By Lee A. Daniels

Rick Santorum, who has surged to the front of the Republican primary field, has apparently been so deranged by visions of inhabiting the White House, he’s willing to wallow in the political sewer to get there.

Last Friday during a campaign rally in Ohio, Santorum asserted that President Obama’s policy proposals are driven by a “phony ideology.”

“It’s about some phony ideal,” he said, “some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology. But no less a theology.”

Later, Santorum told reporters at the event that, although “if the President says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian,” there are “a lot of different stripes” of Christianity.

The Obama campaign condemned the comments as “the latest low in a Republican primary campaign that has been fueled by distortions, ugliness and searing pessimism and negativity.”

Rick Santorum

But Santorum doubled-down on those remarks, telling an incredulous Bob Schieffer Sunday on “Face The Nation” that in using the words “phony theology,” he was referring only to the administration’s environmental policies.

Monday, the Santorum campaign’s spokesperson, Alice Stewart, asserting in a Monday interview with reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC that Santorum’s “theology” remark referred to the administration’s environmental polices, herself called them as “radical Islamist policies.”

The full text of the passage reads: “As he clarified the statement, [Santorum] was talking about radical enviromentalists. There is a type of theological secularism when it comes to global warmists in this country. That’s what [Santorum] was referring to. He was referring to the president’s policies in terms of the radical Islamic policies the president has.”

Mitchell said that moments after the interview, conducted remotely, had ended, Stewart called her back to say she had misspoken. Stewart, who was Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s chief spokesperson before being hired by Santorum, didn’t explain why she found it easy to confuse “environmental” with “Islamic.”

Santorum’s “theology” comments – and insinuations – were echoed Tuesday by the evangelist Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, appearing on the MSNBC “Morning Joe” program. At midday, Mitt Romney chimed in, suggesting to a luncheon audience at a campaign event in Michigan that the president had “fought against religion” and tried to govern by a “secular” agenda instead of one that was faith-based.

The administration called the comments “disgraceful.”

Of course, these remarks are a not-so-subtle attempt to pander to the bizarre, pathological beliefs of a segment of the conservative base that the President is “un-American” in his birth and thinking, and a Muslim.

It’s a despicable tactic. But it should not have been unexpected – stoked as it has been by the increasingly virulent contest between the four GOP primary contenders, as well as by the positive momentum the economy seems to be riding at the moment, which has helped the President’s poll numbers. The clashing of those two developments, each of which has a wide array of secondary facets to it, and the fact that the GOP primary electorate is overwhelmingly dominated by far-right adherents, has driven the candidates themselves to spin further and further beyond the bounds of what has been mainstream Republicanism.

Months ago I warned that we’d all better get “a sturdy pair of hip waders … because the muck right-wing extremists and fellow-travelers have been shoveling out of the cesspool of American society into the respectable discourse since President Obama took office is likely to become a deluge.”

It took no great insight to see that then; the overt and coded evidence oozing from many quarters of the conservative universe, was voluminous. Then, however, it was mostly confined to minor GOP functionaries and political operatives. Now, it’s being taken up by very men seeking to become the Party’s standard-bearer. That augurs for a very dirty primary and general campaign.

But for the moment, haven’t those who’ve tried to lash the President to some “phony theology” revealed there’s something questionable about their own?

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline