVIOUSLY: Perhaps 50 voters showed up Saturday for a campaign event held in a barn on a dirt road amid cornfields near Roland, about 20 miles north of Ames. While a few dozen voters isn’t much of a crowd by Republican presidential campaign standards, the audience inside the barn was enlarged — and enlivened — by the presence of scores of children, the offspring of several Christian homeschooling families in attendance. One family brought eight kids, another brought nine, and the hosts, Scott and Susan Hurd, have seven of their own, as did the guest from Pennsylvania whose “Road to Ames Barn Bash” was the occasion of this gathering. Rick Santorum has been campaigning across the state for months and, as he told the voters (and their numerous children) during his speech in the barn, he has visited 51 cities in Iowa by now. Despite his dogged persistence, however, Santorum’s candidacy has yet to strike the kind of sparks that garner major national attention — a problem the former Pennsylvania senator blames on the media. “The national media has done a very good job of ignoring Rick Santorum,” he said, lamenting the fact that polls show him as the only GOP candidate whose name-recognition hasn’t increased in recent months. “Everybody else was being covered and promoted by the national media, even people that are below me in the polls, even people who most people say have no chance of ever getting the nomination.” The reason for this, he explained, is that the liberal media knows he is a conservative who can win and have decided “maybe the best way to get rid of this guy is to simply suffocate him by making sure that nobody talks about him?” MORE
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[Illustration by ZINA SAUNDERS]