Is Rick Santorum the new Teflon candidate to whom nothing sticks?

Mitt Romney and Ron Paul are spending millions on ads to attack the surging Rick Santorum. But he's proving to be an elusive target, as social conservatives endorse many of his positions.

The minute Rick Santorum clinched caucus and primary victories in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado two weeks ago, revamping the GOP presidential nominating race, front-runner Mitt Romney, and the "super political action committees" supporting him, turned their cannons on the former Pennsylvania senator.?

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Those ads, and the big money Mr. Romney has at his disposal to throw into them, were a big help to Romney in putting Newt Gingrich into the rear-view mirror when Mr. Gingrich seemed to be gaining on him.

The trouble this time: Mr. Santorum isn't nearly as easy a target.

Gingrich offered plenty for Romney and his backers to latch onto. There were ethics lapses in Congress (which seemed particularly to resonate with some voters); videos linking him to Nancy Pelosi, global-warming legislation, and other more liberal issues; and Gingrich's spotty personal life.

At first glance, there's a lot to mine from Santorum's past, too. There are the segments from his book about "radical feminists," seeming to disparage women in the workplace, and his comments criticizing contraception. He recently attacked the idea of prenatal testing, and he once compared homosexuality with "man on dog" sex. (The latter earned a now-famous reply from his Associated Press interviewer, who declared, "I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about 'man on dog' with a United States senator; it's sort of freaking me out.")

The trouble is, those statements, which may be useful in the general election, are almost impossible to use against him now. Santorum's base is the conservative wing of the Republican Party, particularly social conservatives. Romney, who is trying to persuade those voters that he's a better choice, can't risk directly mocking Santorum for some of his more out-there statements on conservative issues. Any such attacks might backfire, leading conservatives who are already unsure about Romney's conservative credentials to definitively conclude that he is, in fact, too moderate.

Instead, Romney is relying on an old standby: criticizing Santorum for not being fiscally conservative enough ? voting to raise the national debt ceiling and supporting "earmarks" (pet projects for the home state) when he was in Congress.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Mgrn6YTCaU8/Is-Rick-Santorum-the-new-Teflon-candidate-to-whom-nothing-sticks

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