Rick Santorum needs to enter a 12-step program for those who are addicted to running for president – could someone please start one now? How he can flit around Iowa and tell folks with a straight face that he’ll be the nominee? But I can guess why he does it: he’s still sore over Senate loss ten years ago.

Santorum once rode the Capitol Hill rocket as a young telegenic guy in the Senate leadership with a bright future.

Then reality hit – he was a Senator from Pennsylvania who did not live there. His “residence” for political purposes was a house in the Pittsburgh area, but his real home (where his family resided) was in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Lacking a true Pennsylvania home wasn’t the sole reason Santorum lost big to Democrat Bob Casey (41 to 59 percent), but it was a major one. Even worse, Santorum outspent Casey by $8 million but was still blown away at the polls.

What frosts me about Santorum is how easy it would have been for him to have parked his family in a nice Pennsylvania house and still come home from D.C. nightly. I didn’t realize this until I moved from the D.C. area to Wilmington, Delaware.

When Vice President Joe Biden was in the Senate, he rode the train home to Wilmington for years. Today, Delawareans take it for granted their Congressional delegation will commute to Capitol Hill.

Could Santorum have done this too? Yes, as it’s only 18 minute trip from the Wilmington station to Pennsylvania’s residential Garnet Valley.  

Some might cite Pennsylvania’s ‘tradition’ of having one Senator from the eastern Philadelphia side and the other from the western Pittsburgh side as a barrier to a Santorum move to Garnet Valley, as he was nominally from Pittsburgh.

If this tradition was part of Santorum’s calculus for that house in Pittsburgh, he made another mistake. Today, both Pennsylvania’s Senators hail from eastern side (Bob Casey is from Scranton, and Republican Senator Pat Toomey is from Allentown), and nobody cares.

For a while after I moved to Wilmington, I’d go to Garnet Valley’s Amish market, and get steamed about Santorum. Specifically about how he thought the better option was to fool voters into thinking he was living in Pennsylvania – when actually living there was very do-able. 

Heck, with two other Senators on the Wilmington train, Santorum could have spent his commute working regional bipartisan deals. But he opted instead for the fun of commuting in Northern Virginia’s traffic.

Today in 2016, it seems Santorum has convinced himself that his 2012 primary victories will reappear somehow. But he’s denying reality while not grasping why he’s at the kiddie table at the Republican debates.  

His ‘value voters’ from 2012 are getting worked up over new stuff now. But Santorum doesn’t seem to realize this.

What are his voters are thinking about?  My guesses include: how thousands of Middle Eastern men/illegal immigrants might be staying at a U.S. military base in the next county, how taxes and healthcare costs increase while wages stay flat, and how college grads drift from coffee shop job to bookstore job – while never earning enough to move out of their parents’ house. Add a dash of fear of a crime wave, and you’ve got a potent stew of angry Americans.

Santorum’s social issues aren’t bubbling to the top in that stew; otherwise Donald Trump (the social issue shrugger) wouldn’t be enjoying his double-digit poll numbers.

Ten years ago Santorum made some bad choices and lost his Senate seat. Has campaigning for president helped him pretend those bad choices didn’t happen? Campaigning as grief therapy is an interesting concept, but Santorum risks being remembered as the Harold Stassen of our generation.

Speaking of grief therapy, perhaps being on the campaign trail has kept Santorum stuck in the ‘bargaining’ phase of grieving (when a person thinks they can bargain their way out of a loss).  

I’m just an economist, not a shrink, but the answer seem obvious to me. Santorum needs to accept his 2006 loss, move out of Iowa and return to his family – in Virginia.