Rick Santorum is a Republican who knows how to connect to the 99 percent, and that’s a problem for Mitt Romney.

Santorum is heavy on religion and far to the right on social issues. But on economic issues — the heart and soul of the 2012 presidential contest — he has a powerful story to tell. As his caucus-night speech proved, he knows how to tell it.

That’s the real threat Santorum poses to Romney. The former senator from Pennsylvania makes the former governor of Massachusetts look like what he is — a CEO who has PowerPoint running through his veins, not the coal dust passed on to Santorum from his immigrant grandfather.

Romney remains the presumptive Republican nominee. But Santorum’s strong Iowa showing throws a new spotlight on his rival’s weaknesses as a candidate, in general, and as a would-be Ronald Reagan conservative.

The contrast was striking as the candidates waited out the final vote tally that would ultimately give Romney an eight-vote margin of victory.

Out of his jeans and back into suit and tie, Romney looked and sounded like what he is, a lifetime member of the 1 percent club. He’s marketing a consultant’s turn-around plan for the country, with riffs from America the Beautiful as overworked inspiration. As much as Romney tries, through wife and sons, to humanize himself, he still lacks the common touch. When you have to drag out family members to convince people you really do have a heart and a sense of humor, that’s a concern. When you are forced to describe a father who headed American Motors as a guy “who made Ramblers,” that’s a candidate struggling to relate to working-class America.

Out of his sweater vest and into his suit and tie, Santorum adroitly painted a picture of a son of the working class, who has won elections by appealing to the working class in a state that, politically, swings both ways. Once he got past thanking his wife, God and Iowa for his virtual tie, Santorum spoke eloquently of a grandfather who left Italy in 1925 and went to work in the coal fields of western Pennsylvania. With a natural poetic flair beyond anything Romney’s script-writers could drum up, Santorum described looking at his grandfather in death, and noting his “enormous hands.” “Those hands dug freedom for me,” he said.

Romney basically sells trickle-down economics. Santorum makes the case for an economic policy that’s not “top down, but builds from the bottom up.” He said he believes in tax-cutting and supports a balanced budget amendment. But Republicans, he said, “have to look at those who are not doing well” and think about ways to include them in their economic recovery plan. That’s a direct pitch to those voters, Santorum said, “left behind” by President Obama — the same voters, he said, that candidate Obama infamously described as clinging to their guns and Bibles.

Santorum’s economic message could have broad appeal. But his stand on social issues, particularly abortion, marginalizes him. Last October, Amy Sullivan pointed out in Time that “if you’re a purist conservative Catholic, Santorum is your man; the defining issue of his Senate career was the fight he led to ban so-called ‘partial-birth’ abortion.” On Tuesday, Santorum’s strong anti-abortion credentials won him support from 30 percent of Iowa’s evangelical voters, as well as from several heavily Catholic Iowa precincts. Past candidates who won evangelical votes, such as Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes and Mike Huckabee, could not transform that support into a winning strategy for their party’s nomination, and it remains Santorum’s long-term challenge.

In the short term, Santorum’s Iowa bounce nudges Romney to the right on social issues and heats up the anti-Obama rhetoric. Romney already accuses Obama of embracing European-style socialism. At his moment of triumph in Iowa, Santorum took it a step further, accusing the Obama administration of promoting “more and more government; what my grandfather left in 1925.”

That’s an overreach, given that the fascist dictator Mussolini headed Italy at the time. But it’s also language that thrills the right.

For those just tuning into Santorum, his ability to speak so eloquently to the middle is the real surprise of Iowa.