Santorum's waiting in the wings

Just hours before the first votes being cast in the months-long process to anoint a Republican challenger to the President, Barack Obama, the former senator from Pennsylvania was enjoying a steep upswing in support, raising campaigners' hopes that he could yet pull off a remarkable victory in last night's caucuses.

While the odds weighed heavily against what would be a minor miracle, the crowd of 200 mostly conservative Christians who packed the chain restaurant were representative of a key constituency in Iowa that has slowly - but tentatively - put its faith in the devout Catholic father of seven. "He lives his faith. Not all of [the candidates] have always lived their faith," said Gail Rinderknecht, who teaches prisoners at Des Moines' low security jail and describes herself as "an extremely conservative Christian".

"He's Catholic and I'm evangelical Lutheran, but we have a lot of things in common with scripture,'' she said. ''He's been steady in his beliefs, steady in how he votes … he votes his conscience."

As many as 100,000 registered Republican voters were expected to brave sub-zero temperatures across Iowa last night to attend the state's caucuses.

Democrats, too, would turn out but only to endorse the incumbent, Mr Obama, who is unopposed and who was scheduled to address the caucuses via video link from the White House.

Although Republican candidates are fighting over just 28 delegates to the party's national convention in August, a win in the state can be expected to give a campaign momentum as well as a fresh influx of donor money.

Although trailing ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and libertarian Congressman Ron Paul in opinion polls, Mr Santorum has won the endorsement of the powerful evangelical figure Bob Vander Plaats, who heads The Family Leader, a pro-life and conservative advocacy group that opposes gay marriage.

However, some church figures have doubted whether religious Iowans were ready to fall into line behind one candidate, as they did in 2008 when they helped deliver Iowa to the former Arkansas Governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee.

Two last-minute polls suggested that enough were coalescing behind Mr Santorum to lift his vote to 18 per cent after the two-term senator had been languishing in single digit figures.

One had him trailing Dr Paul, who led with 20 per cent, and Mr Romney (19 per cent).

Other polls had Mr Romney, labelled the "most electable" Republican by many establishment party figures but yet to spark real enthusiasm among rank and file party members, maintaining a slender lead.

Mr Vander Plaats has played down his influence on the Republican race, but maintains that the group's supporters are "very, very sincere about these issues". At a forum sponsored by The Family Leader, he told candidates: "We don't need you to be Republican or Democrat, but we need you to be biblical."

In Newton, a quintessential mid-western town of 15,000 people which recently lost the Maytag white goods manufacturer, its mainstay business that employed one-in-five residents, Mr Santorum fielded questions on America's longed-for economic revival, as well as on regulation, energy self-sufficiency and leadership.

But he was also asked to respond to a Fox News commentator, who had mocked the way Mr Santorum and his wife, Karen, had grieved over the death of their premature baby, Gabriel, who had died in their arms just two hours after birth.

The couple had spent the night in hospital with the dead child before taking his body home the following day so that their four sons and three daughters could see their brother. Mrs Santorum later wrote a book, Letters to Gabriel, which quoted letters she had written to their son.

Fox News's Alan Colmes said voters could pull back from Mr Santorum once they learnt of the "crazy things" he had done, such as having taken his child's body home "and [having] played with it for a couple of hours".

In an emotional response, the Santorums were teary. Some people, Mr Santorum said, did not "recognise the dignity of all human life", while seeing the child merely as "a glob of tissue to be discarded, disposed of".

"That this is somehow weird, recognising the humanity of your son? Somehow odd? And should be subject to ridicule?"

After fierce applause, he added: "There are a lot of battle fronts in America today, and one is the dignity of all human life. The basis on which I approach these issues [is that] I will stand and fight and I'll do so not out of some faith conviction, not out of reason, but out of both - faith and reason. And, yes, out of having lived it."