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My Message to Rick Santorum March 23, 2012 Not too long ago, I had asked a woman from Pennsylvania what she thought about Rick Santorum. Knowing that she was as conservative and as Republican as I am, I was surprised at her response. She said, “He is the worst. Those of us who know him best have nothing but contempt for him. He is not an honest person and certainly would not hesitate to stab a fellow politician in the back.” That was a few weeks ago, but I have learned what a tawdry character Santorum is. He is a...

Rick Santorum's latest attempt to use a Mitt Romney aide's "Etch-A-Sketch" remark against the Republican front-runner instead gave his rival a chance to fire back on Thursday, after Santorum seemed to say he'd rather see President Obama reelected than send Romney to the White House. Speaking at an event in Texas, Santorum again made the case that Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom's comments Wednesday on CNN about a "reset" of the campaign if Romney clinched the nomination showed the former Massachusetts governor's efforts to appeal to conservatives were insincere. "You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision...

Poll: Santorum Ahead In Louisiana By Jonathan Easley - 03/21/12 Rick Santorum leads the GOP presidential field by double digits heading into Saturday’s primary in Louisiana, according to a poll released late Tuesday by Magellan Strategies. Santorum took 37 percent, followed by Mitt Romney at 24 percent, Newt Gingrich at 21 percent and Ron Paul at 3 percent. The poll was conducted on March 19, before Romney’s convincing victory in the Illinois primary, and has a 2 percent margin of error. Gingrich finished a distant fourth in Illinois, and will likely hear growing calls this week for him to end...

In a new interview, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says he expects to finish in third place in the GOP delegate count and that there's a chance someone other than the four declared candidates could emerge from the party's August convention as the nominee. Neither of those statements is really news; various pundits have been saying the same for weeks. But what is newsworthy is that Mr. Gingrich has said them. While Mr. Gingrich is not completely abandoning his own aspirations to secure the nomination, he seems to be switching his main focus from running against President Barack...

Rick Santorum today gently criticized House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's latest budget effort --- but at least it was from the right rather than the left as was Newt Gingrich's "right-wing social engineering" criticism last year: “He’s put forward a great blueprint for people to campaign upon and shows clearly progress dramatic progress in the direction of shrinking the size of government, and liberating the economy through lower taxes and less regulations,” he told Beck.But of entitlement reform, Santorum said, “we need to move forward quicker” and he called for faster spending cuts.Santorum was the only one of the presidential...

The media is smearing Gingrich right and left while going relatively light on Santorum. We don't know who he is, we haven't examined his record thoroughly, we blindly believe in faith the statements he as a Christian family man uses to make a quick point, and he is the last one standing to experience the negative carpet bombing from Mitt Romney.

Somewhere, buried in Rick Santorum’s fatally flawed campaign messaging, were winning words. Had he committed to them, the former senator could have derailed Mitt Romney’s path to the GOP nomination. Despite Romney’s overpowering resources and organization, Santorum’s potent argument — that the party could not throw the issue of healthcare away by nominating someone who had supported mandates — was his key to victory, but he threw it away. As he transformed from Senator 2 Percent to the last credible alternative to Romney, Santorum often made the point that nominating Romney — or Newt Gingrich — would take the issue...

The Santorum campaign appears to be taking a slightly new tack on Newt Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. Instead of calling on Mr. Gingrich to drop out of the race, they called for Mr. Gingrich’s supporters to come to their side. “It’s time for Gingrich supporters to get behind us if they truly want to have a conservative candidate; it’s up to Newt Gingrich to decide what his future is,” John Brabender, Mr. Santorum’s top strategist, told reporters after Mr. Santorum and a crowd of about 200 people had left the hotel ballroom here where Mr. Santorum had conceded...

News sources have confirmed Jim Runyon, a Gingrich delegate in IL has agreed in principle with 9 other Gingrich delegates in the 4 CD's that Rick Santorum failed to field a slate of delegates, that they will pledge their support for Santorum should he reach Tampa. This will have the effect of eliminating the delegate disadvantage in IL that Santorum was facing, particularly in the 13th Congressional District. It's now possible Santorum may split the delegate allocations by CD with Mitt Romney, or may in face take the lead, despite Romney getting more of the popular vote, since the Congressional...

With former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich low in the polls and splitting the conservative vote with former Sen. Rick Santorum, commentators and pundits have suggested that Gingrich should drop out of the GOP race. Political analyst Scott Rasmussen told The Daily Caller that a dispassionate reading of the tea leaves suggests they’re right. “I think if [Gingrich] dropped out, it would be good for the party and it would be good for Santorum and Romney,” Rasmussen said. “It is much easier and much healthier for the Republican party if you have Santorum and Romney going head-to-head and Ron...

Newt Gingrich had to win Mississippi and Alabama in order to remain a viable candidate. Those states weren't essential because of their delegate counts or their importance to the national election, but because Gingrich had won nothing outside the South and staked everything on a southern strategy. He lost. He remains in the campaign, but he's a ghost, a bitter aftertaste, and a thorn in Rick Santorum's side. Santorum now faces his own "must win" primary, Illinois. He's won more states than Gingrich, but his strength so far has been in the Midwest and South, and in neither region has...

A quick glance at the map might tempt you into thinking that the Republican nomination is roughly an even battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, with Mr. Romney tending to prevail in the Northeast and the West, and Mr. Santorum in the Midwest and the South. Do the math, however, and you’ll find that the nomination isn’t all that close. Mr. Romney hasn’t done that well in the South — but he also hasn’t been shut out there, winning Florida and its 50 winner-take-all delegates, and Virginia, where only Ron Paul was on the ballot alongside him. The Southern...

Rick Santorum is coming under fire for saying that the unemployment rate and economic growth are secondary issues to that of freedom in his campaign, a statement that rival Mitt Romney's campaign quickly seized on as being tone-deaf to the plight of out-of-work Americans. "We need a candidate who's going to be a fighter for freedom. Who's going to get up and make that the central theme in this race because it is the central theme in this race," Santorum told a crowd of about 200 voters during a rally here on Monday. "I don't care what the unemployment rate's...

Seamus the Irish setter may have died years ago, but the now-infamous story of his rooftop ride has been more firmly cemented into the narrative of the 2012 campaign than his retaliatory excrement was plastered to the back window of the Romney family station wagon during that fateful trip 20 years ago. The Santorum campaign has referenced Mitt Romney’s treatment of his dog Seamus four times over the past week as an anecdote that purportedly calls into question the former governor’s character. -snip- “If you can’t be nice to your dog, who are you going to be nice to?”

September 3, 2008 Interview with TPMtv - Santorum says that the GOP has moved away from the Goldwater, "small government" ideas. The full interview can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3uqZSih_wYU

Sunday, March 18, 2012 It's Time For Gingrich To Drop Out of Race For GOP Nomination EDITORIAL The time has come for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to drop out the Republican presidential race and allow Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to battle it out for the GOP nomination. After an up-and-down campaign, Gingrich based his chances primarily on a Southern strategy. That worked, with wins in South Carolina and Georgia. Then Gingrich set his sights on Alabama and Mississippi, where voters make their decisions on Tuesday. Gingrich had been first or second in those two states in pre-election polls....

Gingrich Forges Ahead As A Spoiler By Daniel Malloy and Katie Leslie The Atlanta Journal-Constitution CHICAGO -- Newt Gingrich has unabashedly taken on the role of spoiler in the Republican presidential nomination contest, as a pair of losses in Tuesday’s Deep South primaries cemented his position on the margins of the race. (snip) Appearing on a radio show Wednesday morning in Chicago, Gingrich talked about the results in Alabama and Mississippi -- where he came in second to former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania -- as if he and Santorum were a kind of conservative tag team. “Between the...

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney would stand to benefit just as much as Rick Santorum if Newt Gingrich exited the presidential race, according to a new poll released Friday. The Gallup poll defied conventional wisdom by suggesting Romney would peel off just as many Gingrich supporters as Santorum would. Forty percent of Gingrich supporters in Gallup's daily tracking poll said Romney was their second choice while 39 percent said they would migrate to Santorum. "If two candidates for a presidential nomination compete in the same ideological space, it would make sense that if one dropped out that the other would benefit,"...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Republican voters who prefer Newt Gingrich for the party's 2012 presidential nomination are as likely to name Mitt Romney as their second choice as they are to name Rick Santorum, suggesting the race would not tilt in Santorum's favor if Gingrich dropped out.

PALATINE, Ill.--Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on late Wednesday expressed frustration with both the news media and the Republican establishment for failing to understand his “large ideas” for transforming American politics. As calls for Gingrich to bow out of the race grew louder after his second-place finishes in Mississippi and Alabama--two states he said he had a chance to win--the candidate seemed to be in low spirits and offered a grumpy analysis of the state of the GOP primary to a crowd that gathered for a Lincoln Day dinner in this northwestern suburb of Chicago. “The thing I find most disheartening...