Romney, rivals court Southern support on vote eve

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. Rick San­to­rum holds a piece of shale as he speaks about fos­sil fuel at the Gulf Coast Energy Sum­mit in Biloxi, Miss., Mon­day. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)

BETH FOUHY, DAVID ESPO

Asso­ci­ated Press

BILOXI, Miss. — Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial con­tenders and their super PAC sup­port­ers cam­paigned aggres­sively on land, through the mail and over the air­waves Mon­day on the eve of pri­maries in Alabama and Mis­sis­sippi with the poten­tial to solid­ify or shake Mitt Romney’s stand­ing as front-runner.

In the Deep South, one of the most con­ser­v­a­tive regions of the coun­try, Rom­ney and his Repub­li­can rivals pol­ished their cre­den­tials with attacks on Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s han­dling of the econ­omy and the nation’s use of energy. “The dan­gers of car­bon diox­ide? Tell that to a plant, how dan­ger­ous car­bon diox­ide is,” said Rick Santorum.

But those crit­i­cisms were mere warm-up for the can­di­dates going after each other. Gin­grich is strug­gling for sur­vival in Tuesday’s pri­maries, and San­to­rum is labor­ing to redeem his claim that Rom­ney can’t secure the sup­port of con­ser­v­a­tives, par­tic­u­larly evan­gel­i­cals who are part of the party’s key base.

“If the oppor­tu­nity pro­vides itself in an open con­ven­tion, they’re not going to nom­i­nate a mod­er­ate Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor who has been out­spend­ing his oppo­nent 10–1 and can’t win the elec­tion out­right,” San­to­rum said in a tele­vi­sion inter­view as he cam­paigned across Alabama and Mississippi.

Rom­ney coun­tered, also on tele­vi­sion. “We’re clos­ing the deal, state by state, del­e­gate by del­e­gate,” he said, empha­siz­ing his lead in the cat­e­gory that mat­ters most.

He has more del­e­gates than his rivals com­bined, and is amass­ing them at a rate that puts him on track to clinch con­trol of nom­i­na­tion before the con­ven­tion opens next sum­mer, a prospect that his rivals pre­fer not to dwell on. AP’s tally shows him with 454 of the 1,144 del­e­gates needed to win the nom­i­na­tion, San­to­rum with 217, Gin­grich with 107 and Ron Paul with 47.

Evan­gel­i­cal vot­ers play an out­sized role in both state pri­maries. Four years ago, 77 per­cent of GOP pri­mary vot­ers in Alabama and 69 per­cent in Mis­sis­sippi said they were born again or evan­gel­i­cals, a group that Rom­ney has strug­gled to bring to his side in the pri­maries. His best show­ing in a con­tested pri­mary was 38 per­cent in Florida.

Hop­ing to estab­lish a con­nec­tion with South­ern­ers, the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor cam­paigned in Mobile, Ala., with come­dian Jeff Fox­wor­thy, whose trade­mark jokes that begin “You might be a red­neck if. …”

Rom­ney isn’t — he was born in Michi­gan, edu­cated at Har­vard and elected gov­er­nor of Mass­a­chu­setts. And he drew laugh­ter from his audi­ence when he poked fun at him­self by say­ing he hoped to go hunt­ing with an Alabama friend who “can actu­ally show me which end of the rifle to point.”

“We have a moral respon­si­bil­ity not to spend more than we take in,” he says in an ad his cam­paign ran in both pri­mary states, although not all the com­mer­cials were as self-deprecating as his rhetoric or as pos­i­tive as his on-air message.

Restore Our Future, a super PAC that sup­ports Rom­ney, aired ads crit­i­cal of San­to­rum for hav­ing voted in Con­gress to pro­vide fed­eral fund­ing for Planned Par­ent­hood, and attack­ing Gin­grich for sup­port­ing action to com­bat cli­mate change through cleaner sources of energy.

A radio ad the group aired across both states makes use of Santorum’s own voice, includ­ing him say­ing in a debate last month that he was proud of the ear­marks he has sup­ported and that he had voted for fed­eral edu­ca­tion man­dates even though they are against his principles.

“But you know, when you’re part of the team, some­times you take one for the team,” he says.

The same orga­ni­za­tion hit San­to­rum in mail sent to thou­sands of homes in Alabama.

“Rick San­to­rum voted with Hillary Clin­ton to allow felons to vote. Typ­i­cal behav­ior from Wash­ing­ton insider,” says one mail­ing, which makes no men­tion of Romney.

Red, White and Blue Fund, which backs San­to­rum, was hardly kinder. It aired com­mer­cials say­ing that Rom­ney and Obama “aren’t much dif­fer­ent” on key issues such as fed­eral spend­ing and sup­port­ing a require­ment for indi­vid­u­als to pur­chase health care cov­er­age. That’s a ref­er­ence to a Mass­a­chu­setts law that Rom­ney signed in his home state that bears sim­i­lar­i­ties to the leg­is­la­tion Obama won from Congress.

Gin­grich, who said over the week­end that Rom­ney is the weak­est Repub­li­can front-runner in nearly a cen­tury, is backed by a super PAC air­ing ads, as well.

His cam­paign is adver­tis­ing at lower lev­els, includ­ing a com­mer­cial that hits Obama for high gas prices and another that says the pres­i­dent mod­eled his health care reform plan after the one Rom­ney had enacted in Massachusetts.

The for­mer House speaker also using a recorded phone mes­sage from Chuck Nor­ris in Alabama.

“As pres­i­dent, Newt will repeal Oba­macare, get rid of Obama’s czars, and use com­mon­sense mea­sures, like build­ing the Key­stone Pipeline to lower the cost of gas to two and half dol­lars a gal­lon,” says Nor­ris, whose web­site notes he is a movie star and World Pro­fes­sional Mid­dle Weight Karate Champion.

San­to­rum and Gin­grich employed dif­fer­ent approaches as they cam­paigned dur­ing the day, the for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia sen­a­tor more crit­i­cal of Rom­ney, while the for­mer House speaker focused his attacks on Obama.

His com­ment dis­miss­ing Obama’s con­cerns about global warm­ing, how­ever, over­sim­pli­fied the issue. While it’s true that plants need car­bon diox­ide to grow, the gas also is pro­mot­ing global warm­ing. “For many plants, that’s going to more than off­set the ben­e­fits of car­bon diox­ide,” said David Wolfe, a pro­fes­sor of plant and soil ecol­ogy at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity. “If you have a plant that’s dead from heat stress, you can give it all the CO2 you want, but it’s not going to benefit.”

Gin­grich, at the same con­fer­ence, said Obama is pre­sid­ing over a “very anti-fossil fuel admin­is­tra­tion. The left wing envi­ron­men­tal move­ment hates oil.”

Rom­ney made the econ­omy his text for crit­i­ciz­ing Obama.

He said the pres­i­dent wrongly thinks the coun­try is doing bet­ter because of recent increases in employ­ment. More than 200,000 jobs have been cre­ated in each of the past three months, but Rom­ney said the pres­i­dent, “should go out and talk to the 24 mil­lion Amer­i­cans who are out of work or stopped look­ing for work or are unemployed.”

Posted by AP News on Mar 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.