As Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich stop angling for the presidency and start conceding that Mitt Romney’s the inevitabile nominee, they’ll soon have to stop their aggressive attacks on him. But while the party leaders phase into general election mode, it would be a shame to forget all of the nasty criticism that the candidates leveled against Romney over the previous year. Here, we’ve compiled some of the best jokes, warnings, and character defamations of Romney by his soon-to-be big time supporters.
Rick Santorum
3/25/2012: “Pick any other Republican in the country. He is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”
3/19/2012: Romney “is someone who doesn’t have a core. He has been on both sides of almost every single issue in the past ten years.”
3/23/2012: “Mitt Romney has misled voters on Romneycare; he said he was not for mandates at the federal level when in fact he was,” Santorum said. “He said he didn’t require Catholic hospitals to provide services that were against their conscience, when in fact he did, and he said he didn’t provide free abortions under Romneycare, when he did.”
3/22/2012: “You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision for our country, not someone who’s just going to be a little different than the person in there. If you’re going to be a little different, we might as well stay with what we have instead of taking a risk with what may be the Etch A Sketch candidate of the future.”
3/11/2012: “He was for climate change … Man-made global warming. He put caps on CO2. And now that it’s not popular, now that the climate changed, guess who changed along with it? Governor Romney.”
Newt Gingrich
1/8/2012: “Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation would find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company.”
1/9/2012: From a Gingrich ad: “As Governor, Mitt used taxpayer funds to pay for abortions and gave Planned Parenthood power over Massachusetts health care.”
1/11/2012: “I don’t believe any moderate can debate Barack Obama successfully because there is not a big enough gap between the two of them … If you are going to defeat Barack Obama, you are only going to defeat him with a conservative.”
1/26/2012: “There is something so grotesquely hypocritical about the Romney campaign.”