Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says that Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama are “dividing this country” by playing the race card and using words like “y’all.”

CNN host Jim Acosta on Sunday asked if it was fair for Romney to complain about the tone of the campaign when he had run negative ads during the primary that called Santorum a “lightweight” and suggested that the former Pennsylvania senator was not “ready to be president.”

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“I think what he’s talking about is the tone of the Obama campaign, which is divisive,” Santorum explained. “To go out and do what [Obama’s] doing and divide this country, and he is, and it’s class warfare at its worst.”

“And then you saw Vice President Biden play the race card in Virginia,” the former candidate added, referring to Biden’s assertion to a group, which included many African Americans, that Romney’s pro-Wall Street policies would “put y’all back in chains.”

“Y’all?” Santorum exclaimed. “Y’all is y’all. And in a group — you know, I’ve been in groups like that and, you know, it’s very easy when you’re in a group of people that, you know, when you’re in the South, when you’re up in different areas of the country with different groups of people, you develop an affinity with the groups you’re speaking in front of. That’s what Vice President [Biden] was doing. He was trying to develop that affinity. And he did so in a very horrendous way, and he should apologize for it.”

“But it is exactly the tone of this campaign. Gov. Romney is like any other candidate: ‘You want to go after my record, you want to go after things I’ve said and done, fine.’ That’s not the complaint of the Romney campaign. The complaint of the Romney campaign — the legitimate complaint is that President Obama is trying to divide this country to win this election.”

Watch this video from CNN’s State of the Union, broadcast Aug. 19, 2012.

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