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Rick Santorum sought to win over conservatives wary of Mitt Romney in a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday morning.

"Why would an undecided voter vote for a candidate of a party who the party's not excited about?" Santorum asked, trying to stoke Republican angst about the national front-runner.

He dug into Romney's weaknesses, from his campaign strategy of berating opponents to his record on health care reform in Massachusetts.

And he urged the audience, from start to finish, to stand their ground, arguing that the GOP’s right wing has lost its way in recent years.

“We listened to the voices who said that we had to abandon our principles and our values to get things done, to win,” he complained.

Santorum focused on the budget and debt, but also keyed into this week’s explosive debate over whether religious-affiliated institutions must comply with an Obama administration rule to offer women insurance coverage for contraceptives.

“I think Obamacare is a game changer for America,” the former Pennsylvania senator said. Needling President Obama, he added, “He’s now telling the Catholic Church that they are forced to pay for things that are against their basic tenets and teachings.” Drawing applause, he thundered, “It’s got to stop.”

Santorum then asserted that Romney is the wrong Republican to run against Obama because he ran the “largest government-run health care system in the United States” prior to the national reform, calling him “someone who would simply give that issue away in the fall.”

Riffing further on the theme of Romney being the wrong man to represent the party, he went on: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re not going to win with money. We are going to win with contrast. We’re going to win with ideas.”

“We need conservatives now to rally for a conservative,” he said.

Romney, who was set to address the conference two hours after Santorum concluded his remarks, has faced criticism for not adequately courting the party’s most conservative wing throughout this nominating contest. His campaign sought to step on Santorum’s message with a letter -- released in the middle of his rival’s speech -- from nine Massachusetts-based conservative activists.

The lengthy missive was written Dec. 30, 2011, and dealt mostly with Romney’s record as governor on such issues as marriage and abortion.

For example, it said, “We do not agree with the claims that Gov. Romney is responsible for tax payer funded abortion under the Massachusetts health care system. That blame lies solely on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who ruled in 1981 that the Massachusetts Constitution required payment for abortions for Medicaid-eligible women. In 1997, the Court reaffirmed its position that a state-subsidized plan must offer ‘medically necessary abortions.’ ”