Candidates say nutty things, but usually they’re accidental, unscripted remarks. No adviser or focus group ever suggested to Mitt Romney that he mention his wife’s two Cadillacs or bet Rick Perry $10,000. While those comments revealed Romney’s isolation from the realities of kitchen-table America, they were not part of his game plan.

But when Rick Santorum called President Obama a “snob” for wanting kids to go to college, he said it deliberately. In fact, he’s said it before -- in New Hampshire in early January -- so he can and should be held accountable for his words. And those words create sharp doubts about his qualifications for the presidency.

Even Republicans were appalled. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (who has endorsed Romney) said: “I wish he’d said it differently. When you look at what’s going on in other countries -- China, India, the premium they put on higher education -- we’ve got to do better if we still want to be the global leader that we are.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, no friend of Obama’s, said the president “has a good, strong message on education. In Arizona, we’re trying to implement the things he talked about.”

GOP strategist Ed Rogers, writing in The Washington Post, summed up: “I don’t think I have ever seen another candidate so mistakenly head in the opposite direction of where common sense should have compelled him to go.”

Santorum was actually making two separate points. The first was that college is not the only place to acquire useful work skills. “Not all folks are gifted in the same way,” he told a crowd in Troy, Mich. “Some people have incredible gifts with their hands.”

Fair enough, but Obama never demeaned those folks by praising the value of higher education. As the independent organization FactCheck.org reported, Santorum was “twisting Obama’s words.” The president never said that every youngster should attend Brown or Berkeley; he did say that in the modern economy, some form of advanced training is essential for success.

As the president told the National Governors Association this week: “When I speak about higher education, we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re speaking about someone going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that is now requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school.”