Santorum: I'm more electable than Romney, Paul

Fresh from his sudden rise in the Iowa polls, Rick Santorum on Thursday had harsh words for the two Hawkeye State front-runners, contending that Rep. Ron Paul's foreign policy would "leave an enormous void around the world" and that Mitt Romney has "been all over the map" on too many issues.

Less than a week before Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, a CNN/Time/ORC poll showed Santorum in third place with 16 percent, with Romney at 25 percent and Paul at 22 percent. The poll had Santorum gaining ground while Newt Gingrich, who had previously led in the state, saw his support collapse to 14 percent.

In an interview on CNN, Santorum attributed his new status to his dogged strategy of visiting all 99 Iowa counties to compensate for a lack of money and organizational support. "Hard work pays off," he said.

He said that Paul, who has the best organization in the state, has given many voters pause with his laissez-faire foreign policy views, which include withdrawing troops at U.S. bases abroad.

"My concern is that Ron Paul would walk in there, day one, pull our troops back and leave an enormous void around the world," Santorum said. "He can do that day one without congressional approval. He can as commander-in-chief, move our troops anywhere in the world, disengage from every place from Europe to the Middle East, China, abandon the Straits of Hormuz, pull the Fifth Fleet back."

Meanwhile, the former Pennsylvania senator said, Romney has not been consistently conservative. He cited the ex-Massachusetts governor's views on overhauling health care and a "cap and trade" proposal aimed at reducing greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. "There's a whole laundry list of issues where Mitt's been all over the map," he said.

Although Romney is often described as the Republican most likely to win over Democratic and independent voters in a general election, Santorum said Romney has never won an election where he campaigned as a conservative and went after those voting blocs.

"I've run as a conservative in a blue state of Pennsylvania and won two elections," he said. "Yes, I lost one in an election year where everybody lost [2006], but in the election years that were contested that are going to be more like 2012 than 2006, those are the elections I won in Pennsylvania, and we can win them again."

Santorum also took a swipe at Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Michele Bachmann, both of whom have played up their "outsider" status in being willing to take on the Washington establishment.

"What we've seen is experience is a valuable thing," he said. "We had the president, who came in with little experience ... If you look at the track record, I got a lot of things done when we were in the senate." He added that even though he disagrees with the policies of President Lyndon Johnson - a former Senate majority leader - he said Johnson was "a pretty effective president. He was able to understand the dynamics."