Gingrich, Santorum Share Spotlight at GOP Event in Duncan

Onlookers could have called them Rick Gingrich. Or Newt Santorum. At least on Friday. 

Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the only two candidates to take part in a conservative forum at Byrnes High School in Duncan, played nice Friday, echoing sentiments against Barack Obama, while imploring the audience of more than 500 to consider the vast importance of the 2012 election. 

"This is the most important election of your lifetime," Santorum told the crowd at the conclusion of the event. "South Carolina very well may decide who the next president of the United States is going to be."

Santorum and Gingrich are vying for South Carolina's precious "conservative" vote, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney continues to enjoy a lead in the polls despite his more centrist history. 

"This is the most important election of our lifetime," Gingrich said during the forum, which was moderated by 106.3 WORD host Bob McLain, Rep. Jeff Duncan and Rep. Trey Gowdy.  

"If Barack Obama with the disaster he has been, can get reelected, the level of radicalism he imposes in his second term will be beyond anything we can imagine," Gingrich said.

The forum allowed both Santorum and Gingrich individual time allotments to answer grouped sets of questions, rather than making them each take turns answering the same question, one after the other.

Gingrich, the first to take the stage, used his grasp of American history to appeal to the audience, and drew applause while answering Gowdy's question about progressive judicial activism. 

Gingrich, who believes the U.S. Supreme Court and federal appellate courts have become too powerful, said the founding fathers never intended for the courts to be able to trump the will of congress or the president the way they do now on issues of constitutionality. 

"You can't just rely on them," Gingrich said. "If you look at the history of the United States, starting actually with the Revolutionary War, where the number two complaint of the American revolutionaries was they were against activist British judges who they regarded as dictators."

It wouldn't be the first time Gingrich used the Revolutionary War, fought in many parts of South Carolina, to focus the audience on his message. He likened revolutionaries' slaughter of British troops at nearby Kings Mountain to exemplify one of the nation's most inherent traits — toughness. 

"We are a tough country," Gingrich said. "We are a country that believes in the flag that has a snake on it that 'says don't tread on me.' We're a country that says 'we have not yet begun to fight.'"

Santorum called for entitlement reform during his round of questioning, calling for elimination of most entitlement programs at the federal level so they may be more efficiently implemented at the local level. 

"We don't need to be solving these problems at a level so far removed from the people we're trying to help," Santorum said. 

Gingrich, seeking to consolidate South Carolinians under his own conservative banner to defeat Romney, postured himself as the candidate whose staunch conservative made him more electable, not less, than the moderate former Massachusetts governor. 

"If you run a moderate…. you will lose," Gingrich said. 

"If we end up splitting the conservative vote, we're going to stumble into nominating somebody that 95 percent of the people in this room are going to be uncomfortable with," he said. 

Santorum, a social conservative who used his family values message to surge in Iowa, ended on the same note that has taken him this far. And he warned against voting on the basis of mere perceived electability. 

"Do not defer your judgment to those who do not share your values, to those who do not want to see what happens to America what you want to see happen to America," Santorum said. "Be bold.

"When South Carolina voted for Ronald Reagan, he wasn't Ronald Reagan. Not the Reagan we remember. He became the Ronald Reagan we remember."