Rick and Newt are fighting for the same set of voters, so naturally Santorum is going to spend more time attacking Gingrich. We’ve seen this all election cycle and for every primary cycle previous. That’s just how campaigns work.
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Respectfully, Longbow, point me to 1 negative ad run by Newt against any conservative.
It doesn't matter what ads Newt is running. Newt's angle was to be positive back when no one was paying attention to him - and through attrition still be standing so far into the primary. Not so long ago Newt was an afterthought.
The point is, Santorum is doing what candidates tend to do - which is, fight for the winnable votes (often using negative ads) and hope they can outlast the competition. Santorum is trying to win over the anti-establishment/conservative block of voters that have been going to Gingrich. Rick's goal is to stay in the race and hope Newt implodes. It's really not so far fetched either. Remember just a few months ago Newt's name was a laughing stock around here after he called Ryan's budget "right wing social engineering". Paul can't win the nomination and at this point all it would take was for some big piece of dirt to come out on Newt or to bait him into saying something he shouldn't. If Gingrich implodes the only one left standing to stop Mitt the chameleon is Santorum - and at that point he'd try to coalesce his votes plus what Newt is getting for a winnable majority.
Politics is nasty. People should stop whining about negative ads. They are fairly effective and are not going away. The reason the conservative candidates largely ignore Romney is simply because they know they aren't going to win over his "moderate"/RINO voting block. They've all assumed all along, I believe correctly, there that is a conservative majority to be had - which is why they fight one another for it until such time as we are legitimately down to Romney versus not-Romney. We just aren't quite there yet.
I am supporting Newt and have been since Perry proved he did not have the communication skills necessary to win the nomination. But just because many/most of us are supporting Gingrich doesn't mean we should adopt silly conspiracy theories about Santorum trying to secretly help Romney. I wish Rick would drop out too, but the reason he isn't is because he still sees possible scenarios remaining in which he can win.