Rick Santorum attempted to tar Mitt Romney as a pro-big-government executive on Sunday, more committed to managing the economy through government control than allowing the private sector to do its job.
"This is Mitt Romney again, you know, the CEO trying to go in and manage something,” Santorum said on ABC's This Week. “We don't need a manager. We need someone who can go in there and transform Washington and get it out of the hair of people in the private sector, reduce regulation and cut taxes dramatically."
Santorum said that Romney is "a man who doesn't understand conservative principles" on the economy. However, Santorum did earlier on Sunday tout his own experience as the manager of a small technology company.
"I was the number-two guy at a small technology company and did, in fact, help manage and try to get this company off the ground," he said on CNN's State of the Union, referencing his stint as president of a small tech company that went under, according to the Des Moines Register.
Santorum also criticized Obama on Afghanistan, specifically the timeline for U.S. withdrawal. "Once you give a timeline, you give the enemy an objective to hold on, to bunker down, if you will, and survive whatever onslaught the United States is going to put forth," Santorum said on ABC’s This Week.
Santorum said that the U.S. should "commit to winning" there, but insisted that such a policy wouldn't necessarily require a large military presence in the nation.
"That may not mean the heavy footprint that we have in Afghanistan right now,” he said, adding that “when we initially threw the Taliban out, we did so with a few handfuls of troops, I mean, several hundred troops.”
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