U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) speaks during the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana June 17, 2011. REUTERS/Sean Gardner (UNITED STATES – Tags: POLITICS)
Rick Santorum is a longshot candidate in the GOP field, but in Iowa he’s gaining a little traction with his far-right views on social issues. Rick Perry complicates Santorum’s strategy, as the field is now even more crowded with Christianist candidates, so Santorum is not being shy about taking on Perry. He jumped on Perry’s outrageous comments about Ben Bernanke:
RCK SANTORUM: Gov. Perry steps into the race and he stepped on it a couple of times already. Washington DC is not Austin and my sense is that he’s gonna have a pretty good learning curve, not just on what it means to run a national campaign and have the scrutiny of the national media that he didn’t have in Texas—
JOHN KING: What do you mean by he stepped on it?
SANTORUM: Well his comments about Ben Bernanke, they were completely out of bounds. I don’t agree with Ben Bernanke’s policies… but to me the rhetoric that Rick Perry used was sort of the rhetoric I would expect from a John Conyers, talking about President Bush and saying he should be impeached. We don’t do that. We don’t impeach people, we don’t charge people with treason because we disagree with them on public policy. You might say that they’re wrong, you might say lots of things about how misguided they are, but you don’t up the ante to that type of rhetoric. It’s out of place, and hopefully Gov. Perry will step back and recognize that we’re not in Texas anymore.
It’s interesting to see the battle lines being drawn, and Perry is the prime target now that he’s getting all the buzz and good news in the polls.
