On Primary’s Eve, Romney Cuts to General Election

Republican voters have yet to give Mitt Romney a green light to begin a formal campaign against President Obama, so Mr. Romney paid a visit to the president’s old neighborhood here on Monday for yet another audition to show he is tough enough to win the general election.
On the eve of the Illinois primary, where he hopes a commanding victory will start extinguishing the insurgent fire of Rick Santorum, Mr. Romney took the luxury of ignoring his Republican rivals. It was one part buoyant confidence and one part symbolic opportunity that led Mr. Romney to deliver an economic speech just a short stroll from Mr. Obama’s actual backyard.

The Republican primary calendar is only slightly beyond the halfway mark, with Mr. Santorum and, to a lesser extent, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, still scrapping for delegates. Mr. Santorum said he presented the sharpest contrast to Mr. Obama, while Mr. Gingrich was off the campaign trail strategizing about how to stop Mr. Romney from getting the nomination and Mr. Paul was all but invisible.

Hopeful that the results in Illinois could at last begin rallying the party to his side, Mr. Romney sought to signal that he is moving to the next stage — whether the voters are ready or not — and assailed the president by name more than a dozen times in the span of 18 minutes without mentioning the other Republican candidates.

“Our choice will not be one of party or personality,” Mr. Romney said during a lecture-style speech, taking the rare move of trading his jeans and open-collar shirt for a suit and tie and reading from a prompter. “This election will be about principle.”

In the speech, Mr. Romney avowed a commitment to conservative economic principles and deregulation. But in citing examples of what he said was the stifling hand of the Obama administration, he presented two specific examples, including the phasing out of the incandescent light bulb, that turned out to have their roots in actions taken by President George W. Bush’s administration.

Mr. Romney did not directly mention Mr. Santorum, but the Romney team and its allies were intently focused on him, trying to bury him in negative advertising. In Illinois, Mr. Romney had a spending advantage of at least 6 to 1 over Mr. Santorum.

But the voters of Illinois, perhaps including some of the same crossover Republicans who helped contribute to Mr. Obama’s own political rise, will now help write the next chapter of the Republican primary. Mr. Romney’s aides believe a comfortable victory could be at hand on Tuesday, but Mr. Santorum and the rest of the field showed no signs of stepping aside.

As Mr. Romney previewed general election themes in a speech at the University of Chicago, Mr. Santorum spoke about 120 miles west in Dixon, the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. He argued that his campaign, unlike Mr. Romney’s, was not built around the rises and falls in the economy.

“I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be,” Mr. Santorum said, a remark that drew criticism from the Romney campaign. “It doesn’t matter. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates.”

The Illinois results will provide an important test of whether Mr. Romney can regain for good the sense of inevitability he has had sporadically since the New Year — winning it in New Hampshire; losing it in South Carolina; winning it in Florida; losing it in Minnesota and Colorado and last week in Mississippi and Alabama.

And so it is that Mr. Romney and the “super PAC” supporting him, Restore Our Future, have pounded Mr. Santorum on television and radio here, especially on broadcast television, where the Romney forces have spent at least $2 million and the Santorum forces, which have advertised mostly on cable, have spent at least $60,000 according to an analysis by Kantar Media/CMAG.

The anti-Santorum advertisements call him an “economic lightweight” and question his policy acumen, a line of attack he appeared to walk into with his comments about the jobless rate. Mr. Santorum, who has been attacking Mr. Romney for what he said was a lack of core convictions, was still hoping a strong vote from downstate Illinois — abutting two states where he won, Iowa and Missouri — would propel him to victory. But he was hesitant to predict an outright win, telling reporters who asked him if he had a chance to overtake Mr. Romney, “I don’t know. If you’d have asked me that last week in Mississippi and Alabama, I’d have said ‘no.’ ”
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His campaign aides indicated that their hopes in this critical primary were fading in light of the heavy advertising campaign against him, especially in the expensive market of Chicago, where the suburban vote could prove decisive for Mr. Romney.

Mr. Santorum’s campaign was already beginning to look ahead to contests in Wisconsin on April 3 and in his home state of Pennsylvania, which holds its primary, along with those of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware, three weeks later. He scheduled his primary night party on Tuesday in Gettysburg, Pa., rather than Illinois.

If New Hampshire and Massachusetts can be a guide, Mr. Romney is stronger than Mr. Santorum in the Northeast. And Mr. Santorum’s campaign said it was prepared for a relatively rough April that would be followed by a better May, when the voting moves to several Southern states, including Texas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Arkansas.

In the meantime, the Santorum campaign is continuing to track the small gatherings on the county and district level through the country where delegates will be allotted based on byzantine rules that do not necessarily follow the results of the caucuses and primaries. It is a largely behind-the-scenes process that the campaign believes will be as important to winning the nomination as the popular vote.

Mr. Santorum’s ability to block Mr. Romney from reaching the 1,144-delegate mark needed for the nomination could rest to some degree with Mr. Gingrich’s ability to stay in the race and win delegates that would otherwise go to Mr. Romney. And Mr. Gingrich is vowing to stay in the race for that reason.

Former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi told ABC News on Sunday that he voted for Mr. Gingrich in last week’s primary, an indication of Mr. Gingrich’s continued appeal to some conservatives and their qualms about Mr. Romney. But Mr. Gingrich’s rivals could not be blamed for their confusion when Mr. Gingrich spent the weekend not campaigning here but in Washington, strolling along the Tidal Basin to view the cherry blossoms with his wife, Callista.

Mr. Gingrich’s aides spent Monday with him in Arlington, Va., planning what they said would be a highly targeted approach to the remaining contests. The plans are necessitated in part by money. A senior aide on Monday said Mr. Gingrich’s next financial filing will show a “huge chunk of debt” that the campaign hopes to make up for from its list of 176,000 small donors.

But, with a goal that now boils down to preventing Mr. Romney from gaining 1,144 delegates, Mr. Gingrich and his aides on Monday mapped out “a second half” focusing on states where he can have maximum impact.

At the strategy session, Mr. Gingrich referred to a chapter in the book “Ballots and Bandwagons,” by Ralph Martin, that focused on the brokered 1920 convention that resulted in the nomination of Warren G. Harding, according to one person who attended and who relayed the view of the staff as of now: “We always understood this was a long campaign, and we realize how far we have come and always been ready for the long march to Tampa if necessary.”