Skeeter is right in what he says here. (I disagree with his last paragraph beyond what I excerpt above, however — reference my last post about the admission of New Mexico to the Union. Another poster has cited precedents in Louisiana and California, as well as Pennsylvania.)
From what I've seen in the media and what I know from people who saw Santorum in Iowa, one of the things which makes Santorum unusual among presidential-level candidates is that he doesn't just give stump speeches or rephrase people's questions to give the answer he wants rather than answering the question he was asked.
That has good and bad points. He engages questioners by giving them real answers to what they wanted to know, and while that is a huge part of his one-on-one appeal, sometimes that means he gets drawn into stuff that creates problems when broader audiences hear the answer to a question asked by a single individual.
This is what politicians call getting drawn off-message.
Reporters hate it when a candidate answers the question the candidate wanted to be asked instead of the question we asked, and so do voters, but usually voters don't get to complain in public when their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ask a question to a potential future president doesn't get answered.
I'll give Santorum lots of credit for believing that if he wants people to vote for him, he's in a job interview and needs to answer the questions that the hiring boss — i.e., the voters — want to ask.
My read of this is that Santorum, as a job candidate, just gave a really bad answer in the job interview. I've hired people before who gave bad answers to some questions if I liked most of what I heard.
While Santorum’s answer sounds like the same thing Newt Gingrich would have said to an “official English” question and may actually help him with traditional Republican primary voters, this could create serious damage for Santorum long-term with Hispanic voters that did not need to happen. As a conservative Roman Catholic, Santorum has real opportunities with religiously conservative Hispanic voters who don't usually consider Republican candidates, and I sincerely hope this doesn't come back to bite him.
The answer was ""Like any other state, there has to be compliance with this and any other federal law," Santorum said. "And that is that English has to be the principal language. There are other states with more than one language such as Hawaii but to be a state of the United States, English has to be the principal language."
Aside from the reference to the law, which doesnt exist here, the answer is common sense. And I'm not willing to grant that Santorum made a mistake there, either, as a) he has since mentioned that he believed congress would make english as the primary language a prime requirement for statehood; and b) the interview was apparently conducted in spanish through an interpreter. His seemingly awkward answer implies to me that he was responding to something else asked that wasn't related in any accounts I've seen so far.
Ordinarily I'd have moved on but crap like this non-story is affecting our choices and has been for some time. Its got to stop.