Illinois showdown
Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD, Ill.
An increasingly confident Mitt Romney called President Barack Obama an “economic lightweight” Monday as the Republican presidential candidate looked beyond today’s Illinois primary to a general-election showdown with the incumbent Democrat.
Romney’s chief rival — Rick Santorum — kept the focus on the GOP front-runner, arguing that nominating the former Massachusetts governor would deprive the party of a defining issue to use against Obama in the November election — health care. “Obamacare,” Santorum said, was based on “Romneycare,” Massachusetts’ 2006 health-care law.
Courting voters in Obama’s home state, Romney acknowledged that the economy was moving in the right direction as hundreds of thousands of jobs have been created, the unemployment rate has dropped and consumer confidence has jumped. Romney suggested it was in spite of the president.
“The economy always comes back after a recession, of course,” said Romney, previewing what could be a general-election argument. “There’s never been one that we didn’t recover from. The problem is this one has been deeper than it needed to be and a slower recovery than it should have been.”
The former venture capitalist said he’s better equipped to steer the economy.
“There are dramatic differences between me and President Obama,” Romney said during a morning campaign stop at Charlie Parker’s diner in Springfield. “I’m not an economic lightweight. President Obama is.”
Romney extended his delegate lead Sunday in Puerto Rico, where he trounced rival Santorum and scored all 20 of the Caribbean island’s delegates. Romney has collected more delegates than his opponents combined and is poised to win the delegate battle in Illinois, even if he loses the popular vote, thanks to missteps by Santorum’s shoestring operation.
Brushing aside skepticism from the party’s right flank, Romney aides have been emphasizing their overwhelming mathematical advantage in the race to 1,144 delegates — the number needed to clinch the GOP presidential nomination and face Obama in the fall.
Santorum has all but conceded he cannot earn enough delegates to win but claimed he was in the contest for the long haul because Romney is a weak front-runner.
“I looked at the leading candidate for president on the Republican side and I said, ‘He can’t be the nominee,’” Santorum told several hundred people at the Venetian Club in Rockford. “He can’t be the nominee because he would take away from the Republican Party in this crucial election — the most important in your lifetime, he would take away the central issue in this campaign. He is uniquely disqualified to go and make the case against Obamacare because he developed the blueprint for Obamacare.”
In 2006, then-Massachusetts Gov. Romney instituted a sweeping health-care system in the state that required everyone to have insurance. It was the model for Obama’s divisive health-care overhaul that he signed into law two years ago this Friday.
“Why, Illinois, would you consider voting for someone for president on the Republican side who is for Romneycare, the blueprint for Obamacare, and for government mandates?” Santorum asked. “... He will give every single important issue on this subject matter away. There is no difference between the two.”