Is it possible that Rick Santorum is not the most outspoken Republican running for Senate in Pennsylvania? This is the question buzzing through my head as I sit beside John Featherman, the man who is "running to win" against Santorum in a Republican primary. We are at a seminar on pitching stories to the media, hosted by the Jewish Business Network. As a panel of local reporters discourses about press releases, Featherman offers a play-by-play.

"When I pitch things to the press, they often want an exclusive," he says very audibly. A few minutes later, he says, "That was my question." When a man enters the room carrying a tray full of cake, Featherman leans over and states, "Cake."

On the way out, the candidate says that he hasn't learned anything new about media relations — which some might say poses a problem. Most Pennsylvanians are taking for granted that the 2006 Senatorial race will square incumbent Santorum off against conservative Democrat Bob Casey. Bosses of both parties have said as much. That lesser-known candidates like Featherman, or his Democratic counterparts Chuck Pennacchio and Alan Sandals, have declared for the primaries is regarded, if not quite as a joke, then as a formality.

Featherman feels for the underdogs.

"God bless Chuck Pennacchio and Alan Sandals," he says. "They don't know what this campaign is going to be like yet. … Those guys are not going to get a fair shake."

At 41, Featherman is a bulky man with a fondness for bright shirts and rose-tinted sunglasses. He is articulate, and has an enormous appetite for the sound of his own voice — which, altered by a childhood tracheotomy, is loud, hollow and high, like someone blowing hard into a raspy flute. This may help explain why he doesn't mind campaigning against long odds.

In 1998, Featherman ran and lost in the special election that put Democrat Bob Brady in Congress. In 2000, he ran against Santorum in the general election with the imprimatur of the Libertarian Party, receiving 48,000 votes (Santorum beat Democrat Ron Klink with 52 percent of the vote). But rather than see himself as a perennial also-ran, Featherman argues that he's just learning the ropes.

For instance, he says, he's running as a Republican this time to gain credibility with the media. Featherman thinks there's space in Pennsylvania for a "reasonable Republican" such as himself, and offers as a potential supporter a hypothetical Montgomery County couple — one a stockbroker, the other a lawyer — who "don't want anyone who's a senator who's a jerk … [and] want to be able to go out, make their money, keep their money, but not have someone who's insulting gays, who's insulting women."

He decided to run, he says, because of Santorum's intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo (he told the Philadelphia Inquirer it was because of Santorum's book, It Takes a Family), and he says he believes that, if some pollster would acknowledge his candidacy, "John Featherman would do much better in a head-to-head poll against Bob Casey than Rick Santorum."

It does not disturb him to think that this might be because people haven't heard of him.

The son of a steel manufacturer, Featherman grew up in a "big house at 21st and Spruce" and attended Friends Select before gaining both his undergraduate degree and his MBA from Columbia. One day back in Philly, he walked into a Radio Shack on Aramingo Avenue to buy some batteries and found his calling. The cashier asked for his name, phone number and address, none of which seemed necessary. Not only did Featherman refuse, he began publishing Privacy Newsletter.

In 1995, City Paper ran a somewhat tongue-in-cheek profile of Featherman the guru, describing how he tore the labels off his mail and shielded the screen of his laptop from view. It also observed that one issue of Privacy Newsletter advised readers how to cheat on their spouses. A skeptic might think that such a history would be politically damaging. Not Featherman.

"If anything," he now says, "I understood these issues about identity theft and privacy before anybody else did."

Over the years, the candidate has also dabbled in real estate, TV news (producing a feature called "Featherman's Follies" for UPN-57) and standup comedy ("I'm not a stuffed shirt," he says, "I do ballroom dancing"). He even teaches continuing education classes at Temple University, and hopes to offer a course on running for public office. Asked whether he's ever won an election, he says, "I've never won. So what? It's not called how to win public office. It's how to run for public office."

When I met Featherman in his Prudential, Fox & Roach office, he did not come off as a man running on a whim — in fact, he laid out his agenda in great detail.

Government should get "out of our pockets and out of our bedrooms," he said. That means he's fiscally conservative, pro-choice, pro gay marriage, against the war on drugs, and very, very pro-privacy, to the extent that he opposes the Patriot Act. He has a plan for tort reform (a $250,000 cap on pain and suffering awards) and a plan to prevent identity theft. All this, and he doesn't even have a campaign office yet.

His biggest issue, though, seems to be his opponent. Featherman comes back to Santorum over and over — things he's said, donations he's taken — and speaks of the man with a visceral anger. He doesn't plan to bring up Santorum's gay staffer or controversial use of state funds to homeschool his children, he says (never mind that once he said this, he had brought up both those things). But he does plan to quote Santorum's book "the same way he quotes the Bible."

"Santorum is digging his own ditch right now," Featherman warns. The incumbent's "candidacy could self-destruct."

Toward the end of the interview, I read Featherman an excerpt from a 2003 New York Times Magazine profile of U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

"Each campaign, in its early days, includes a small cadre of sure losers. … The Unelectables dash from rally to rally, seeing only people who have come out to see them, and thus knowing in their hearts that the pollsters have it all wrong. Until that one frosty day in Iowa or New Hampshire when grim reality sets in. … A second phase of the race begins, in which he or she becomes 'an agenda candidate,' slugging it out only 'to influence the debate.'"

I asked Featherman if this sounded familiar.

"No, not at all," he said. "They're not including me in the polls."