NEWTON, Iowa — At a coffee house, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum didn’t sugar coat his message when he told two-dozen Iowans that the America they grew up in is disappearing.
“Barack Obama is not incompetent, ladies and gentleman,” the former Pennsylvania senator said Friday afternoon at Uncle Nancy’s Coffee. “He knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. He sees America differently than you see America.”
Santorum has visited all 99 counties in Iowa, fighting for GOP primary voters’ attention who, despite his across-the-board conservatism, aren’t flocking to him yet.
The message he’s bringing to voters is one of a changing America.
He laments the “grave, serious problems” with the economy and the country’s “national security picture, which is getting darker and darker.”
Santorum says Obama “has gone out of his way to divide this country in a way I haven’t seen since the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt went around to divide his country. That’s his hero.”
He also said “what makes America great” in Obama’s mind is that “the government takes money from somebody and gives it to somebody else.”
“No, that’s what makes America,” he said, “France.”
Santorum said “this is the most important election maybe since the election of 1860,” however saying “the great thing is these are not irresistible problems”
“The question is are the people of Iowa willing to put forth a strong, conservative, convictioned leader that has the courage to go out and tackle the really critical issues we’re dealing with,” he said.
Santorum told voters to prepare to shock the world and not to “buy this two person race stuff” now between former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
“It’s been a two person race since June. The problem is its been two different people for every month for the last six months.”