Santorum campaign faces growing pains as Super Tuesday approaches

NASHVILLE--Rick Santorum was late. The students at Belmont University were growing restless.

"So the rule is we wait five minutes for an adjunct, 10 for a professor ... How many for a potential presidential candidate?" tweeted Belmont University student Ale Delgado as she waited in her seat Wednesday night.

Santorum had scheduled an appearance on Fox News before the event, but was detained when the live feed went down because of a nearby storm. The evening showcased the worst of the growing pains the Santorum campaign is suffering as it tries to beat Mitt Romney in the contest for the Republican nomination. Campaign staples, like providing signs for the audience to wave or gathering contact information from everyone who walks through the door, are notably absent.

Students continued to trickle in, but by the time Santorum finally arrived, the floor seats of the venue were only about 80 percent full. It became clear when Santorum began to speak that he was addressing a mixed crowd. Most of the students on the floor were eager supporters of the senator who cheered and hooted at his best lines, but surrounding them in the stands sat a loud horde of liberals, snarky Ron Paulites and yawning co-eds glued to their cell phones.

And in the bleachers stage right, were a handful of students with Romney yard signs.

It wasn't five minutes before a Santorum campaign aide approached and demanded they take down the signs. They complied, but not before a Belmont employee told the Santorum staffer that he was out of line.

So long as they weren't being disruptive, she told him, they could hold up their signs.

"But we paid to be here," he said.

The school doesn't censor speech, she replied.

Santorum's traveling staff, formerly comprised of just a few aides--or sometimes just one back in Iowa-- who drove him around in a rental or a borrowed car, has noticeably grown. The campaign recently hired Alice Stewart, a former spokeswoman for Michele Bachmann, to field press inquiries on the trail. But as the campaign has transitioned from single-state contests to a nationwide battle that requires organization across the country, it has become more difficult to stick the landing every time. (Santorum's advance team sometimes pulls it off: At a rally on Friday in Ohio, each chair had a "Rick Santorum for President" sign waiting for supporters before they arrived, and campaign aides manned a table collecting information on voters.)

On the stage, Santorum seemed off his game. Instead of adapting his speech to an arena full of tweeting millennials, he blessed them with an hour-long monologue in which he outlined most of his platform, issue by issue. At one point he explained in detail how Health Savings Accounts work. After that, he described the technical process of how to extract shale oil from rocks.

The lines that play well for Santorum at Knights of Columbus meeting halls flopped, while others outright backfired. When he broke the news to the students, for instance, that federal spending on entitlement programs had skyrocketed to 60 percent of the budget in his lifetime, an entire section cheered. (Usually people gasp.)

After explaining how the principles of auto insurance could be applied to health insurance markets, Santorum polled the audience: "How many people, if you had a $500 deductible insurance policy would turn in a fender bender that cost $700 dollars?"

No one raised their hands.

Santorum paused.

"Nobody would! Why wouldn't you turn it in?"

Blank stares.

"Because your insurance rates would go up!"

This is not to say that Santorum can't hold his own in front of a mixed audience. He has been in public life for nearly two decades and he's relatively successful at handling confrontations, even with young people.

But the day before the Nashville event, a reporter in Michigan who was interviewing Santorum referred to him as the "scrappy challenger ... taking on the big, over-funded establishment candidate."

"That's pretty good," Santorum replied. "That's who we are."

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