Rick Santorum, speaking in Missouri this weekend, stopped to thank the voters around the country who believed in him — but made it clear there were some voters whose ballots he wasn’t interested in.
“I kept saying, you just stick with us, you go out and vote for your values and trust what you know,” Santorum said Saturday, fresh off his victory in the Kansas caucuses. “Because you don’t live in New York City. You don’t live in Los Angeles. You live like most Americans in between those two cities, and you know the values you believe in.”
In voicing his preference for the Americans in the middle of the country, Santorum is taking a page of Sarah Palin’s playbook. In 2008, the former vice presidential nominee declared herself happy to be visiting the “real America” during a campaign stop in North Carolina. Palin told the crowd that small towns she visited on the trail were “these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America. … pro-America areas of this great nation.” Palin later apologized, but the designation of a “real America” helped make the culture wars a fixture of the campaign. (North Carolina, of course, went for Obama.) Three and a half years later, Santorum has eagerly grabbed the culture warrior mantle in this GOP primary.
Santorum has also hinted that there’s another state apart from New York and California that he considers suspect: Massachusetts. Santorum, who hammers Romney for not being a true conservative, has picked up the line touted more often by Newt Gingrich that Romney is “Massachusetts moderate.”
