Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich are both hoping rising gas prices will help put them in the driver’s seat for Tuesday’s Deep South primaries in Alabama and Mississippi.
Both continued to push their energy messages hard on the trail. Gingrich again promised to drastically lower gas prices through drilling while Santorum kept touting his credentials as the guy who never believed in all that climate change hooey in the first place.
But this is the Deep South, where social issues are a constant part of the agenda.
The polls are neck and neck between Gingrich and Santorum (and neck-and-neck-and-neck when you throw Mitt Romney into the mix), so no one really knows what’s going to happen Tuesday. It does seem as if Santorum has lost some momentum, and Romney’s picking up on the remaining split among conservatives between Gingrich and Santorum. Romney has spent enormously in the Deep South, too, which has been his ticket to eking out tough wins in the past.
But it’s clear that Gingrich and Santorum are running hard for the Christian vote in Alabama and Mississippi, as they have throughout the campaign, and they’re chumming the waters with as much red meat as they can before voting ends.
At a presidential forum hosted by the Alabama GOP Monday night, Santorum and Gingrich (the only candidates who attended) were asked how they would “lead our nation back to God.” The panelists were ready with several one-liners aimed at stoking concerns that Obama is insufficiently Christian.
“I believe that we have to have a president that articulates a vision that’s not just, as this president does, ‘freedom of worship,” Santorum said.
He went on:
“They’re starting to say that in the State Department more and more for international religious freedom. They don’t use the word ‘religious freedom’ anymore. They use the word ‘freedom of worship.’ For those of us who are people of faith, we all know that worship is certainly a critical aspect of our religion but it is not everything of our religion. What we do outside our worship services is just as important as what we do inside those worship services. And so what you will see [with me] is someone who … will talk about the importance of faith in public life.“
Gingrich echoed Santorum’s concerns about what he deemed anti-religious sentiment.
“Part of it is, frankly, is to take on the elite media,” Gingrich said. “There’s a brand new show out that has the word Christian in its title and is deliberately, viciously anti-Christian.”
Gingrich appeared to be referring to the ABC show GCB, which stands for Good Christian Bitches and has drawn iits fair share of criticism from the right. He went on:
“And I would simply suggest to all of you that if you imagine that exact same show with the title ‘Muslim’ in the title, you would know it’s impossible, that no one in the elites would think of it. And it just tells you how bad the anti-Christian bigotry has become among our elites and we need a president who as a national leader is prepared to say head-on, ‘This kind of behavior is reprehensible, destructive, bigoted and should not be tolerated in polite society.‘”
