Santorum, campaigning in Pennsylvania, calls 2006 loss a ‘gift’

Rick Santorum faced a room of Pennsylvania conservatives Saturday morning, offering not quite a mea culpa for the ways he’d disappointed them in the past, but presenting himself as humbled since his crushing Senate loss.

Trying to shed his Washington insider image, he described his 2006 loss as a “gift” from Pennsylvania voters that forced him to step outside the Capitol Hill bubble and realize he wasn’t really getting it.

“The only thing I feel toward the people of Pennsylvania is overwhelming and profound gratitude,” he said. “The people of Pennsylvania didn’t always give me what I wanted but they always gave me what I needed.”

“It was a real eye-opening, awakening experience to me,” he added. “It was a good sort of self-correction.”

Santorum, after 12 years in the U.S. Senate, lost to Democrat Bob Casey in part because of a widespread belief that he was arrogant and out of touch with Pennsylvanians, and because he’d angered state conservatives with his backing of pro-choice Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004, as well as his support for earmark spending.

At the time he thought it was the public who didn’t understand, but “in a sense, I didn’t understand,” he said.

Santorum, who gave a speech largely policy-focused, sprinkled with political attacks, and calm though at times rambling, received a warm reception from the few hundred in attendance for the two-day Pennsylvania Leadership Conference. He received polite applause, and at one point a standing ovation from most in the crowd for a dig at Mitt Romney’s “Etch-A-Sketch”-style flip-flopping.

Santorum has been traveling with the 1950s children’s toy since a Romney surrogate suggested on CNN that in the general election the campaign would be like an “Etch-A-Sketch” that could be simply shaken and reset.

“Folks, we don’t need people who write their public policy in Etch-A-Sketches,” Santorum said to the loudest applause of his 45-minute address. Earlier he’d said Romney was a “decent man,” but “uniquely disqualifed” because of his Massachusetts healthcare law that some have called a blueprint for President Obama’s health reform plan.

Romney has not begun his campaign yet in Pennsylvania, which votes on April 24. But Toomey, who entered the Senate in 2011 to replace Specter, had praise for the former Massachusetts governor, if not an endorsement, here Friday.

“I think Mitt Romney is a conservative and if he’s president, he’ll govern as a conservative,” Toomey told reporters after speaking to the conference.

Toomey made his mark in Washington hunting down and replacing Republican moderates in Congress with Republican conservatives as president of Club for Growth, a powerful anti-tax group.

Romney was represented at the conference by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who vouched for Romney’s conservative bona fides.

“Is he a flip-flopper? Ultimately that’s going to be up to you,” she told the audience. “What I care about is the issues. He’s absolutely pro-life, he’s absolutely going to repeal healthcare, he’s absolutely pro-military, he absolutely is a business person. … Those are the things I want to know.”