Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum served as the keynote speaker at a campaign rally for Louisiana's Republican senatorial hopeful Bill Cassidy, who was busy attending to business in the House of Representatives,
The Washington Post reported.
Cassidy appears poised to defeat incumbent Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu in Saturday's runoff election.
Santorum's message to Louisiana voters was that a vote against Landrieu was a vote against the policies of President Barack Obama.
"The only thing that will deter this president ... is you," said Santorum, who served in the Senate from 1995 to 2007, and personifies the cultural conservative wing of the Republican party. He is
running for president in 2016.
He upbraided Obama for his use of executive powers to stop the deportation of certain illegal migrants, urging his audience to send "not just a warning shot, but a torpedo into the side of the destroyer" by voting out Landrieu and replacing her with Cassidy.
Laura Cassidy, the candidate's wife, also attended the rally, reiterating the Cassidy campaign theme that Landrieu has voted with Obama "97 percent" of the time. She warned that the "Obama-Landrieu turnout machine" would be mobilized for Saturday's vote and asked for the prayers as well as the votes of Cassidy supporters.
The Landrieu campaign, in a statement, criticized Cassidy for staying in Washington: "There should be no question that Bill Cassidy is hiding from Louisiana voters."
Landrieu has implied that Cassidy wrongly billed Louisiana State University for work after he became a congressman, the Post reported.
Cassidy is a physician by training who was first elected to the House in 2008. He captured attention in 2005 when, during Hurricane Katrina, he helped to establish a field hospital. The next year he won a seat in the state Senate, according to The Almanac of American Politics.