Romney takes Wis., blasts Obama; president responds

MILWAUKEE (AP)

Mitt Romney tightened his grip on the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday night, sweeping primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington D.C., with time left over to swap charges with President Barack Obama.

“Four more years?” Romney asked sarcastically of the president as supporters cheered him in Milwaukee.

He said Obama was “a little out of touch” after spending four years surrounded by the trappings of power and had presided over near-record job losses as well as increases in poverty, home foreclosures, government debt and gasoline prices.

The victories enabled Romney to pad his already-wide delegate lead over Republican rival Rick Santorum, who flashed defiance in the face of pressure to abandon his own candidacy in the name of party unity.

Wisconsin was the marquee contest of the night, the only place of the three on the ballot where Santorum mounted a significant effort.

Returns from 10 percent of the state’s precincts showed Romney with 42 percent of the vote to 39 percent for Santorum, 11 percent for Ron Paul and 6 percent for Newt Gingrich.

Increasingly, Romney and many senior figures in his party have begun behaving as if the primaries are an afterthought, hoping to pivot to the fall campaign and criticism of Obama.

“He gets full credit or blame for what’s happened in this economy and what’s happened to gasoline prices under his watch and what’s happened to our schools and what’s happened to our military forces,” Romney said of the president while campaigning in Waukesha, Wis.

Obama said things could be worse — and predicted they would be if Romney and Republicans got their way.

In a speech to the annual meeting of The Associated Press, he said a House-passed budget written by Republicans was “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it ... It is a prescription for decline.”

When he wasn’t focusing his rhetoric on Obama, Romney prodded Santorum to quit the race, suggesting a refusal to do so could cost the party the election in November.

“The right thing for us, I think, is to get a nominee as soon as we can and be able to focus on Barack Obama,” Romney said in an interview with Fox News. “You have to remember that it was Ross Perot that allowed Bill Clinton to win” in 1992, he added, a reference to the Texan who ran as an independent that year.

There was no immediate response from Santorum.