Rick Santorum campaigning hard today was heard striking out at both Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.

Santorum, stung by Romney’s attacks claiming his congressional record was dotted by wasteful legislative “earmarks,” accused Governor Romney of marching to Washington to ask for “earmarks” to help support the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics which he supervised.   But Santorum had an even more personal attack aimed at Barack Obama which has been re-broadcast all day long:

“Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator known for his social conservative views, said Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.” He later suggested that the president practices a different kind of Christianity.

“In the Christian church there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity,” he said. “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian.”

The Obama campaign said the comments represent “the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness, and searing pessimism and negativity.”

In Ohio, a Super Tuesday prize, Santorum played to friendly crowds. Trailing Romney in money and campaign resources, he is depending on the Tea Party movement and religious groups to deliver a victory March 6 in the contest.

More delegates will be awarded in Ohio than in any other state except Georgia in the opening months of the Republican campaign. Ohio and Georgia are two of the 10 contests scheduled for March 6, a benchmark for the primary campaign that often decides who can continue to the next level.

Santorum has surged in recent opinion polls after capturing Republican caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and a nonbinding primary in Missouri on Feb. 7. Several polls have shown him ahead in Romney’s native state of Michigan, where primary voters cast ballots a week from Tuesday.

Even as he criticized Obama, Santorum also went after one of Romney’s most promoted achievements – his leadership at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

“One of Mitt Romney’s greatest accomplishments, one of the things he talks about most is how he heroically showed up on the scene and bailed out and resolved the problems of the Salt Lake City Olympic Games,” Santorum said. “He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake games – in an earmark, in an earmark for the Salt Lake Olympic games.”

The Romney campaign does not dispute that congressional earmarks helped save the games. But they noted that Santorum voted for those earmarks, among many others, when he was a senator.

“Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. Continuing, Saul remindd reporters that “there is a big difference between asking Congress to provide extra security funding because of 9-11, and asking for funding for a ….zoo.”

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/02/18/MNAL1N9LBE.DTL#ixzz1mnnaYWXm

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Filed under: Economy, Featured, Inside The KC, Politics by Sonja Eddings Brown, Feb 18, 2012