Romney charges Santorum compromised his principles

BETH FOUHY

Asso­ci­ated Press

PHOENIX — Mitt Rom­ney took new aim at Rick Santorum’s image as a devoted con­ser­v­a­tive Thurs­day, accus­ing his rival of com­pro­mis­ing his own prin­ci­ples by repeat­edly vot­ing for leg­is­la­tion he didn’t believe in.

Rom­ney noted that dur­ing Wednes­day night’s heated GOP debate the for­mer sen­a­tor said he had voted for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind edu­ca­tion bill because “some­times you take one for the team.”

“I won­der which team he was tak­ing it for?” Rom­ney asked dur­ing a speech to an Asso­ci­a­tion of Builders and Con­trac­tors meet­ing in Phoenix. “My team is the Amer­i­can peo­ple, not the insid­ers in Washington.”

Dur­ing the debate, San­to­rum was forced to defend sev­eral votes on issues such as a right-to-work mea­sure that clashed with his con­ser­v­a­tive phi­los­o­phy. He explained at length why he backed bills that included tar­geted spend­ing called “ear­marks,” say­ing it was bet­ter to have Con­gress decide where to send the money than to let exec­u­tive branch depart­ments have com­plete authority.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a politi­cian explain in so many ways why he voted against his prin­ci­ples,” Rom­ney said Thursday.

Rom­ney and San­to­rum are pow­er­ing into a cru­cial stretch of Repub­li­can pri­maries and cau­cuses over the next 13 days.

Later Thurs­day, Rom­ney was turn­ing his focus to tea par­ty­ers in Michi­gan, his birth­place, where cash-strapped San­to­rum is wag­ing an unex­pect­edly strong chal­lenge. Romney’s been put on the defen­sive in the auto-building state over his oppo­si­tion to the government’s bailout of car makers.

Rom­ney took a pound­ing on the auto issue in the debate, and Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s re-election cam­paign piled on Thurs­day. Obama released a TV ad in Michi­gan accus­ing Rom­ney and the other GOP can­di­dates of turn­ing their backs on an indus­try that sup­ports more than 1 mil­lion work­ers in the state by oppos­ing the bailout.

A tea party rally Thurs­day night in Mil­ford, Mich., will give Rom­ney another chance to explain why he opposed the res­cue of GM and Chrysler amid the eco­nomic cri­sis but sup­ported bailouts for banks.

San­to­rum, flour­ish­ing in the polls, trails in the money chase and is con­cen­trat­ing on beef­ing up his cam­paign trea­sury in hopes of an upset in Michigan’s pri­mary on Tues­day. That would cap a rebound that began two weeks ago when San­to­rum won cau­cuses in Min­nesota and Col­orado and a non­bind­ing pri­mary in Missouri.

The 20th debate of the nom­i­na­tion race offered the GOP hope­fuls their final face-to-face out­ing on a national stage before con­tests that may well win­now the four-man field.

The debate was staged in Ari­zona, which also votes Tues­day and where Rom­ney is so con­fi­dent of vic­tory he hasn’t aired any tele­vi­sion ads.

After the Ari­zona and Michi­gan pri­maries come Washington’s cau­cuses four days later. Then 10 states cast bal­lots on Super Tues­day, March 6.

Polls show San­to­rum lead­ing the field nation­ally and in sev­eral states. Rom­ney and rivals Ron Paul and Newt Gin­grich used the tele­vised debate to chal­lenge San­to­rum, who repeat­edly found him­self in the hot seat over his record on spend­ing, home-state projects known as ear­marks and sup­port for a fed­eral edu­ca­tion law.

Rom­ney crit­i­cized San­to­rum for sup­port of spend­ing pro­grams when he rep­re­sented Penn­syl­va­nia in Con­gress, where he served both in the House and Sen­ate. Rom­ney said San­to­rum voted five times to raise the government’s abil­ity to bor­row, sup­ported reten­tion of a law that favors con­struc­tion unions and sup­ported increased spend­ing for Planned Par­ent­hood. He said fed­eral spend­ing rose 78 per­cent over­all while San­to­rum was in Congress.

San­to­rum retorted that gov­ern­ment spend­ing declined as a per­cent­age of the econ­omy when he was in the Sen­ate, and he noted that when Rom­ney was asked last year if he would sup­port a pend­ing debt-limit increase, “he said yes.”

The for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor also went after San­to­rum on ear­marks, the spe­cial­ized spend­ing bills directed to a par­tic­u­lar state or program.

“You voted for the Bridge to Nowhere,” Rom­ney said to San­to­rum, refer­ring to an infa­mous bridge pro­posal in Alaska that would have been built with mil­lions in fed­eral funds. “I would put a ban on earmarks.”

Paul went fur­ther, call­ing San­to­rum a “fake” con­ser­v­a­tive. Gin­grich dis­missed the argu­ment over ear­marks as “silly” but said his years as House speaker made him best equipped to bring reform to such Wash­ing­ton practices.

San­to­rum, for his part, said he had dif­fer­en­ti­ated between “good ear­marks and bad ear­marks” and sup­ported only those that funded defense and other needed projects.

He also noted that Rom­ney had sought ear­marks to fund the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And he blamed Rom­ney anew for cham­pi­oning a health care law in Mass­a­chu­setts that became the pro­to­type for Obama’s health care law, which is detested by conservatives.

“It would be a dif­fi­cult task for some­one who had the model for Oba­macare — the biggest issue in this race — to be the nom­i­nee of our party,” San­to­rum said.

In rebut­tal, Rom­ney said San­to­rum actu­ally bore respon­si­bil­ity for pas­sage of the health care law that Obama won from a Democratic-controlled Con­gress in 2010, even though he wasn’t in office at the time. Rom­ney said that in a pri­mary bat­tle in 2004, San­to­rum had sup­ported then-Sen. Arlen Specter of Penn­syl­va­nia, who later switched par­ties and voted for the law Obama wanted.

San­to­rum also took his lumps from the audi­ence, which booed when he said he had voted for the No Child Left Behind edu­ca­tion law even though he had opposed it.

“Look, pol­i­tics is a team sport, folks,” he said of the mea­sure backed by Repub­li­can Pres­i­dent George W. Bush and other GOP lawmakers.

Santorum’s rise in the race has left Paul and Gin­grich as out­siders look­ing for a way in.

Paul has yet to win any pri­maries or cau­cuses. He is air­ing an ad in Michi­gan, though, chal­leng­ing Santorum’s claim of tak­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive line against fed­eral spending.

Gin­grich, the for­mer Geor­gia con­gress­man, is pin­ning his hopes for a come­back on that state on March 6. He was cam­paign­ing in Wash­ing­ton state on Thurs­day and Friday.

Posted by AP News on Feb 23 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.