Santorum touts Iowa “win,” blasts Gingrich ahead of debate

Rick Santorum trumpeted his new 34-vote “big win” over Mitt Romney in Iowa, saying it showed he can put together a victorious campaign and can defeat the former Massachusetts governor.

“We feel very, very good about what this win will mean,” Santorum said at a news conference in a breezy park near the soaring Cooper River Bridge. “It says that we can win elections, we can organize, we can put together an effort to pull the resources together to be able to be successful in being the person who can defeat Mitt Romney. Because guess what? We defeated Mitt Romney in Iowa.”

Santorum, however, aimed most of his criticisms at Newt Gingrich. He has been battling him to win conservative votes and overtake Romney in South Carolina, which holds its primary Saturday. Gingrich, who has been rising in state polls while Santorum has slipped, won the endorsement of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who left the race Thursday. “That’s his decision, and I certainly respect that,” Santorum said.

The former Pennsylvania senator, appearing at the second stop of a cross-country bus tour promoting family values, spoke briefly about his conservative record and beliefs, then answered a few questions. He used them to try to undermine the former House speaker in a bid to persuade the Palmetto State’s evangelical Christians that he is the only candidate left in the GOP primary who shares their values.

“Congressman Gingrich routinely puts these issues to the back of the bus and sees them as controversial issues that need to be avoided,” he said. “We know what kind of leader he will be when those tough issues come to the fore. He will push them aside and focus on other things.”

He also said that Gingrich would be a controversial and unpredictable presidential nominee. “We have to nominate someone who’s going to make Barack Obama the issue in this race, not be the issue themselves in the race,” he said. “We can’t have a candidate that every day you’re going to worry that when you open the newspaper it’s an ‘Oh my, oh, what did he say today’ moment.”

Santorum cast himself as a consistent conservative with strong core values. “You need someone who’s stable, someone who’s courageous, someone who’s principled, someone who doesn’t need a teleprompter,” he said, adding that he was the candidate who could be trusted, who was authentic and “who you don’t have to worry about what they’re going to do or say from one day to the next.”

His news conference, which drew a small group of enthusiastic supporters and a big group of reporters and photographers, was interrupted by a few gay rights protesters who began to shout as he was talking about negative campaigning. “The sad part is you see a lot of negativity. You see a lot of folks who are just being hurtful,” he said. “That’s the ugly side of politics. And it’s not one that I’m going to pay frankly any attention to. It’s ugly. It’s cheap. It’s tawdry. And it has no relationship to the issues at hand in this race.”