After rise in polls, Rick Santorum braces for attack

Riding a closing burst of support ahead of Tuesday’s presidential caucuses, Republican candidate Rick Santorum told a crowd of supporters Sunday afternoon that he is ready for a wave of negative attacks now that he has emerged as one of the top tier contenders in Iowa.

“This isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been in tough races,” said the former Pennsylvania senator. “I’ve had the national media crawling up anywhere they could crawl . . . . It’s not going to be fun.”

Santorum’s final sprint had the air of a victory lap as he began the last two days of a long Iowa campaign with what he said was his 372^nd town hall meeting.

This conservative capital of western Iowa is “where it started to take hold for us,” he told more than 150 people jammed into the Daily Grind coffee shop in downtown Sioux City. Santorum stopped short of predicting a win, but said that the Iowa caucuses two days from now will “send a shock wave across this country.”

The large New Year’s Day throng wasn’t the only sign of Santorum’s radically changed circumstances. As he spoke a TV screen featured live CNN video of the event. A channel switch brought up a Fox News channel screen, reporting that “Santorum gains ground in new Iowa poll.”

Santorum took shots at President Obama—calling his policy toward Iran “un-American”—and several of his GOP rivals. He said if Obama wins reelection, “his foreign policy will not be any different from Ron Paul’s foreign policy,” referring to the Houston-area congressman’s non-interventionist views. And he ridiculed Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s unforgettable debate gaffe, when he forgot the name of one of the Cabinet departments he wanted to close.

But Santorum also signaled that his rising prominence in the race would draw increasing criticism from his rivals, who will gather next weekend in New Hampshire for a pair of televised debates.

Referring to his years in Congress, Santorum said his track record is “not perfect, and I’m sure you’ll hear from my friends about my warts. We all have them.” Apparently alluding to attacks from Perry on his support for earmarked federal spending, Santorum said that “I may have held my nose” because there were “bad things” in spending measures, as well as good things, but “you didn’t see me advocate for the bad.”

The heightened attention, and voter turnout, is a function of Santorum’s closing leap into contention in Iowa, after spending months near the bottom of the field. A Des Moines Register survey, released Saturday night, showed him in a tight race for first place with Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

Interviews with voters at his Sioux City event, the first of three western Iowa stops on Sunday, hinted at the potential for the latest opinion survey to create something of a bandwagon effect for Santorum.

Denny Rehan, 66, a commercial printing salesman in Sioux City, said the polling surge “reinforces my thinking in support of Rick Santorum.” He said he had been trying to decide between Santorum and Romney but “I just like Rick Santorum’s ideas a little better. . . . I’m a big support of the family life movement. Antiabortion, that’s a big one for me.”

Mary Albrecht, 43, who attended with her husband, Dave, and their young children, heard about the Register poll on Fox satellite news on the 30-mile drive from their home in Le Mars.

“I think he’s lucky to have momentum building at the right time. He may be lucky,” she said, adding that the poll might tip her into Santorum’s camp. The highly publicized poll has an influence, she said, “even though I know it shouldn’t, because I want might my vote to count.”

Kevin Fletcher, 49, a Sioux City lawyer who with his wife, Debbie, will be attending a caucus for the first time this week, said “some of my friends always liked [Santorum] but didn’t think he was electable.” Debbie Fletcher, 50, said she thinks “personally that the surge will help, with people who think he is not electable.”

paul.west@latimes.com