The rumored scheme in which the campaigns of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich lay off one another and focus their attention on Mitt Romney appears to be backfiring before it began.
On a conference call with reporters Thursday, former Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) — a Gingrich surrogate — laid into Santorum with one of the worst charges in politics: the claim that he’s an unprincipled opportunist.
Not exactly the kind of thing you expect to hear from the team that’s supposed to be laying off.
In 2002, the incumbent Smith was defeated for renomination by John Sununu, who would go on to win the general election against then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen (D). The primary loss was an embarrassing one for Smith, and on the call Thursday he told a story about the race he said he’d never told before: Rick Santorum, he said, stood with Sununu (who polls showed was in a better position to win the general) instead of Smith, who had been a political ally.
This is a familiar tale for Santorum. He lost a lot of cred with his social conservative base in 2004 when he stood with the moderate Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter (then a Republican, later to become a Democrat) in a primary fight against the much more conservative Pat Toomney (who eventually won a Senate seat in 2010.) Santorum is defending that decision to angry conservatives to this day.
Santorum has said he backed Specter then because it guaranteed President Bush’s Supreme Court picks would get approved. But way back in April, he also acknowledged it was a mistake.
It’s not good story for a guy running on his conservative purity. And Smith said Santorum did the same thing to him that he did to Toomey.
“You’e got to be able to stand up for those principles, and I’m not saying that he won’t, but I’m just saying here’s a time when he did not,” Smith said.
Here’s his whole tale:
One quick point that I’ve never really talked about to you or to anyone else. We all know the story about Toomey and Specter as far Rick is concerned. Look, Rick’s a good conservative that I have known for years, we traveled together I like him personally. But if you have the right ideas, sometimes you get pushed to the point where you really need to show whether you really mean it or not. And when he supported Specter over Toomey, there was an example there when he could’ve taken his philosophy and put it to work and he went the wrong direction. He did the same thing to me — and this is the new thing. I never made a big deal about it, it’s history, I’m not whining about it, it’s over. But he supported John Sununu in the primary over me and it’s really unprecedented for an incumbent Senator — he supported Specter who was an incumbent, saying that that was the reason that he supported him but he opposed me. And here’s a guy who was 98.5% of the time, you know, with the president and with the party on the conservative issues. I’m not bringing it up to whine about it, I’m bringing it up to say, here’s a chance where Rick could have stood up and said, “my principles first, I like Bob Smith, maybe he’s polling a little worse than somebody else against Jeanne Shaheen, but I tell you he was there for me, he helped me on the partial birth” — I was the one who that brought him to the partial birth issue, I wrote the bill, he came out on top and came in on it—You’e got to be able to stand up for those principles, and I’m not saying that he won’t, but I’m just saying here’s a time when he did not.
