ORLANDO, Fla. — Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum accused President Obama of waging “a public relations war” against the Islamic State on Saturday, hours after the Islamic terrorist group claimed responsibility for a series of deadly attacks in Paris, France.
“The public relations value this president gives ISIS every day by engaging in a war he has no intention of winning. That’s what we say yesterday,” Santorum told reporters at the Florida GOP’s Sunshine Summit, using one of the acronyms describing the Islamic State.
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Obama declined to speculate who was behind the terrorist attacks during an address Friday evening from the White House Briefing Room.
“The president is living in an alternative world that he’s looking at right now and people are dying,” Santorum said Saturday.
He continued, “This president doesn’t have a plan. This president has no strategy. This president is completely abandoning ship.”
Santorum, a lower-tier candidate in the Republican presidential field who is currently No. 11 in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, also criticized the administration’s bombing campaign against Islamic State militants in Syria.
“Four bombs a day? Are you serious? That’s a public relations war,” he said. “That is not an effective campaign against a gang of hoodlums in a small town and we’re fighting an organization that controls ground the size of the United Kingdom.”
In late October, Obama announced plans to deploy 50 special operations ground troops to Syria to assist local Arab and Kurdish forces in the fight against the Islamic State. In an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that aired Friday, Obama said of the Islamic State, “I don’t think they’re gaining strength.”
“What is true, from the start our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them,” he said in a statement that drew heavy criticism from a handful of Republicans, Santorum included.
“This is a serious threat and the president is not taking it seriously,” the former Pennsylvania senator said. “If we do not begin to take ground back from ISIS, we will see the war brought here dramatically.”
