Romney Goes After Santorum on Budget

“Senator Santorum goes to Washington and calls himself a budget hawk, and after he’s been there a while, he says he’s no longer a budget hawk,” Mr. Romney said, his voice rising for emphasis as he looked out at the row of cameras before him. “Well, I am a budget hawk.”

As Mr. Santorum was greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd four hours away in Ohio’s coal country, he made no mention of his rival at all, a clear sign that the tables have turned — for now, at least — in the Republican nominating contest, leaving Mr. Romney scrambling to regain his command over the race.

While Mr. Romney may not know for weeks or even months whether he will win the nomination, his performance over the next seven days will most likely provide a telling signal about whether he can persuade the party at last to embrace his candidacy.

After a stretch in which Mr. Santorum’s focus on appealing to conservatives through social issues has dominated the campaign, Mr. Romney has two high-profile opportunities this week to steer the conversation back to the economy and defeating President Obama: a debate on Wednesday in Arizona followed by a speech on Friday in Michigan that his campaign is billing as a major policy address. Both states will hold their primaries next Tuesday.

There are few outward signs that panic has set in at the Romney campaign — the delegate-by-delegate chess game has only begun — but concern is palpable among Mr. Romney, his allies and Republican Party elders, many of whom are increasingly fretting aloud about the prospect that he may not be as electable as he seemed only weeks ago.

“It’s way too premature to be talking about something like that,” said Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a top supporter of Mr. Romney, when asked about the growing worries from some of his colleagues about the need to prepare for a backup Republican candidate. “He knew that this was going to be a long haul. He’s been through it before.”

But Mr. Romney has not been through this moment before, so far from persuading conservative activists that he has the strongest potential as a nominee to appeal to independent voters and defeat Mr. Obama.

“I wish this was over,“ Alex Triantafilou, the Republican Party chairman in Cincinnati, said in an interview Monday, adding that he was not taking sides but eager to avoid a protracted fight. “I’d rather air our attacks at the president.”

The Romney campaign has shed much of the bravado that was often on display last year when it focused on Mr. Obama and all but ignored its Republican rivals. (During a Chicago visit in May, aides to Mr. Romney sent leftover pizza to the Obama re-election office, just to make the campaign aware that they were on the president’s home turf.)

Mr. Romney had hoped to resume his confident posture against Mr. Obama with a Chicago speech on March 20, the day of the Illinois primary. But those plans are on hold, given that talk of the general election is all but forbidden now, and that Mr. Romney could still be battling Mr. Santorum.

For the next seven days, the campaign is intensely focused on Michigan, which has emerged as a pivotal state for Mr. Romney, whose candidacy would be devastated by a loss in his boyhood home. The campaign and a supportive “super PAC,” Restore Our Future, have been relentlessly attacking Mr. Santorum in television advertisements that paint him as a Washington insider and serial user of earmarks.

But Mr. Romney’s aides have also heightened their focus on Super Tuesday on March 6 and beyond. Acutely aware that Ohio could prove just as important as Michigan, the campaign has dispatched its Florida state director, Molly Donlin, here to Ohio to oversee the operation.

“A win in Michigan will definitely help in Ohio, but there will still need to be an Ohio campaign,” said Curt Steiner, a Republican strategist in Ohio who is supportive of Mr. Romney. But, he said, a loss in Michigan will necessitate a major effort: “It will signal to Romney supporters in Ohio that Ohio better be a firewall — or else.”

The campaign had something of a setback last week when a top Ohio official who had endorsed Mr. Romney in October, Attorney General Mike DeWine — a former two-term United States senator — switched his allegiance to Mr. Santorum. While Mr. Romney’s campaign shrugged that off in public, questioning how much support Mr. DeWine would bring with him, a top Ohio Republican said that behind the scenes, top donors and supporters were trying to keep others from following suit to quell an “uprising.“

Trip Gabriel contributed reporting from Steubenville, Ohio.

View the original article here