Rick Santorum: GOP Underdog Frontrunner

The good news for Rick Santorum is that the latest poll numbers from Gallup have him leading Mitt Romney by 10 points; the bad news is that respondents also think Romney, not Santorum, is the GOP's best shot at beating Barack Obama.

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According to February 15-19 polling data from Gallup, Santorum is polling ahead of Romney 36 percent to 26 percent among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Newt Gingrich has 13 percent support while Ron Paul has 11 percent. This is Santorum's first lead against Romney in a Gallup poll, and with a 10-point margin it's a quite large one at that. The meager 2- and 3-point leads from CNN and CBS News/The New York Times earlier in February are now being replaced by double-digit ones like today's from Gallup.

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But despite that good news for Santorum, he didn't do so well on the also-important question of "Which Republican candidate do you think has the better chance of beating Barack Obama in November?" 54 percent of Americans asked in a separate Gallup poll said named Romney is more electable one-on-one against Obama, while only 32 percent said the same of Santorum.  Per Gallup, "Overall, almost 3 in 10 Republicans in the USA Today/Gallup survey who believe that Romney has the best chance of beating Obama still say they would vote for Santorum over Romney."

RELATED: Polls Give Santorum Reason to Look Forward to Tomorrow

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Romney Duels With Santorum in Republican Debate

Outside the Mesa Arts Center, people gathered on Wednesday to watch the debate taking place inside. It was the final one on the Republican primary calendar. More Photos »

MESA, Ariz. — Mitt Romney challenged Rick Santorum’s credentials as a fiscal conservative in a fiercely combative debate on Wednesday, trying to redefine Mr. Santorum as part of the problem in Washington and regain his footing in the fight for the Republican presidential nomination.

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With the Arizona and Michigan primaries only six days away, followed quickly by a dozen more contests, Mr. Romney arrived here at a critical moment of his candidacy armed with a detailed indictment of Mr. Santorum’s record in Congress. Mr. Romney sought to dismantle his rival’s claim to be the authentic conservative in the race.

“While I was fighting to save the Olympics, you were fighting to save the ‘Bridge to Nowhere,’ ” Mr. Romney said, drawing upon a noted symbol of government excess to drive home his point against Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator.

It was Mr. Santorum’s first time in the cross hairs as a leading candidate, an uncomfortable position that has set back other Republican challengers. He did not recoil or wither under pressure, but he was placed on the defensive again and again, with Mr. Romney and Representative Ron Paul of Texas acting as a tag team in critiquing his record in Congress.

They criticized his earmarks, his vote for a provision that financed Planned Parenthood and his support of the No Child Left Behind law, President George W. Bush’s signature education plan now out of favor with conservatives. By the end of the night, the scrutiny seemed to wear on Mr. Santorum, who was taunted with boos when he said he had voted for the education program even though “it was against the principles I believed in.”

He explained that he had done so because of its importance to Mr. Bush, saying: “Sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader.” That line provided an opening for Mr. Paul, who declared: “He calls this a team sport. He has to go along to get along, and that’s the way the team plays, but that’s what the problem is with Washington.”

The landscape of the Republican presidential campaign — reshuffled yet again since the last time the candidates debated on Jan. 26 — came into sharp view here on stage at the Mesa Arts Center. It was the final scheduled Republican debate on the calendar, but unless a presumptive nominee emerges swiftly, debates could take place throughout the spring as the party’s nominating contest becomes a drawn-out fight for delegates.

If Mr. Romney came across as a persistent prosecutor, jumping in eagerly to make his points, Mr. Santorum was defensive yet did not lose his temper as others have in the hot seat.

From the start, it appeared that Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum had a shared goal: turning the night, and the race, into a two-man contest. But Newt Gingrich came alive yet again, not as an angry combatant but as what he described as a “cheerful” alternative, enthusiastically challenging the moderator, John King of CNN, and turning questions to his own purposes.

The candidates sat behind a table for only the second time in the long-running series of debates, rather than standing behind lecterns, which at times made them seem like squirmy schoolchildren scrunched into classroom desks.

The economy — the dominant issue to most voters — took a back seat to a host of other topics in the wide-ranging debate, which dwelled on social issues, immigration and the arcane world of Congressional voting records. Mr. Romney played up his status as the only candidate on the stage who had never served in Washington, but Mr. Santorum would not let his rival take credit for balancing the budget as governor of Massachusetts, which is required by state law.

“Don’t go around bragging about something you have to do,” Mr. Santorum said. “Michael Dukakis balanced the budget for 10 years. Does that make him qualified to be president of the United States? I don’t think so.”

Mr. Santorum parried the barbs from Mr. Paul as he has all year, often laughing and shaking his head. But the exchanges between him and Mr. Romney were sharper.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mr. Santorum told him at one point.

“Wait — wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. Wait!” Mr. Romney said, cutting in as Mr. Santorum attacked the Massachusetts health care plan that Mr. Romney signed into law.

Mr. Romney managed to bring before Republican primary voters an issue that has been a sore subject between Mr. Santorum and conservatives for years: his support in the 2004 Republican primary in Pennsylvania for Senator Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey, his conservative challenger.

Michael Barbaro contributed reporting.

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Santorum takes heavy fire in Arizona Republican debate

MESA, Arizona (Reuters) - Mitt Romney is fighting his way back into the driving seat in the Republican presidential race, putting in a strong debate performance in Arizona and gaining in polls against conservative rival Rick Santorum.

An aggressive Romney repeatedly put Santorum on the defensive in a CNN debate on Wednesday and attacked the former U.S. senator and staunch social conservative for supporting big-spending government programs.

Romney has also battled his way into a slight lead in a new poll in Michigan, which along with Arizona will hold a primary contest on February 28. Romney had trailed Santorum by as much as double digits a week ago in the Michigan race.

The pace of the Republican race quickens dramatically next month, with 22 state nominating contests in March, including 10 on "Super Tuesday" March 6.

"This debate will really give Romney some momentum heading into the Michigan primary," Republican strategist Ron Bonjean said. "Santorum clearly was having a hard time having to apologize and explain so many of his votes."

The debate was Santorum's first time in the political spotlight since charging into a national lead after winning three contests on February 7 in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado.

But his sometimes awkward defense of votes he cast in the Senate, including his claim that politics was a "team sport" and that he sometimes had to vote for bills that did not like, could hurt his support among conservatives tired of Washington politics-as-usual.

"There is always an excuse," rival Ron Paul said of Santorum's various explanations. "That's what the problem is with Washington," said Paul, a Texas congressman who described Santorum's fiscal conservatism as "fake."

The primary in Michigan, where Romney was born and raised and his father was an auto executive and popular governor, has become a must-win for the former Massachusetts governor and former head of a private equity group.

A Romney loss there would be crippling blow that would set off alarm bells among Republicans about his ability to win the allegiance of conservatives, ensuring a long and potentially draining battle for the nomination.

But a win in Michigan and Arizona would put Romney back in command in a race that has featured a series of conservative rivals who have risen to challenge him only to fall back into the pack.

Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, is the latest candidate to seriously contest the party's nomination to face Democratic President Barack Obama in a November 6 general election.

On Thursday, Romney will speak to a builders' group in Arizona before heading to Michigan for an evening rally of the conservative Tea Party movement. On Friday, he will address the Detroit Economic Club. Santorum is fund-raising in Texas on Thursday.

POLLS TIGHTEN

New polls in Michigan and Arizona on Wednesday showed Romney gaining ground on Santorum. He held a slight 2-point edge on Santorum in an NBC/Marist poll in Michigan, and a 16-point edge in an NBC/Marist poll in Arizona, where a CNN/Time poll earlier in the week gave him just a 4-point edge.

The broader campaign battleground in March could allow Romney to exercise his financial and organizational edge on his rivals, and put him in a strong position to knock them out and wrap up the race at least by April, if not earlier.

Santorum may have missed his chance at Wednesday's debate.

"Santorum needed a strong performance in the debate and he didn't get it," Republican strategist Ford O'Connell said. "All eyes were on him. He had an opening and he missed it."

A devout Catholic, Santorum is best known for conservative positions on religious freedoms, abortion and gay marriage, but Romney took aim at him frequently on Wednesday night as a big spender.

"I'm looking at his historic record - voting for raising the debt ceiling five different times without voting for compensating cuts," Romney said.

"Voting to fund Planned Parenthood, to expand the Department of Education. During his term in the Senate, spending grew by some 80 percent of the federal government," he said. Planned Parenthood provides abortion, birth control and other health services to women.

Former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented Georgia while he served in Congress, is hoping to rebound from his recent drop in the polls to reassert himself during some of the March contests in Southern states like Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

No other debates are scheduled in the Republican race, although more could be added if the contest stretches into April and beyond.

(Writing by John Whitesides; Editing by Alistair Bell and Paul Simao)

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Graham Not Sold on Obama's Christianity, Santorum Warned of Satan in 2008

Eric Gay/AP Photo

The 2012 race turned to God, Satan and religion when Franklin Graham said he's surer that Rick Santorum is a Christian than President Obama and a 2008 Santorum speech surfaced in which the top GOP candidate told a religious audience that Satan is attacking U.S. institutions.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, said on MSNBC Tuesday that he could not verify that President Obama is a Christian. "I just have to assume that he is," Graham said.

But he has no question about Rick Santorum. "His values are so clear on moral issues. No question about it. … I think he's a man of faith."

Santorum's faith was in the news for another reason, too. The Pennsylvania Republican said in 2008, two years after losing his Senate seat and four years before seeking the presidency, that Satan was attacking U.S. institutions in government and religion.

The comments, not before mentioned during the 2012 election cycle, were the lead item on the Drudge Report Tuesday. Santorum has surged to even or even ahead of Mitt Romney in opinion polls, including in Romney's home state of Michigan, where Republican voters cast their preference for the GOP nominee next Tuesday.

Santorum, speaking at the conservative Catholic Ave Maria University in Florida, praised the Catholic Bishop Samuel Aquila for pledging to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights and said the matter went beyond politics and was a symptom of Satan's reach in U.S. society.

"While we all see all this as a great political conflict in warfare between the Obama camp and the McCain camp and culture wars, what Bishop Aquila put his finger on and what I think, I suspect those of you who are here understand, this is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war," Santorum said in August of 2008.

"And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country, the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost 200 years, once America's preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers."

Santorum said Satan's reach in U.S. society has grown.

"He didn't have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition."

The Republican presidential contest that has so far focused on the economy has taken a definitive swing toward social issues with the emergency of Santorum as a major contender. And where Republicans and candidates had attacked President Obama for his stewardship of the economy, they today are focusing more on his social positions and even the religious underpinnings of his policy.

Even Mitt Romney, the Mormon front-runner, who has by and large shied away from including religion in his campaign, today argued that Obama has a " secular agenda."

Santorum has never been shy about his faith and its effect on his policy.

Rick Santorum went after President Obama in Ohio last week for "exercising his values and trumping the values of the Church," but less than two years ago, the candidate wasn't so opposed to letting theology into the presidency.

During a speech at American University in November 2010, Santorum told the College Republicans , "I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

Santorum went on to say, "It has allowed politicians to say, 'I am privately this way, but publicly that way.' "

Santorum spoke last week in regard to the president's controversial mandate requiring employers to provide insurance that offers co-pay-free birth control. Santorum argued that this imposed a way of thinking on religious people that ran counter to their beliefs.

Santorum continued on that vein this weekend , saying, "It is imposing his ideology on a group of people expressing their theology, their moral code, and saying the government will force you to do what your faith says is gravely wrong."

There have been exceptions to the rule.

Santorum has said that while he personally opposes contraception and believes that it contributes to societal degradation and "the whole sexual libertine idea," he would not seek to outlaw it as a policy matter. And he pledged in 2006 not to curb access to contraception.

Likewise with homosexuality, he has said he would not vote for a law to outlaw homosexual behavior. But Santorum opposes  the landmark Supreme Court decisions that overturned such laws on contraception in 1965 and homosexual behavior in 2003.

ABC's Sarah Parnass contributed to this report.

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Romney Faces Unexpected Challenge From Santorum in Michigan

Mitt Romney and an aide, Garrett Jackson, in Michigan on a bus, where a banner from a previous Romney campaign hangs.

NOVI, Mich. — This was supposed to be a state, at last, where Mitt Romney could coast. After all, he grew up here. His father, an automobile executive, had been the governor. And the last time there was a Republican presidential primary in Michigan, Mr. Romney won handily.

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Yet, with less than a week until Michigan Republicans vote and with polling suggesting that Rick Santorum is mounting a serious challenge, Mr. Romney finds himself urgently pouring resources into his home state — unveiling gauzy television ads aimed at reminding residents of his family roots and rolling out endorsements from a virtual who’s who in Lansing: the governor, a former Senate majority leader, the attorney general, a former attorney general, and on and on.

While Mr. Romney’s comments against the federal bailout of the auto industry have drawn particular attention in Michigan, his troubles among Republican voters here appear to have less to do with his views on the bailout — which plenty of them say they were not keen on either — than with a shifting political landscape in a changing state and a fading, and in some cases tattered, emotional bond to the Romney name.

“Sure, I’d love to be able to say that our president is from Michigan, but that’s not all that matters to me,” said Cindy Minier, a Republican Party chairwoman from Presque Isle County, who said she was leaning toward Newt Gingrich or, given a second choice, Mr. Santorum. “When it comes right down to it, I just don’t feel that Romney is a real conservative — not a real, true one.”

It is hard to remember that in 2008, Michigan voters perceived Mr. Romney as the more conservative Republican beside Senator John McCain of Arizona, who ultimately won the nomination. This time, of course, others are claiming that mantle. Meanwhile, Michigan is changing too, with its long-struggling economy in the uncertain midst of transition, the emergence of Tea Party groups and conservatives who helped Republicans win a wave of elections in 2010, and an ever-growing generational split between those for whom 1950s- and 1960s-era images of Mitt Romney with his father still stir nostalgia and younger people with blurry memories of Gov. George W. Romney, or none at all.

“It’s a joke,” Randy Bishop, 54 and a Tea Party organizer, said of Mr. Romney’s emphasis on his connections to Michigan. “He left after high school, became the governor of Massachusetts and never looked back.”

Mr. Bishop criticized Mr. Romney for the health care insurance law he supported in Massachusetts, portrayed him as a “moderate in lockstep with the establishment folks” and described Michigan’s economy as a far cry from the manufacturing capital over which Mr. Romney’s father presided. Mr. Bishop said he would vote for Mr. Santorum.

In a way, much of Michigan is only beginning to meet Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania. Even some supporters here acknowledged that they had not given particular attention to him until this month, when he won a series of races elsewhere. Michigan’s influential Right to Life political action committee said it would not endorse any one Republican over the others; all oppose abortion, it says. But Mr. Santorum drew praise from voters who said their evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic faith drove their political outlook, particularly from voters in the state’s western section and rural northern stretches.

Plenty of Republicans — even some of Mr. Santorum’s supporters — said they believed that Mr. Romney would ultimately win here, given a flood of advertisements and support from influential Republican leaders. Mr. Romney certainly has a base of loyal supporters, some of whom seemed to view the outcome of Michigan’s primary as carrying a special, personal weight, and the notion that Mr. Romney might actually be in trouble here as reason to redouble their efforts now.

“His family made a substantial effect on our state, and you just can’t take that away from him,” said Al Heilman, 76, who said he still had a photograph socked away somewhere of himself meeting Mr. Romney’s father decades ago.

Mr. Heilman, a Republican chairman from Kalamazoo County in the southwestern part of the state, said some people seem to want to penalize Mr. Romney for his business experience. “I don’t understand people who kick people in the shins because they’ve been successful — profits make the world go around,” Mr. Heilman, who retired after running a confections and nuts business, said. “Look, we’re on a dive, and this is the time for a true businessman like Mitt Romney who can turn around the country.”

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Santorum, Romney Even in Popularity While Gingrich Fades to a New Low

Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have battled essentially to parity in basic popularity, far outpacing Newt Gingrich, who's faded to a new low in the 2012 election cycle. But Santorum's arc flattened this week, underscoring a potentially difficult battle ahead.

Within their party, 65 percent of Republicans express a favorable opinion of Romney overall, and about as many, 61 percent, hold a positive view of Santorum, levels that suggest many party regulars ultimately would accept either candidate as their nominee.

Gingrich, maybe not: He's dropped to 45 percent favorability within the GOP in this ABC News/Washington Post poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. That's down by 10 points in the past month and by 15 points from Gingrich's best, in November and December.

Still Santorum, after advancing earlier this month, saw his ratings flatten overall this week, with a 10-point increase in unfavorable views among Americans who describe themselves as "very" conservative. It's still among his best groups, though, and one in which he continues to lead Romney.

Santorum and Romney alike, moreover, remain well below the levels of popularity - both within their own party and among all Americans, including independents - that had been attained by this point in the 2008 campaign by eventual nominees John McCain and Barack Obama.

McCain and Obama both had broken through the 70-point favorability barrier in their own parties by January 2008, and were at or over 60 percent among political independents. Santorum, and Romney, by contrast, have just 33 percent favorable ratings from independents now.

Among all adults, while they're essentially tied in overall favorability, at 37 and 36 percent, respectively, Romney's unfavorable ratings exceed Santorum's by 10 points, 44 percent vs. 34 percent - meaning that, unlike McCain and Obama last time, neither is clearly above water. (More people have yet to form an opinion of Santorum - 30 percent, vs. 19 percent for Romney.)

The Republican contenders meet tonight for their 20 th debate, their first since Jan. 26, a face-off that preceded Santorum's surge and Gingrich's fade. It's their last debate before the Arizona and Michigan primaries next Tuesday.

TREND - The most striking recent trend, reported last week, was Santorum's rise in favorability among Republicans, from 48 percent in early January to 61 percent, marking his emergence as the latest non-Romney alternative after winning the Colorado and Minnesota GOP caucuses and the Missouri beauty contest primary.

This week, as noted, that surge stalled. Among very conservatives, Santorum had a 67-13 percent favorable-unfavorable rating last week; it's 61-23 percent now. Among conservative Republicans, last week Santorum had a 69-12 percent score; this week, 66-19 percent.

Santorum still does better than Romney's 52-38 percent among very conservatives. Among conservative Republicans, though, they're very similarly rated, with Romney at 69-23 percent.

A concern for Romney is his erratic trend line among independents. After essentially breaking even in popularity with these customary swing voters last week (37-40 percent), he's at a 14-point disadvantage this week (33-47 percent), halfway back to his January level. Santorum's got challenges in this key group too, with a 33-38 percent favorability rating.

Whatever their difficulties, both Santorum and Romney are in enviable positions compared with Gingrich. More than twice as many Americans now see him unfavorably as favorably, and a third have a "strongly" negative view of him, about four times his strongly positive score.

Gingrich only manages parity among Republicans (45-42 percent) and among very conservatives (43-48 percent), with a 15-point increase in unfavorable ratings in that group since late January. Among conservative Republicans he's got a 50-37 percent differential, but that's vastly lower than his 64-27 percent score in January, as well as far behind Santorum and Romney alike.

METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by landline and cell phone Feb. 15-19, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,012 adults. Results have a margin of sampling error of 3.5 points. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by SSRS/Social Science Research Solutions of Media, Pa.

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The Caucus: Debate Fact Check: Santorum Waffles on Title X

Rick Santorum may have had a “I voted for it before I voted against it” moment Wednesday night.

In response to an assertion by Mr. Paul that he had voted to fund Planned Parenthood, Mr. Santorum said: “As Congressman Paul knows, I opposed Title X funding. I’ve always opposed Title X funding.” He quickly added, “But it’s included in a large appropriation bill that includes a whole host of other things.” Here the audience started to boo.

Technically, Mr. Santorum was saying that he opposed Title X funding — not that he voted against it — but he was implying that he had voted against it. Then when he said it was included in a larger bill, the audience cried foul.

Title X, by the way, is the major funding vehicle for family planning programs. It was signed into law in 1970 by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who declared, “Contraception for all.”

Mr. Santorum said that because Title X “was always pushed through,” he countered by pushing for Title X to provide funding for abstinence programs, saying they “actually work in keeping children from being sexually active instead of facilitating children from being sexually active.”

Finally, he got around to an admission: “Yes, I — I admit I voted for large appropriation bills and there were things in there I didn’t like.”

His bottom line, he said, is that as president, “I will defund Planned Parenthood; I will not sign any appropriation bill that funds Planned Parenthood.”

Mr. Santorum’s recent statements are likely to add to the confusion about his stance on the issue. Since 2006, he has cited his support for Title X to show that he is not opposed to funding for contraception.

As recently as last week, on “CBS This Morning,” Rick Santorum told the host, Charlie Rose, that he has no problems with federal funds for contraceptives, saying that he voted for Title X funds in the Senate.

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Santorum Denies Comparing Obama to Hitler

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The Caucus: Santorum Steps Up Critique of Obama's Worldview

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio — Visiting coal country, Rick Santorum repeated criticisms of President Obama‘s pro-environmental “theology” and women’s health mandates that caused a dust-up over the weekend. He did not rescind one bit of his earlier remarks, as he sought support as a blue-collar native of neighboring Pennsylvania, here in a state that leans to the right in Republican primaries.

Mr. Santorum enjoys a lead over Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in state polls in Ohio, which votes on March 6, a week after Michigan, where he is vying closely with Mr. Romney and where he was headed on Monday afternoon for three more rallies.

Mr. Santorum was applauded for reiterating his critique of Mr. Obama’s health overhaul that requires insurance plans to cover prenatal screenings. The issue boiled over earlier when he suggested such screenings were used to “cull” fetuses with birth defects.

His objection, he explained, was to amniocentesis. The procedures “are done by and large to find out late in pregnancy whether the child in the womb has a disability,’’ Mr. Santorum said. “And as we all know, 90 percent of Down syndrome children in this country are aborted once the mother and father find out that child is going to be less than what they were expecting.’’

He charged that the president’s health care overhaul was heading toward “a brave new world” in which doctors would be pressured to make decisions based on cost, not the interests of the patient. “Let’s take a child who is high cost and who the world, particularly, unfortunately, the medical profession increasingly is looking at as less utility, less value than others in society,’’ he said. “‘I don’t want to see this patient. This is going to be a real cost for me. I’m going to get nailed on this one, so let’s minimally treat, let’s not treat all because it’s going to be such a cost to the system.’ That’s happening now, folks.’’

Mr. Santorum also revisited his charge that Mr. Obama was motivated by “a phony theology,’’ which he said was criticized by some “of our less-than erudite members of the national press corps.’’

He explained he was referring to the president’s embrace of “radical environmentalism” that valued all species equally.

That attitude, he said, was responsible for thwarting energy development including in coal country, although he also excoriated the president’s veto of a pipeline from Canada.

Global warming, he said, “is not climate science, it is political science,’’ adding, “affordable low-cost energy really drove this country.’’

“Ladies and gentlemen,’’ he said, “We need somebody who comes from the coal fields, who comes from the steel mills.’’

Mr. Santorum, never a natural speech-maker, has become more concise and attuned to the emotions of his crowd. More than 300 turned out to a catering hall here and he seemed to read their mood well.

“This guy in a sweater vest traipsing in a worn pickup truck in Iowa a couple of months ago with nobody paying attention to us,’’ he said, “has a message that is your message.’’

“Ohio is going to make a huge difference,’’ he told them. “You have the opportunity here to stand up and shout loudly across this country that you want a true conservative.’’

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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.

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Santorum Likens Election to World War II

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Santorum Likens 2012 Election to World War II

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Santorum Defends Remarks on Obama and Public Schools

But a number of his statements over the weekend drew criticism, illustrating one of the perils of political success: the same acclaim that brings confidence also brings greatly increased scrutiny.

Mr. Santorum, who is surging in national polls, accused President Obama of “a phony theology,” likened public schools to “factories” and criticized prenatal testing as a way of encouraging society to “cull the ranks of the disabled.”

As he emerges as a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Santorum is moving from a generic alternative to Mitt Romney to a specific brand of conservative who will be known and judged by his own views. All weekend, he was forced to explain and defend his more provocative remarks, maintaining that some were distorted in the echo chamber of the Internet and the news media.

Keith Nahigian, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Michele Bachmann, another candidate whose provocative remarks drew scrutiny when she was briefly atop the polls, said Mr. Santorum now stood to have his statements parsed far more closely and to become fodder for other Republicans, as well as for Democrats.

If Mr. Santorum were to win the Michigan primary on Feb. 28 and Ohio on March 6 — two states where polls suggest that he has a chance of defeating Mr. Romney — “he could very easily have a path to the nomination,” Mr. Nahigian said. “Here we are in the ninth inning, and people don’t know who he is.”

Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist not affiliated with any of the candidates, said, “Santorum is now being tested — not just his position on issues, it’s his stability, his maturity that is being tested.”

On Saturday in Ohio, Mr. Santorum described the “president’s agenda” as being “about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible.”

After a spokesman for the Obama campaign called it “the latest low,” Mr. Santorum told reporters he was not suggesting that Mr. Obama was not a Christian.

“Obviously, as we all know in the Christian church, there are a lot of different stripes of Christianity,” Mr. Santorum said. “I’m just saying he’s imposing his values on the church, and I think that’s wrong.”

Questioned further about the remark on Sunday, Mr. Santorum said he had meant that Mr. Obama’s worldview placed care of the earth and natural resources above human needs.

“The earth is not the objective,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS News. “Man is the objective, and I think that a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.”

At another point on Saturday, Mr. Santorum repeated his skepticism about the government’s role in public education. He harked back to a pre-industrial 19th century when many Americans, including presidents, home-schooled their children.

The public school, Mr. Santorum said, arose “when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools.”

Education reformers on both the left and right criticize the uniformity of instruction that dates from mass public education. But Mr. Santorum, who home-schooled some of his own children, makes many education advocates nervous because he seems to want to substantially scale back or cancel federal and state guidelines on standards and equality of access.

Mr. Santorum also criticized Mr. Obama’s health care law over the weekend, in part because it requires insurance plans to offer free prenatal testing. “Free prenatal testing,” he said, “ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

“That, too, is part of Obamacare, another hidden message as to what President Obama thinks of those who are less able than the elites who want to govern our country,” Mr. Santorum said.

The remarks might win Mr. Santorum further support from evangelical Christians and Catholics who have been galvanized by the Catholic Church’s opposition to the president’s insistence that religious-affiliated hospitals and schools offer health plans with free contraception.

But the issue also risks pushing away voters, especially women, who find in such stances an assault on women’s control over their own health decisions. Mr. Santorum has said that as a Catholic, he opposes contraception.

On Sunday, Mr. Santorum spoke to more than 3,000 people at First Redeemer Church here, and offered another statement that could prove controversial.

In a long analogy, he compared the threat to Americans’ freedom under Mr. Obama to the “great peril” of World War II and likened the present moment to the isolationist period when Americans were complacent about “this guy over in Europe.” Unlike the challenge for the “greatest generation,” Mr. Santorum said, there is no “cataclysmic event” to rally around.

In his string of provocative remarks, some strategists see calibration. “Santorum knows exactly what he is saying and doing it for a reason,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a strategist for President George W. Bush’s campaigns. “Santorum is too smart and too disciplined for his comments to be mistakes.”

His statements also might work by further eclipsing Newt Gingrich, his main rival for conservatives seeking an alternative to Mr. Romney.

But some say there is a risk for him in the new scrutiny.

“You get under the glare of that light,” Mr. Castellanos said, and “a lot of people catch on fire.”

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FiveThirtyEight: Santorum and the Emphasis on Social Issues

Last week, I made the case for why the “electability gap” between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney might not be all that large. But there’s a contrary point to consider, one that would not necessarily work in Mr. Santorum’s favor.

One of the factors that our forecasting model uses in conjunction with presidential approval ratings and economic forecasts is a score to indicate the ideological disposition of the opposition candidate. Historically, candidates whose issue positions are closer to the center of the electorate tend to do a little bit better than the fundamentals would dictate; those who are closer to the extremes do somewhat worse.

There are various objective ways to measure candidate ideology, and the different systems tend to be in fairly strong agreement for Mr. Romney. He is neither a moderate nor is he extremely conservative, according to these ratings, but somewhere in between.

The ratings for Mr. Santorum, however, are all over the map. Without going into too much detail into how each system is calculated, there are some that deliberately place more emphasis on economic policy and others that weight economic policy and social policy more equally.

In the economically driven systems, Mr. Santorum rates as essentially no more conservative than Mr. Romney. But he is substantially more conservative in the systems that also consider his social views. This is particularly true for the system that directly measures voter perceptions about the candidates from surveys. For the time being, Mr. Santorum is seen by voters as being quite conservative indeed, and Mr. Romney less so.

So if the general election is primarily about economic policy, Mr. Santorum may not be at much of a disadvantage to Mr. Romney. In fact, a case can be made that he’d be a little stronger than Mr. Romney based on Electoral College considerations. However, the more that social policy is emphasized, the more the electability gap could grow.

The ideology scores that the model uses, as I’ve mentioned, are somewhat deliberately slanted toward economic policy. There are several good reasons for this. First, the economy remains in pretty bad shape, although it is improving. Second, voters routinely indicate in surveys that they are much more concerned with economic issues than social ones. Third, the president probably has less influence on social policy than on economic policy. Social policy is often determined more through the courts and at the state level than through the executive branch.

To some extent, the emphasis that voters and the news media will place on these issues is likely to be dictated by economic conditions. Frankly, if issues like gay marriage and contraception are making headlines — rather than unemployment or gas prices or the European debt crisis — that will probably be a bullish sign for President Obama, since there is more bandwidth available to cover these issues when the economy is improving.

It is also true, though, that the amount of emphasis placed on economic issues versus social policy may be influenced by the Republicans’ choice of a nominee. If Mr. Santorum is picked, there will probably be relatively more coverage of social policy — both because he tends to place more emphasis on social issues himself, and also because the news media tends to focus on his social policy positions.

There are already some indications of this. When Mr. Santorum’s name is mentioned in news coverage, it tends to be associated with social issues more often than economic ones. The opposite is true for Mr. Romney.

I used Lexis-Nexis, a database of news articles, to look up how often each candidate’s name was mentioned in conjunction with various keywords related to economic and social policy. Examples of social policy keywords include “abortion,” “gay marriage,” “values” and “evangelical.” Examples of economic policy keywords are “jobs,” “taxes,” “Medicare” and “deficit.”

In order to ensure that the usage of these terms was in context, my search required that they were used within 15 words of the candidate’s last name. I then compared the number of “hits” to how many articles used the candidate’s last name in any context from Jan. 1 through Feb. 19.

For instance, the terms “birth control” or “contraception” were used in conjunction with Mr. Santorum’s name in 1,302 articles. There were a total of 31,548 articles that used Mr. Santorum’s name in any context during this period, which means that about 4 percent the articles about Mr. Santorum covered these issues.

By contrast, the same terms were used 1,049 times in conjunction with Mr. Romney’s name out of 55,906 articles about Mr. Romney. That means that about 2 percent of the articles about Mr. Romney covered his position on birth control — about half the frequency as for Mr. Santorum.

Indeed, this pattern was typical. Mr. Santorum’s name was used more commonly in conjunction with 12 of the 15 social policy keywords; the exceptions were “guns” (or “Second Amendment”), “immigration” and “Mormon.”

However, Mr. Romney name was used more commonly in conjunction with all 15 of the economic keywords.

One of the biggest discrepancies was for the keywords “sex” and “sexuality”; those terms were used about three times more often in conjunction with Mr. Santorum’s name than Mr. Romney’s, adjusting for the overall amount of news coverage that each candidate received.

At the other end of the spectrum were a set of three keywords that I grouped together in the search: “wealth,” “wealthy” and “rich”. These were used about three and a half times more often in conjunction with Mr. Romney’s name than Mr. Santorum’s.

So if you want a somewhat jaundiced view of the associations that the news media tends to make disproportionately often with each candidate, it is this: Mr. Romney and the term “rich,” Mr. Santorum and the term “sex”.

If you group all of the terms together, social policy keywords were used about 80 percent more often than economic policy keywords in discussions of Mr. Santorum. By contrast, economic policy keywords were used 50 percent more often than social policy keywords in articles about Mr. Romney.

Does this reflect news media bias of some kind — or is it a fair reflection of the emphasis that the candidates tend to place on these issues themselves?

That is not an easy question to address, but here is one approach. I looked up how often each of the candidates used the keywords on the “issues” sections of their respective campaign Web sites.

Both candidates used the economic keywords more often than the social keywords on their Web sites, but the disparity was greater in Mr. Romney’s case.

Mr. Romney’s Web site used one of the economic policy keywords in 217 instances and one of the social policy keywords 60 times, a ratio of about 3.6 to 1. By contrast, Mr. Santorum’s Web site used the economic keywords 190 times but the social keywords 128 times, a ratio of 1.5 to 1.

So the answer here is somewhat complicated. For both candidates, the news media coverage placed more emphasis on social issues than the candidates did themselves. I would need to think more carefully about the research design before conclusively labeling this a form of bias, but that is certainly one interpretation: the news media tend to place more emphasis on social issues than the candidates do — and probably also than most voters profess to, given how much economic issues dominate among voters across the political spectrum when they are asked to identify which issues are most important to them.

However, to the extent there is bias in the news media coverage, it is at least somewhat proportional to the respective stances of the candidates. Mr. Santorum does tend to place more emphasis on social issues than Mr. Romney — if not as much as the news media seem to think he does.

Still, this could put Mr. Santorum at a disadvantage. If he is the nominee, the coverage might tend to place more emphasis on social policy, where his views are further removed from those of the median voter.

It should be mentioned, however, that Mr. Romney is not as much of a social moderate as he is sometimes described — at least based on his current issue positions. In fact, if you look at public statements that Mr. Romney has made recently, they are nearly as conservative as Mr. Santorum’s on social issues: slightly less so on issues like gay rights, but slightly more so on others like immigration.

Some of this disconnect, of course, is because Mr. Romney’s positions on some social issues were formerly more moderate when he was running for office in Massachusetts. It may also be because of Mr. Romney’s tone: he is somewhat less strident than Mr. Santorum on social issues, even though they don’t differ very much when you examine their actual policy positions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Romney will probably have an easier time maintaining a focus on economic policy if he gets to the general election. Although the electability question between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum is debatable, that is a point in Mr. Romney’s favor.

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The Caucus: Debate Looms as a Critical Moment for Santorum

The Republican presidential debates have proved critical for just about every candidate in the race — disastrous for some and essential for others.

Now it is Rick Santorum’s turn.

On Wednesday, the four remaining contenders for the right to challenge President Obama will meet again under the glare of the television lights, and under the scrutiny of a nation trying to understand where the Republican contest is headed.

The face-off, sponsored by CNN and held in Arizona, one of two states to hold primaries on Feb. 28, will be important for each of the candidates. But none more so than Mr. Santorum, who is suddenly being taken seriously as a threat to Mitt Romney.

It is the first debate since Mr. Santorum swept contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri two weeks ago, and it comes as he is under more scrutiny for his background and positions, including his opposition to many prenatal tests and his assertion on Saturday that the government’s role in education is “anachronistic.”

Despite moving to the top of four national polls and several state ones, Mr. Santorum remains a long shot to prevent the well-financed, well-organized Mr. Romney from winning the nomination.

Wednesday’s debate could change that dynamic. A strong performance by Mr. Santorum, or a particularly weak one by Mr. Romney, could ensure a shocking upset in Michigan, the other state that will vote a week from Tuesday. If that happens, the nomination could slip from Mr. Romney’s grasp.

Last year, in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses, Rick Perry’s debate performances knocked him out of contention. In South Carolina, Newt Gingrich used two debates to become a serious threat to Mr. Romney. A week later, Mr. Romney reclaimed his position by putting Mr. Gingrich in his place in two Florida debates.

But the task for Mr. Santorum is not easy. Here are five things that he must do if he wants to emerge from the debate with momentum on his side:

Focus on Health Care

Senior Republican strategists say Mr. Santorum’s most aggressive moments in the debates so far have been when he criticizes Mr. Romney’s health care plan as governor of Massachusetts. He has been relentless in accusing Mr. Romney of being the inspiration for Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul. During one debate in Florida, he had Mr. Romney stammering. If he can do that again, it will be a good moment for him.

Look Presidential

When Mr. Santorum was at 2 percent in the national polls and hardly seemed to be a threat, he could afford to come across a bit like a fringe candidate. He cannot anymore. Voters in Arizona, Michigan and 11 Super Tuesday states will be watching closely on Wednesday, and they will be trying to determine whether they can picture him in the Oval Office.

Mr. Santorum will no doubt try to rise above the mudslinging that has characterized much of the race, in part as a way of conveying that presidential quality. But Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney will be doing everything they can to keep him engaged.

Rattle Romney

One of Mr. Romney’s great strengths throughout most of the debates, and for much of 2011, was his calm, cool demeanor. He rarely got rattled and conveyed a sense of stature that voters tend to like. But there have been times when his rivals have gotten under his skin, and those have tended to be his worst moments. Mr. Perry did it on immigration in an early debate. And Mr. Gingrich did it on taxes and Bain Capital in South Carolina.

The question for Mr. Santorum is whether he can find a way to do it without coming across as mean. One of Mr. Santorum’s strengths with voters is that he remains likable. If he can get Mr. Romney to lose his cool without seeming like a bully, it will help him in the coming primaries.

Be Authentic

If elections are about presenting voters with contrasts, this may be Mr. Santorum’s ace in the hole. With Mr. Romney sometimes seeming calculating about his positions, Mr. Santorum seems that much more real. But it is easy to be authentic when you are at the bottom of the pack, with no one thinking you can actually win. The challenge for Mr. Santorum is to make sure that the possibility of success does not make him come across as somehow less genuine — like a typical politician.

Avoid Gingrich and Paul

Most of the focus on Wednesday will be on the matchup between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum. But the two other candidates, including Ron Paul, will be on the stage, and they will be eager to knock Mr. Santorum down as well. Mr. Gingrich, in particular, has a sharp wit and an ability to harness the enthusiasm of the audience. If Mr. Santorum is not careful, it could be Mr. Gingrich who sets a trap for him.

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The Caucus: Santorum Defends Comments on Obama and Education

2:58 p.m. | Updated Rick Santorum on Sunday tried to clarify his comment that President Obama subscribed to a “phony theology,” saying he was referring not to the president’s faith but to his view of man’s relationship to the world.

It was during a campaign stop in Ohio on Saturday that Mr. Santorum described what he called the “phony theology” of Mr. Obama’s agenda.

“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a theology.”

On Sunday, Robert Gibbs, a political adviser to President Obama, criticized such attacks on “character and faith.”

“I can’t help but think that those remarks are well over the line. It’s wrong. It’s destructive,” Mr. Gibbs said on the ABC News program “This Week,” adding that it reflected the “nastiness, divisiveness, ugliness” and distortions of a hard-fought Republican nominating process.

Mr. Santorum, at another appearance on Saturday, in Columbus, Ohio, called the idea of schools being run by the federal government or by state governments “anachronistic.” Mr. Santorum did not say public schools were a bad idea, and he said that there was a role for government help in education.

“Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America?” he said. “Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”

“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly — much less that the state government should be running schools — is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

Asked about those remarks on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Santorum, who with his wife has home-schooled their children, remained adamant on Sunday.

While he said he did not oppose government financing of schools, Mr. Santorum said that “public education should be a dynamic process that’s locally run.”

“I think the parent should be in charge,” he added, “working with the local school district to try to design an educational environment for each child that optimizes their potential.”

Mr. Santorum also defended his criticism of a requirement in the president’s health-care policy that insurance companies to cover prenatal testing. He had said earlier that the policy was included to save money “because free prenatal testing ends up in more abortions and therefore less care that has to be done, because we cull the ranks of the disabled in our society.”

The former Pennsylvania senator has a 3-year-old daughter, Bella, with a serious chromosomal disorder, and he said that doctors who detect such a condition before birth typically recommend abortion.

Asked whether he was suggesting that Mr. Obama lacked sympathy for the disabled, Mr. Santorum did not back down, saying, “I think the president has a very bad record on the issue of abortion and children who are disabled.”

One of Mr. Santorum’s rivals for the Republican nomination, Representative Ron Paul of Texas, scoffed at Mr. Santorum on Sunday for focusing on social issues like abortion and contraception – and for believing that he could defeat Mr. Obama.

“Well, I don’t see how that’s possible,” Mr. Paul said on the CNN program “State of the Union.”

“And this whole idea about talking about the social issues and who is going to pay for birth control pills,” Mr. Paul said. “I’m worried about undermining our civil liberties, the constant wars going on, the debt of $16 trillion. And they are worried about birth control pills?”

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In Detroit, Santorum Defends Opposition to Auto Bailout

Mr. Santorum, who is locked in a tight Michigan primary race with Mr. Romney, argued in a speech to the Detroit Economic Club that Mr. Romney was inconsistent for supporting the Wall Street bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, while objecting to billions of dollars in federal loans to the auto industry.

“Governor Romney supported the bailout of Wall Street and decided not to support the bailout of Detroit,” Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, said. “My feeling was that we should not support — the government should not be involved in bailouts, period. I think that’s a much more consistent position.”

In response, the Romney campaign said that Mr. Santorum had once defended a congressman who voted for TARP by saying the congressman’s vote was “the wrong decision, but I don’t think it was an unreasonable decision.”

A new Detroit News poll showed Mr. Santorum leading Mr. Romney by four percentage points in Michigan, which was within the poll’s margin of error. Mr. Romney needs a victory in the Feb. 28 primary to regain momentum after Mr. Santorum unexpectedly swept three contests on Feb. 7.

The battle for Michigan will soon be evident on the airwaves. On Thursday, a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Santorum reserved nearly $700,000 in television time for commercials that are to begin Friday. The group, the Red, White and Blue Fund, is stepping in where Mr. Santorum’s campaign has had a minimal presence, committing only $40,000 to advertising in Michigan.

But that increase in spending will not come close to matching the total number of advertisements supporting Mr. Romney. His campaign has reserved more than $800,000 in airtime, and the pro-Romney super PAC has spent more than $650,000 on television commercials in the state.

Both candidates, recognizing the political power of labor unions here, sought on Thursday to tone down some of their anti-union comments. Mr. Romney said during a visit to Monroe that unions play an “important role,” but defended so-called right-to-work laws. Mr. Santorum said during his address here that private-sector unions were a “legitimate” part of the economy.

But Mr. Santorum drew a distinction with public-employee unions, which he said had an unfair advantage because they bargain not with business owners representing shareholder interests, but with politicians trawling for votes and handling taxpayer money. “I have no problem with private-sector unions,” he said, adding, “I don’t feel quite as warm and fuzzy about public-sector unions.”

If either man wins the Republican nomination, his opposition to the auto industry bailout will be seen as a hurdle to winning Michigan, a critical swing state, in the general election. The auto bailout, which was begun during the Bush administration and continued by President Obama, is now widely seen as successful, and as if to emphasize that point to the candidates, General Motors on Thursday reported a quarterly profit of $472 million.

Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney both say they favored a managed bankruptcy — which ultimately happened — but without the government loans. They argue that such a process would have allowed the companies to emerge at least as healthy, if not healthier, as they did from the bailout.

But many industry analysts say that the huge amounts of money required to save the companies was available only through the government; banks and other private sources of capital were too weakened by the economic crisis to provide loans on anywhere near the scale needed.

“These companies were hemorrhaging cash on a daily basis into the millions and millions of dollars; credit was not easily accessible from almost any of the markets, and so I don’t know that they would have survived,” said Gary Corbin, managing director of business development in Michigan for Accenture, the consulting firm. For every job lost at one of the big car companies, he said, 6 to 10 other jobs would have also been lost across the United States in a ripple effect.

“It was a huge catastrophe just about to happen,” he said.

In his speech, Mr. Santorum laid most of the blame for the bailouts not with Mr. Obama but with George W. Bush, a rare departure from the Republican candidates’ nonstop assault on Mr. Obama’s policies.

“President Obama was just following suit,” he said. “President Bush set the precedent, and it was the wrong precedent.”

Mr. Santorum also said that he favored income inequality because some people contribute more to society than others. While also emphasizing that he favors “equality of opportunity,” he added: “There is income inequality in America. There always has been and hopefully, and I do say that, there always will be. Why? Because people rise to different levels of success based on what they contribute to society and to the marketplace, and that’s as it should be.”

He also made light of the release on Wednesday night of his recent income tax returns, noting that he had paid roughly double the effective tax rate of Mr. Romney, who made far more money.

“Look, I do my own taxes,” Mr. Santorum said. “Heck, Romney paid half the tax rate I did, so obviously he doesn’t do his own taxes. Maybe I should hire an accountant in the future.”

Jeremy W. Peters contributed reporting from New York, and Ashley Parker from Monroe, Mich.

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Romney Losing Some Michigan Support to Santorum

Returning to the state for a business roundtable and a rally Wednesday evening for the first time since November, Mr. Romney, who grew up the son of an auto executive turned governor of Michigan, landed here to find a tightening race in his home state, where Rick Santorum is leading in many polls less than two weeks from the primary.

In a race that has been defined by fits of momentum from the various candidates, Michigan now represents a critical proving ground for the remaining Republicans, but particularly for Mr. Romney.

Mr. Romney’s father, George Romney, is still fondly remembered here from his time as governor, and Mr. Romney won the state by nine percentage points in 2008. His aides liked to crow that he “found his voice” here four years ago. A loss could prove devastating at worst, and embarrassing at the very least.

And Mr. Santorum, who is still riding a wave of momentum from his triple victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri last week, starts campaigning in Michigan on Thursday to persuade reluctant Republican voters that he has what it takes to beat Mr. Romney — as well as President Obama in November.

There are few reliable polls in the state, but strategists for both campaigns say the race will be intensely competitive despite Mr. Romney’s Michigan ties. His campaign released a list on Wednesday of 129 local officials in Michigan who had endorsed Mr. Romney, which aides said was part of a strategy to showcase the breadth and depth of his support across the state. The governor, Rick Snyder, plans to endorse Mr. Romney at an event on Thursday.

“When you come out of Michigan, a Rust Belt state, you have a lot of momentum going into Super Tuesday,” said Robert Schostak, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

“Social conservatives might relate strongly to Rick Santorum,” he said. “Newt Gingrich relates well across the state. Ron Paul has his pockets. And Mitt Romney has considerable name recognition here.”

Despite Mr. Romney’s deep advantages in the state, the forces that have reshaped the Republican Party across the country are also alive in Michigan. The state is not only drastically different from the place his father led as a three-term governor a half-century ago, but it has even changed significantly from five years ago this week, when Mr. Romney announced his first presidential bid at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

The populist sentiment that has propelled the Tea Party movement nationally is also coursing through Michigan politics. Mr. Santorum, who is heavily promoting his working-class background, is hoping to tap into those well-organized activists, along with a heavily Catholic and evangelical population in the Republican electorate. That combination could help him overcome the reservoir of good will for Mr. Romney.

The strength of the Tea Party movement, which demonstrated its clout during the 2010 midterm elections, will be tested in the Feb. 28 primary. Mr. Santorum’s conservatism and working-class roots are a natural fit for Tea Party activists, but Mr. Romney is not ceding this ground.

“I think Romney is facing an uphill battle with Tea Party groups,” said Wendy Day, the president of Common Sense in Government, a statewide Tea Party organization with a 2,500-member e-mail list. “The challenge I have with Romney is that his unrepentant attitude toward the health care issue is very difficult to swallow.”

And Jeff McQueen of Rochester, who is involved with several Tea Party groups throughout the state, said that even though Tea Partiers were generally “excited to see Romney moving out of the lead poll position,” that would not necessarily translate into huge support for Mr. Santorum.

“Santorum is getting a lot of support because he’s not Romney,” Mr. McQueen said.

Mr. Romney’s decision to open his fight for Michigan here in a suburb of Grand Rapids on Wednesday night underscores the campaign’s concern about Mr. Santorum’s potential strength in the western side of the state, where social conservatives dominate the party. A strength for Mr. Romney rests in Detroit and its suburbs, but the state’s 30 delegates also are awarded by Congressional district, which makes all regions important. At a rally Wednesday, he played up his local roots.

“I visited every county in Michigan, I think more than once, on my dad’s campaign, and my mom’s campaign,” he told the crowd. “I love Michigan.”

And highlighting the importance of the state, the advertising wars have already begun here, with a pro-Romney “super PAC” going up with $460,000 campaign criticizing Mr. Santorum as a “Washington insider.” Mr. Santorum responded with a humorous commercial that features Mr. Romney as a Rambo-style action hero splattering his opponent with mud.

Mr. Romney’s advisers said they planned to paint Mr. Santorum as a big-government earmarker and fiscally irresponsible politician, while reminding Michigan voters of Mr. Romney’s roots in the state, something they did with a biographical advertisement in which Mr. Romney reminisces about Detroit.

Yet perhaps because of his deep roots here, a Romney loss in Michigan could be particularly tough to recover from.

“If he loses in his own home state, it sends a message that people recognize that a politician from Massachusetts is not the conservative leader that the party needs,” said Alice Stewart, Mr. Santorum’s national press secretary.

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from Washington.

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Santorum has 18-point lead over Romney in Ohio

Rick Santorum is smoking Mitt Romney in a Rasmussen poll of Ohio Republican voters released on Thursday.

Santorum gets 42 percent in the swing state, a crucial one in the general election, while Romney sits 18 points behind at 24 percent. Newt Gingrich is in third at 13 percent and Ron Paul is at 10 percent.

If the field were to narrow to just Romney and Santorum, Santorum would flatten Romney 58 percent to 30 percent. (RELATED: With Santorum surging, Romney faces crucial test in Michigan primary)

Romney is not unpopular in the state, but Santorum is more popular, and his supporters feel more strongly toward him. Sixty-four percent of Ohio Republicans say they hold a favorable opinion of Romney, and just 33 percent say they have an unfavorable opinion. However, just 14 percent of those supporters feel very favorably toward them, and 50 percent just feel somewhat favorable. Santorum has a 75-19 favorability rating, but 38 percent of those who favor him feel strongly favorable.

Nonetheless, Romney is still the expected victor in the primary process, with a 55 percent majority saying they expect him to be the nominee, and just 26 percent saying it will be Santorum. Ohio voters see them as equally strong competitors in a general election against President Barack Obama, with 38 percent saying Romney would be the strongest candidate, and 37 percent saying Santorum.

Obama won the state in 2008.

Ohio holds its primary on March 6 — Super Tuesday. With 66 delegates, after Georgia, it is the Super Tuesday state with the second most delegates at stake.

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Santorum Faces Questions on Women in Work Force

WASHINGTON — Only days after having to explain a comment about women in the military and emotions in combat, Rick Santorum seemed to struggle a bit on Sunday to explain a remark in his book “It Takes a Family” that accuses “radical feminists” of undermining families and trying to convince women that they could find fulfillment only in the workplace.

Rick Santorum also faced criticism over his book’s “radical feminists” remark in 2005 when it was published.

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Asked by George Stephanopoulos about that remark on ABC’s “This Week,” Mr. Santorum said that his wife, Karen, had written that section of the 2005 book — though only his name is on the cover and he does not list her, in his acknowledgements, among those “who assisted me in the writing of this book.” He said that when Ms. Santorum, a nurse and a lawyer, had quit her job to raise the couple’s children, she felt that many people “looked down their nose at that decision.”

“Sadly the propaganda campaign launched in the 1960s has taken root,” Mr. Santorum, or his wife, wrote in the book. “The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.”

In the interview Sunday with Mr. Stephanopoulos, Mr. Santorum pleaded unfamiliarity with the citation, saying, “I don’t know — that’s a new quote for me,” before adding that “the bottom line is that people should have equal opportunity to rise in the work force.”

But criticism of his argument that more women should perhaps stay home should not have come as news to Mr. Santorum as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination. The book was sharply debated during his unsuccessful 2006 bid for re-election as a senator from Pennsylvania, drawing pointed criticism from women’s groups and Democratic officials at the time.

Mr. Santorum argues in the book that many of the problems facing the poor could be solved by building stronger families and communities, including by making divorce more difficult and providing fatherhood training programs.

His fundamental point, he said on Sunday, was that there should be a strong “affirmation of whatever decision women decide to make.”

Last week, Mr. Santorum faced a brief storm of criticism after saying in a CNN interview that to put more women in combat roles “could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.”

He managed to quell some of the criticism — if not all — by saying later that he was referring to the emotional reactions of male soldiers. “Men have emotions when you see a woman in harm’s way,” he said Friday on NBC, adding that it was a “natural inclination to not focus on the mission but to try to be in a position where you might want to protect someone.”

There is another reason Mr. Santorum, in his interview Sunday, should not have been surprised by the line of questioning he got Sunday. Mr. Stephanopoulos had asked him about the same quote in 2005, pressing him to identify those he said were creating pressure for women to work:

Asked by Mr. Stephanopoulos, “Where are these radical feminists?” Mr. Santorum had replied, “It comes from an elite culture, dictated, again, from academia, dictated, again, from the Hollywood culture and the news media, that says, ‘The only thing that’s affirming, the only thing that really counts is what you do at work.’ ”

He then added: “And that goes for men and women. And it’s wrong. It’s wrong to tell that to fathers. It’s wrong to tell that to mothers. And we need to value mothers and fathers spending time with their children much more than we do in America.”

Katharine Q. Seelye contributed reporting from New York.

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