Former Sen. Rick Santorum, who is mulling another run for the White House in 2016, said he believes New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will face an uphill climb if he decides to seek the GOP presidential nomination.
"Chris is a good man. For a Republican in New Jersey, he's done a good job in the state of New Jersey," Santorum told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
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"But he's clearly not someone who is in the center of the Republican Party nationally and, as a result of that, he's got a much more difficult task to make."
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Earlier, Santorum said on Fox News that he's still in the "thinking-about-it" stage of a 2016 run.
Santorum also told Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg that he is puzzled by House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s claim that Republicans have offered no alternatives to Obamacare.
"Newt has a lot of ideas about what healthcare is and as far as I've checked he's still a Republican and there's a lot of folks including me who thinks he's got some pretty good ideas," Santorum said of his 2012 political rival for the GOP nomination.
"A lot of Republicans have good ideas on how to move forward into a more free market, private sector healthcare system … There are ways in which we can structure the free market to allow for better patient care for high quality care and lower cost."
The former Pennsylvania lawmaker said he understands Gingrich’s remark at the Republican National Committee summer meeting that the GOP is "caught up right now in a culture" where — "as long as we are negative, as long as we are vicious, as long as we can tear down our opponent, we don’t have to worry, so we don’t. This is a very deep problem."
Santorum told Malzberg: "He is right in that being negative only is not an answer. If that's his point, OK, point given, you have to propose alternatives. But don't say that there aren't alternatives and don't say people don't propose alternatives.
"A legitimate criticism is we don't highlight alternatives as much as we do but when you're a minority party — as he well knows because he served in the minority for a long time and had lots of ideas that nobody knew about until he became speaker.
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"So a part of that is just the reality of being a minority party and not having the opportunity to have your ideas get aired."
Santorum is also worried about the ideological differences that have caused major rifts between ultra-conservatives, conservative, moderates, and liberals within the Republican Party.
"The whole foundation of the Republican Party from the very beginning in 1856 in its first convention was the dignity of every human life and that dignity of every human life is the foundation of which all of our policies are built," he said.
"Respect for human life and respect for the dignity of persons economically, socially, in a family life, and, when we jettison that, then we jettison a whole foundation. We jettison the family is the basic building block of society and we say, well, marriage and the family are not that important. It's just sort of one of many other lifestyles."
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