IA: Santorum: Pawlenty engaging in ‘class warfare’

Recent statements by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty criticizing “country-club elitists” are an example of “class-warfare rhetoric,” former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said Tuesday in an interview with the National Review.

The two Republicans are both openly mulling a run for president in 2012, and both will be in Iowa in the coming weeks: Pawlenty will hold several events in eastern Iowa this weekend, and Santorum will make his fifth trip to the Hawkeye State next month.

Pawlenty was talking to a breakfast gathering in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Monday when he said he was the one person who could dispel the impression that Republicans are “a bunch of country club elitists.” He pointed to his his blue-collar upbringing in south St. Paul, Minn., as proof.

Santorum dismissed the statements by his potential Iowa Caucus rival.

“I’m not a class-warfare guy,” Santorum tells National Review Online in reaction to Pawlenty’s remarks. “That’s the Democrats’ gig. They like to divide and play the class card. We don’t have classes in America — I don’t even like the term ‘middle class.’ People are lower income or middle income, and the dynamism of this country is that you can rise, and sometimes fall, but you are not stuck in classes. We should not get into that kind of rhetoric, or showing some sort of prejudice.”

(Photo: Flickr Creative Commons/IowaPolitics.com)