Slipping in the polls, Rick Santorum blasts the media, Mitt Romney and President Obama

Rick Santorum is losing ground in Michigan by the day, and his comments on the campaign trail Friday and Saturday illustrate the former senator's willingness to fight crisis with a steady stream of increasingly snarky comments about the mainstream media, Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.

Santorum's slide

The New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog uses the latest polling data to produce objective, numbers-based predictions of how voters will act. And after several weeks of forecasting victory for Santorum in the upcoming Michigan Republican presidential primary, FiveThiryEight changed course Friday and tagged Romney with a 65-percent likelihood of winning the Great Lakes State's primary.

Attack, attack, attack

Friday evening, Santorum lambasted the media during a policy speech in Lincoln Park, Mich.

"I shared my vision with you tonight because it’s probably the only time you’re going to hear it," Santorum said, per the online news site Politico. "Because most of the folks who are going to be reporting here aren’t going to write about it. They’re going to write about some controversial thing."

But that was only an introduction for the performance Santorum delivered Saturday while speaking at an Americans for Prosperity conference in Detroit.

Blogging for Politico, Jonathan Martin wrote, "Rick Santorum delivered a slashing speech Saturday morning that portrayed (Romney) as an elitist and unreliable conservative. … Santorum attacked (Romney) by name in what was one of the toughest speeches he's delivered in recent weeks. … The former senator was notably more energized here than he was in going through a litany of rehashed policy proposals to a modest crowd last night."

Santorum said about Romney: "What you see today might be something different than what you get tomorrow. … He wasn't what he said he was yesterday."

The Associated Press reported Saturday that at the same event Santorum also "called Obama 'a snob' for saying every American child should be able to go to college. 'Why does Obama want everybody to go to college? So his liberal college professors can be indoctrinating people like he has,' Santorum said, drawing a long ovation."