Rick Santorum is struggling as he tries to emerge as the sole conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, a role that several Republicans over the last year have unsuccessfully sought.
The ex-senator’s performance in a debate in Arizona on Wednesday was widely panned by fellow Republicans, who felt that he didn’t successfully rebut criticisms from the other candidates about his record in Congress. Santorum’s complaint that Romney and Ron Paul are coordinating their attacks against him was dismissed by former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, a key figure in the GOP.
Rove said Santorum was “whining” in an interview on Fox News.
Other Republican strategists have said Santorum’s attacks on the president’s “theology” and his controversial statements about birth control take attention away from the central issue that the GOP wants to use in the fall election, the economy.
Santorum is in some ways suffering from the same challenges that hampered Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry earlier in the campaign cycle.
Romney is not only persistent in his attacks, but also he and his allies can pour millions of dollars into airing negative campaign commercials. Santorum is being vastly outspent in Michigan, which holds a key primary on February 28, just as Gingrich was in Florida.
The other challenge is courting the very conservative Republicans who have been resistant to Romney. Gingrich, Cain and now Santorum have all employed fiery anti-Obama rhetoric to woo conservatives, who seem to appreciate a candidate who will take a more blunt, aggressive tone against Obama than Romney does.
But each time one of them rises, they face a twin challenge. Romney has in some ways stolen the language of Santorum, now shifting towards more pointed language in casting the president as anti-religious. He adopted a similar approach when Gingrich rose, then shifted back to the economy once he had weathered that challenge.
That fiery rhetoric also often takes the candidate off of his core message. Santorum’s comment about Obama’s theology drew considerable news coverage, putting him on the offensive, while not offering him any obvious benefit: socially conservative voters already back Santorum over Romney in most polls.
Gingrich’s attack on Obama as the “food stamp president” at first galvanized conservatives, but also drew considerable media attention and controversy.
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