The financial firepower that fueled the rise of a network of conservative advocacy groups now pummeling Democrats with television ads can be traced, in part, to Box 72465 in the Boulder Hills post office, on a desert road on the northern outskirts of Phoenix.

That’s the address for the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an organization with ties to Charles and David H. Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankroll a number of conservative organizations.

During the 2010 midterm election, the center sent more than $55 million to 26 GOP-allied groups, tax filings show, funding opaque outfits such as American Future Fund, 60 Plus and Americans for Job Security that were behind a coordinated campaign against Democratic congressional candidates.

At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

But he doesn’t seem that enamored with Mitt Romney either.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Wednesday morning, Mr. Powell, a Republican who did endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, despite having worked under President George W. Bush, chided Mr. Romney for listening to conservative foreign policy advisers.

Mr. Powell noted that Mr. Romney recently said that Russia was the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States.

“Well, c’mon Mitt, think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said. “I don’t know whether Mitt really feels that.”

Asked whether he thought Mr. Romney’s advisers told him to say that, Mr. Powell said: “I don’t know. You ask him.”

Mr. Powell said Mr. Romney’s comment had been “catching a lot of heck from the regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

“We’re kind of taken aback by it,” he said. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”

Earlier in the interview, Mr. Powell described Mr. Romney’s foreign policy advisers as “quite far to the right.’

“Sometimes, they, I think, might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

Newt Gingrich closed down his campaign early this month with at least $4.8 million in debt, according to campaign records filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday.

Among the biggest debts Mr. Gingrich accumulated were $181,977 for public relations consulting, $165,000 for Web advertising, $1 million to Moby Dick Airways, a charter company, and over $466,370 for security services. Mr. Gingrich also owes himself $580,134 in travel expenses.

His campaign reported $100,000 in debts to Crimson Hexagon, a Massachusetts firm, for software licenses, but a notation indicates that the campaign is disputing those bills.

During April, with his campaign effectively over, Mr. Gingrich raised just $786,782. He ended the month with $806,950 in cash on hand.

Mr. Gingrich’s debt is significant against the roughly $23 million he raised over the course of a tumultuous Republican primary.

Richard G. Lugar , a six-term Republican senator from Indiana, lost his bid to stay in office after his Tea Party -backed rival questioned his conservative credentials and accused Mr. Lugar of losing touch with Indiana and its voters.

Richard E. Mourdock, the state’s treasurer, defeated Mr. Lugar in the Republican primary on Tuesday, according to networks and The Associated Press. Mr. Mourdock will face Joe Donnelly, a Democratic member of the House, in November.

The results of the primary end the career of one of the longest-serving members of the Senate and provide a new trophy for the Tea Party movement. Mr. Lugar, 80, leaves after three decades as one of the chamber’s leading foreign policy experts and with a reputation as a voice of moderation in his party.

That reputation — and a sense among his constituents that he had long ago become a creature of Washington — doomed Mr. Lugar, who had not faced a primary challenger in more than a quarter-century.

Mr. Mourdock repeatedly accused Mr. Lugar of not being conservative enough for Indiana. He pointed to Mr. Lugar’s votes to confirm President Obama ’s Supreme Court nominees, support for immigration legislation known as the Dream Act and his backing of bank bailouts during the economic crisis.

Conservative organizations with connections to the Tea Party movement flocked to Mr. Mourdock, hoping to add to the list of moderate senators they had helped to oust over the past several years. (Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski , Republican of Alaska, both lost primary battles to Tea Party candidates, though Ms. Murkowski ran as an independent and kept her seat.)

But Mr. Mourdock also benefited from the perception that Mr. Lugar had long ago abandoned Indiana for a life in Washington. The senator and his wife live in suburban Washington, having sold their house in Indiana years ago.

Mitt Romney often finds himself on the defensive in Rust Belt states for having been against the auto industry bailout, which many credit with saving the industry. Now, he is taking a new tack on the sensitive issue: he’s taking credit for the industry’s rebound.

Though Mr. Romney’s closest aides acknowledge that he is politically vulnerable over his opposition to the government bailout — immortalized in a New York Times op-ed in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” — Mr. Romney on Monday told WEWS-TV in Cleveland that he deserved some praise for the auto industry’s recovery. (In fact, that headline was written by the paper, not Mr. Romney, who originally submitted the piece as, “The Way Forward for the Auto Industry.”)

“I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” Mr. Romney told the local news station after a campaign event in Euclid, Ohio.

In opposing the bailout, Mr. Romney instead lobbied for a process of “managed bankruptcy,” which he said would have allowed the car companies to restructure and emerge stronger than before.

“My own view is that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help,” Mr. Romney said. “And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy.”

The federal government eventually did help the companies restructure through bankruptcy, but only after providing billions of dollars in loans.

Mr. Romney’s opposition to the auto industry bailout presents a challenge to his hopes of winning Michigan, his native state, in November. While campaigning in Lansing on Tuesday, he did not mention the bailout at all, though he made sure to talk about his plans to “help usher in a revival in American manufacturing.”

Rick Santorum told his supporters in an e-mail Monday night that he was endorsing Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential candidate and that “all hands on deck” would be needed to defeat President Obama in the fall.

Mr. Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination last month after making a strong showing in multiple states, said he met privately with Mr. Romney in Pittsburgh last Friday.

During that hour-long meeting, Mr. Santorum said that he felt a responsibility to assess Mr. Romney’s commitment to issues that are important to social conservatives and tea party supporters, among others. He said he also wanted a commitment from Mr. Romney, assuring him that there would be “appropriate representation” of conservatives in a Romney administration.

He said they also discussed the role of the family in the country’s economic success. “I was impressed with the Governor’s deep understanding of this connection and his commitment to economic policies that preserve and strengthen families,” Mr. Santorum said.

Mr. Santorum noted that he had repeatedly raised concerns during the Republican primary fight over whether Mr. Romney would take on Mr. Obama’s health care policy. However, in the e-mail, he told his supporters that he had no doubt that Mr. Romney would work with a Republican Congress to repeal it and replace it.

“Above all else, we both agree that President Obama must be defeated,” Mr. Santorum said. “The task will not be easy. It will require all hands on deck if our nominee is to be victorious. Governor Romney will be that nominee and he has my endorsement and support to win this the most critical election of our lifetime.”

He closed by saying that while his conversation with Mr. Romney was productive, he intended to keep the lines of “communication open with him and his campaign.”

Despite Mr. Santorum’s praise for Mr. Romney in his endorsement, the Democratic National Committee was trying to make sure that people did not forget all the unkind things he said about his fellow Republican during the campaign that were captured on video.

Saying pleasant things about one's political adversary who just a few short weeks earlier was ripping you apart as you returned the favor might be the accepted thing for the ultimate victor in a contest to do in politics. But Smith was clearly in no mood for it.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Pieces in two conservative publications, the National Review and Daily Caller , reflected the uproar by some social conservatives over the appointment.

In the National Review, Matthew J. Franck wrote late last week: “Suppose Barack Obama comes out — as Grenell wishes he would — in favor of same-sex marriage in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. How fast and how publicly will Richard Grenell decamp from Romney to Obama?”

The argument that Grenell could essentially not be openly gay and serve on a GOP presidential campaign was belied by the fact that Grenell has been a loyal Republican for many years, working for esteemed foreign policy figures including former Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton.

The ongoing pressure from social conservatives over his appointment and the reluctance of the Romney campaign to send Grenell out as a spokesman while controversy swirled left Grenell essentially with no job. The Romney camp has not responded to my request for comment.

Mitt Romney hasn’t appreciated the fact that President Obama’s campaign released a new video pointing out that Romney said in 2007 that he would not order military action similar to the one Obama ordered that ended up killing Osama bin Laden.

Romney now says that “of course ” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account . “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is , the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were .

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported .

“We are disappointed that Ric decided to resign from the campaign for his own personal reasons,” Matt Rhoades, the Romney campaign manager, said in a statement. “We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill.”

Mr. Grenell served four American ambassadors to the United Nations during the presidency of George W. Bush. But his selection had been sharply criticized by some social conservatives soon after he was named less than two weeks ago as Mr. Romney’s campaign spokesman for national security issues. In addition to concerns from some in the party about his sexual orientation, Mr. Grenell had been criticized for sometimes caustic Twitter posts about women including Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC host, and Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich.

In a statement to Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post columnist who first reported the resignation, Mr. Grenell said: “While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyperpartisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.”

A openly gay spokesman for presidential candidate Mitt Romney has resigned on his first official day of work, amid criticism by anti-gay conservatives.

Richard Grenell, recently hired to speak on foreign affairs for the presumptive Republican nominee, announced his departure on Tuesday.

In a statement, Mr Grenell thanked Mr Romney for “his belief in me”.

The spokesman had previously deleted about 800 tweets and took down his personal website.

According to the Washington Post Mr Grenell had come under fire for statements about Callista Gingrich and Michelle Obama.

The Romney campaign said it was “disappointed” that Mr Grenell had resigned.

“We wanted him to stay because he had superior qualifications for the position he was hired to fill,” Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades said in a statement.

For the Romney campaign, however, a paucity of small-dollar donations is inauspicious not because it means that it will have trouble raising enough money (it probably won’t, and if it does, Mr. Romney has considerable personal wealth at his disposal). Rather, a lack of small-dollar donors could indicate tepid support for Mr. Romney among the Republican base.

Research by Adam Bonica of the political science department at Stanford University suggests that small donations tend to come from the wings of the ideological spectrum. For Mr. Romney, donations of less than $200 would most likely come from the most conservative camp in the Republican Party, a group that resisted his candidacy throughout the nominating process.

“In the primaries, there were a lot of small donors, but they weren’t giving to Romney,” Professor Bonica said. “I think it does have something to do with Romney being perceived to be more moderate.”

The Romney campaign’s continuing dearth of small-dollar contributions suggests that very conservative voters, like those who supported Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, have yet to warm completely to Mr. Romney, which could potentially mean not only less money but also fewer lawn signs and bumper stickers, fewer volunteers and, ultimately, fewer votes.

It is too early to call the problem chronic. The Republican primary was only recently resolved. Mr. Gingrich is expected to drop out of the race officially on Wednesday. Mr. Gingrich, as well as Mr. Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who appealed to more conservative voters, will presumably endorse Mr. Romney eventually. And at that point, conservative Republicans may begin coalescing around Mr. Romney in earnest, enabling his campaign to construct a robust small-donor network.

As Republicans rally to unify behind the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, the campaign’s allies are working to heal old wounds from the bruising primary fight. In the latest example, the pro-Romney “super PAC” Restore Our Future has scrubbed its YouTube account of all negative ads against Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

As noticed by Politico, the group’s YouTube account now just has two advertisements: an attack on President Obama’s job-creating credentials and a rehashing of a 2008 ad about Mr. Romney saving a young girl gone missing in New York City. The former negative videos have been scrubbed from the group’s channel and made private on individual ad pages.

The super PAC had been one of the main attack dogs of the Romney primary campaign, critcizing Mr. Gingrich heavily in Iowa and Florida. The group then shifted its attacks to Mr. Santorum following his post-Iowa surge in the polls.

Mr. Romney’s campaign is expected to meet with Mr. Santorum this week to discuss a possible endorsement and ways in which the two former rivals can work together. Mr. Gingrich is expected to formally withdraw from the race this week.

The Republican National Committee officially embraced Mitt Romney as the party’s presumptive nominee on Wednesday morning after Mr. Romney claimed his new title in an energetic speech Tuesday night.

Reince R. Priebus, the chairman of the committee, said in a statement sent out early Wednesday morning that the party organization and its resources were now at the disposal of Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“Governor Romney’s strong performance and delegate count at this stage of the primary process has made him our party’s presumptive nominee,” Mr. Priebus said. “In order to maximize our efforts I have directed my staff at the R.N.C. to open lines of communication with the Romney campaign.”

The statement ends the committee’s neutral role in the Republican primaries despite the fact that Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and Representative Ron Paul of Texas, are still, technically, in the race to be the nominee.

But officials at the committee said that it became clear — if not technically official — that Mr. Romney would be the nominee after he swept five large primaries Tuesday night.

Officials said the shift, which was planned with top aides in Mr. Romney’s Boston headquarters, will lead to what they called a “full synchronization of both operations,” with the goal of making the most of the resources in both places.

Brian Jones, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on several presidential campaigns, will be the chief liaison between the campaign and the committee and will split his time between Washington and Boston, said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the committee. Mr. Jones, a former committee staff member, is very close to Matt Rhoades, Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, and has been advising the campaign for several months.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is expected to suspend his campaign next week, US media report.

The former House Speaker said on Wednesday that he expected Mitt Romney, who won five primaries on Tuesday, to be the Republican nominee.

The Gingrich campaign had said it would reassess its future if he did not win the contest in Delaware.

He has won only two primaries - South Carolina and Georgia - since the election season began in January.

Mr Gingrich will reportedly hold his last campaign event on 1 May in Washington DC.

Odds are, in other words, that if Obama wins, he will still be negotiating with Republican leaders in Congress. But the same can’t be said for Mitt Romney.

If Romney wins the election, it’s almost a sure bet that Republicans win control of both the House and the Senate. And that matters. Right now, the GOP’s agenda is the Ryan budget, and that’s entirely fiscal: It’s a premium support plan for Medicare, and tax cuts, and deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other domestic programs. All that can be passed through budget reconciliation — which is to say, all that can be made immune to the filibuster.

So if Romney wins and the Republicans take control, they could accomplish quite a lot on party-line votes, even if their majorities are slim, and Democrats are opposed. Indeed, Romney could end up being a fairly transformational president for conservatives so long as he’s paired with a Republican Congress.

Mitt Romney vowed to oust Barack Obama and build “a better America”

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has vowed to take the White House from President Barack Obama and end four years of “disappointments”.

Speaking while racking up a series of primary night victories, he said a “new campaign” was beginning.

“Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight,” he said.

The presumptive Republican nominee easily won primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

As the results began to come in on a night with the most electoral delegates at stake since Super Tuesday, Mr Romney took the stage in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary win of the year.

He focused on the forthcoming general election campaign, saying America needed a new direction and a renewal of its greatness.

“Tonight is the start of a new campaign to unite every American who knows in their heart that we can do better,” he said.

Former Republican candidate Jon Huntsman took a battle axe to his own party, comparing it to China's Communist Party and criticizing it's standard bearer in a wide-ranging interview at the 92nd Street Y Sunday night.
Recounting his first experience on the presidential debate stage in Iowa last August, Huntsman says he was struck by the question "Is this the best we could do?"
Huntsman, the former Utah governor and once President Barack Obama's Ambassador to China, expressed disappointment that the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party.
"This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script," he said.
Huntsman said he regrets his decision to oppose a 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase deal to cut the deficit at the Iowa debate lamenting: “if you can only do certain things over again in life.”
"What went through my head was if I veer at all from my pledge not to raise any taxes…then I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining," he explained. "What was going through my mind was 'don't I just want to get through this?'"
That decision, Huntsman said, "has caused me a lot of heartburn.”
Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, Mary Kaye, who told him she'd leave him if he abandoned his principles.
“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman recounted.
"So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you're was an oddball," Huntsman said, explaining why he was "toast" in Iowa.
Asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield if he could win the nomination of the Republican Party in Utah today, Huntsman said he could not, saying later that Ronald Reagan would "likely not" be able to win the GOP nomination nationally in this political climate.
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents' hard-line positions on China. "I don’t know what world these people are living in," he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.
Though he categorically ruled out being Romney's running mate, Huntsman stood by his tepid endorsement of Romney, saying he would manage legislation through Congress more effectively.
But Huntsman said Romney has to campaign on more than fear, and provide a positive alternative to Obama.
“He’ll have to work hard on making sure that happens,” he said.

Mitt Romney is facing a severe crisis of popularity.

He has the weakest favorability ratings on record for a presumptive presidential nominee at this stage of the campaign, according to new polling by ABC News and The Washington Post . The organizations have been measuring such popularity since 1984.

Mr. Romney is in a situation that pollsters call “underwater”: more people view him negatively than view him positively. His favorable rating is 35 percent, and his unfavorable rating stands at 47 percent.

He was the first nominee to be underwater in the Washington Post/ABC News poll in the eight presidential primary seasons it has been surveying the subject, the poll said. The pollsters attributed the results in part on the Republican primary process, which Americans viewed negatively overall, and on Mr. Romney’s unpopularity among women.

President Obama, by contrast, is more popular than he is unpopular: 56 percent viewed him positively, while 40 percent of those polled viewed him negatively.

Mr. Obama is more popular than he has been for two years, which the pollsters ascribed to the improving economy.

So long, flip-flopper. Hello, right-wing extremist.

Mitt Romney may be inclined to start moving to the political center now that he’s practically got the Republican nomination won and done, but the Obama campaign would much rather keep him right where he’s been for the past few months: in the conservative territory he staked out while battling for Republican primary voters.

After months of depicting Mr. Romney as the ultimate squishy, double-talking, no-core soul, Team Obama is shifting gears. Senior administration officials, along with Democratic and campaign officials, all say their strategy now will be to tell the world that Mr. Romney has a core after all — and it’s deep red.

Mr. Romney’s overheard remarks at a fund-raiser in Florida on Sunday night that, if elected, he planned to slash government programs (though he has not spelled that out for the voters) gave Obama backers the perfect opening, and they jumped on it. “Mitt Romney Tells Rich Voters His Secret Plan to Cut Housing Assistance,” said a headline from ThinkProgress , a blog put out by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Democratic officials followed that up with a call to reporters on Thursday charging that Mr. Romney’s proposal would “cut critical funds for homeless veterans.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s advisers saw another chance, and they were all over that, too. Hours after Mr. Romney accepted the endorsement of Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, the Democratic National Committee was out with an ad “Mitt Romney and Tom Corbett: Too Extreme for Women.” The traditional spooky music accompanies video of Mr. Corbett defending his advocacy of a proposal that could make women undergo ultrasounds before receiving abortions, and saying women could “close their eyes” if they didn’t want to see what was on the screen.

“Did Mitt Romney close his eyes to accept this endorsement?” the D.N.C. said in an e-mail it helpfully sent to reporters trumpeting the advertisement. “Probably not, since Mitt Romney’s positions mirror those of the extreme elements of his party,” the e-mail continued, going on to list a host of conservative Romney positions that Democrats hope will alienate women.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to start going after Mr. Romney from the left is as much a logical evolution as is any attempt by Mr. Romney to move to the center, in particular Mr. Romney’s effort now to try to woo Hispanic and female voters who may have been alienated by some of the talk coming out of the Republican primary.

As the general election heats up, a central battlefield promises to be the fights for suburban women in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Colorado, and both camps are now trying to prove their bona fides with that population. When added to recent data that shows an increase in Hispanic voters in key states, the Obama campaign sees an opening to paint Mr. Romney as out of touch among both women and Hispanics.

As long as Newt Gingrich stays in the presidential race, he is still receiving Secret Service protection — at a cost of more than $40,000 a day.

Mr. Gingrich has no intention of dropping out of the race or of asking the Secret Service to drop its detail, his campaign spokesman said on Friday, despite calls from a taxpayer group that the protection is a waste of money.

The issue bubbled up this week after The Daily Caller , an online news site, dug up Congressional testimony from 2008 in which Mark Sullivan, director of the Secret Service, estimated the cost of daily protection for a presidential candidate at $38,000. He said then that he expected the cost to rise to $44,000 a day.

The Utah Republican convention is going to a second ballot, to determine whether six-term Sen. Orrin Hatch will be renominated outright today, or if he will face a primary in June against former state Sen. Liljenquist.

Out of over 3,900 delegates in attendance on Saturday, Hatch received 57.2 percent of the vote on the first ballot, the state GOP announced, to Liljenquist’s 28.8 percent. All eight other candidates have been eliminated — even if their supporters combined together, they would not be able to overtake Liljenquist.

Hatch and Liljenquist will now compete again on a second ballot, in a one-on-one match. The level of support needed to win outright is 60 percent of the vote, at which point there would not be a primary.

At the state GOP convention two years ago, incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett came in third place, and was eliminated without the chance to compete in a primary.

Even as the nation rebounds from the recession, its lingering effects are reflected in the adversities facing families. Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater. Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford to send their children. More than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships.

The general election match between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney is opening with evidence that economic conditions are providing ammunition for both candidates. For Mr. Obama, there is a gradually growing perception that the general outlook is turning brighter, and for Mr. Romney, there are those individuals who are still not feeling substantial improvement in their own lives.

The poll found that the two men are locked in a tight race, with each gathering 46 percent of the support. Nearly an equal number of voters say they are as confident in Mr. Romney’s ability to make the right decisions on the economy and to be commander-in-chief as express confidence in Mr. Obama.

House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio formally endorsed Mitt Romney as the Republican presidential nominee on Tuesday, throwing the weight of his office behind Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, roughly a month before the candidate can amass the delegates necessary to make it official.

“It is clear now that Mitt Romney is going to be our nominee,” Mr. Boehner said at a news conference that followed his weekly meeting with the House Republican Conference. “I think Mitt Romney has a set of economic policies that can put Americans back to work and, frankly, contrast sharply with the failed economic policies of President Obama.”

Mr. Boehner promised to do “everything I can to help him win.”

What does Rick Santorum want?

On Monday night he held a conference call that was billed as a chance for him to discuss the presidential campaign and his future. But during the half-hour discussion, with more than 4,000 supporters listening in, he raised more questions than he answered about his intentions between now and November. And the uncertainty about his intentions highlights the challenges that Mitt Romney faces in revving up Mr. Santorum and his conservative followers for the fall campaign.

Mr. Santorum refrained from endorsing Mr. Romney during the conference call, but John Brabender, his top strategist, said Tuesday that he expected such an endorsement to take place in the next two or three weeks. Mr. Brabender said that he and his counterparts in the Romney campaign had simply not had a chance to coordinate their schedules.

Still, this period before an endorsement is a delicate time in which Mr. Santorum is likely to try to leverage what he can out of Mr. Romney while also presenting a constant political threat to him.

Mr. Santorum did make clear that he was eager to pay off his campaign debt. He asked for donations during the conference call and on Tuesday followed up with yet another e-mail solicitation to supporters, telling them that he must retire his debt before he gets involved in anything else.

He was less clear about his long-range goals, but friends and aides said that he wanted to establish himself as the leader of the conservative base of the Republican Party . Any such plans would be seen as laying the groundwork for another presidential run, in either 2016 or 2020, depending on whether Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is elected this fall.

During the call, Mr. Santorum suggested he would be putting a structure and organization in place in the next few weeks to promote the conservative values he advocated during his campaign, which he suspended last week. He could form a political action committee or some type of foundation through which he could continue to raise money and prepare for a later presidential run.

On Thursday, President Obama’s allies in organized labor are to announce an Internet-based effort to rally workers to the president’s corner using what they say will be the latest social media tools.

In an event at the Washington headquarters of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., organizers are scheduled to unveil a new Web site, workersvoice.org, along with ambitious plans to energize union and nonunion workers to participate in the presidential and Congressional elections.

“The labor movement is the original social network,” said Eddie Vale, the communications director for the new group. “Workers’ Voice will be revolutionizing it for today’s world by taking our traditional field and organizing knowledge and applying it to the digital era and making it available to all workers.”

In the last six months, Mr. Obama has increasingly focused his campaign for re-election on a populist argument that the policies of the Republicans would benefit the wealthiest in the country, leaving most workers behind.

This week, Mr. Obama is pushing Congress to pass what Democrats call the “Buffett Rule,” which would require anyone making over $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

“Tell them to stop giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and aren’t asking for them,” Mr. Obama said during an event on Wednesday. “Tell them to start asking everybody to do their fair share and play by the same rules.”

The new labor group describes itself as a counter to those allied behind Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s likely opponent in the fall. They include American Crossroads and other “super PACs” that have pledged to support Mr. Romney with advertising and voter mobilization efforts.

In fact, Mr. Romney has made clear in recent weeks that he intends to prosecute the same populist case against Mr. Obama, describing the sitting president as out of touch with the plight of everyday Americans and unable to develop solutions that will help them weather the economic turmoil.

Newt Gingrich became the latest Republican candidate to lash out at the cable news network, accusing it on Wednesday of dooming his flagging campaign by slanting its political coverage to Mitt Romney‘s benefit.

Mr. Gingrich quickly found that Fox News’s tenacity is a match for his own. The network shot back on Thursday, calling the former House speaker bitter.

The sniping started when Mr. Gingrich, a former Fox News commentator, told a gathering of Tea Party supporters in Delaware that Fox News had distorted its coverage of him. And he accused Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the network’s parent company, News Corporation, of pulling the strings behind the scenes. His comments were reported on Thursday morning by Real Clear Politics, which gained access to the Delaware event.

“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich was quoted as saying. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches Fox.”

He went on to add: “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of Fox. That’s just a fact.”

In a prepared statement, Fox News said Thursday that Mr. Gingrich appeared to have other motives: “This is nothing more than Newt auditioning for a windfall of a gig at CNN. That’s the kind of man he is. Not to mention, he’s still bitter over the termination of his contributor contract.”

Mr. Gingrich, like Rick Santorum, found his Fox News contract terminated last year after the network suspended the two men while they pursued a run for the presidency. Mr. Santorum, who ended his campaign on Tuesday, had also accused Fox News of favoring other candidates in its coverage.

But if Fox News covered other candidates — namely Mr. Romney — more often, they weren’t the only ones. The Pew Research Center, which conducts regular studies on the amount of media coverage the candidates receive, has found repeatedly that Mr. Romney is covered the most.

Rick Santorum says that when push came to shove, what shoved him out of the race was his dwindling bank account.

In an interview with Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council Action president, Mr. Santorum said: “Someone – one of the old politicos when I got involved in this race said the same thing, which is: ‘Every presidential campaign ends for the same reason: You run out of money.’ And we didn’t have a lot of money to begin with, but we were at a point where we simply had in the last couple of races — really worked hard and spent money and particularly in Wisconsin — we felt we had to win Wisconsin in order to do well in Pennsylvania, and it was a situation where we simply didn’t have the resources to compete going forward.”

Most important, he said:

“We had for the first time in the campaign had a debt. The debt was — from my perspective — a little more substantial than I was comfortable with. And I’ll be honest with you, Tony. In the last week after Wisconsin, we basically raised almost no money. We had solicitations going out, and people were just e-mailing back, saying the race was over, and you’ve got to join the crew. And there were others saying not, but it was a very, very small trickle of funds that were coming in. And we just realized, you know, it’s one thing to go out and compete in Pennsylvania, Romney had already laid down $4 million of advertising, and we were looking at probably not being able to spend a penny on advertising.”

He added, “You reach a point where you want to compete, but you have to be able to compete, and we felt we couldn’t.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign scrambled Wednesday afternoon to clarify his support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act after top aides were caught flat-footed by the question.

In a statement, Amanda Hennenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.”

That came after top policy aides to the former Massachusetts governor seemed uncertain how to respond when a reporter asked about Mr. Romney’s position on it during a campaign conference call.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” the adviser told reporters.

The stumble comes as Mr. Romney’s campaign is searching for ways to address the large lead that President Obama holds among female voters. That lead developed during the last several months, as Mr. Romney expressed positions that have angered many women.

The fumble on the Lilly Ledbetter law is not likely to help his case.

The law, which makes it easier for women to sue in equal pay cases, was the first bill that Mr. Obama signed into law, just nine days after taking office. It is despised by conservatives who claim it is leading to a flurry of unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits.

But the law is hailed by many women’s organizations as a step forward toward rectifying discriminatory salary situations. Democrats immediately jumped on the campaign’s hesitance to support the law, quickly distributing audio of the conference call.

“If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” Ms. Ledbetter said in a statement distributed by Mr. Obama’s campaign. “This act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign reacted quickly, putting out statements from women attacking the impact of Mr. Obama’s policies on women.

“Barack Obama talks a good game on women in the economy, but the facts don’t back him up,” Representative Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California, said in a statement. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions.”

The Democratic National Convention quickly noted that Ms. Bono Mack voted against the Ledbetter Act when it passed in Congress in 2009.

As Mitt Romney begins to pivot to the general election, President Obama’s campaign is working to remind voters of the things Mr. Romney said during the primary.

In a new “greatest hits” video, the Obama campaign highlights what it calls “memories to last a lifetime” from the campaign trail. They include some of Mr. Romney’s most oft-cited comments on issues that may come back to haunt him as he tries to attract swing voters, including:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

“I like being able to fire people that provide services to me.”

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

The video by Mr. Obama’s “Truth Team” makes no effort to put any of Mr. Romney’s statements into context. For example, the comment about liking to fire people was really said about being able to change health insurance providers.

But as the campaigns begin to engage each other more directly, it is clear that the competing narratives are set.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are hoping to portray Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch, wealthy conservative whose statements about a number of issues — immigration, women’s health, the budget — appear too extreme to moderate and independent voters.

As part of its bizarre strategy of blaming President Obama for the GOP’s “war on women,” the Romney campaign released statements today from two Republican Congresswomen, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The statements correctly note that women have been hit particularly hard by job losses in recent years, but misleadingly lay the blame for those losses on Obama, just as Romney himself has been doing recently .

“Mitt Romney supports pay equity for women and, as president, will do what President Obama has not — implement pro-growth economic policies that will allow women and all Americans to finally get back to work,” wrote McMorris Rodgers. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions,” added Bono Mack. “Simply put, women cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

But their concern for pay equity and women in the workplace must be a recent development. Both congresswomen voted against the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — which empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — and both voted against the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act , which would have made it easier for women to fight pay inequality.

This morning, the Romney campaign refused to say during a conference call whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law that President Obama signed. The campaign later scrambled to assert that Romney “supports pay equity ” and “is not looking to change current law.”

A $500 (£314) cheque issued by the cash-strapped campaign of Republican candidate Newt Gingrich bounced, it has emerged.

Election officials in Utah told US media they contacted the Gingrich campaign over the unpaid filing fee for the state’s primary in June.

Mr Gingrich has vowed to stay in the contest following Tuesday’s exit of Republican rival Rick Santorum.

But front-runner Mitt Romney is expected to wrap up the race by June.

Utah election officials say the cheque bounced on 27 March. The fee must be paid by 20 April if Mr Gingrich is to qualify for the ballot.

The Republican primary has reached an endgame. Mitt Romney has turned his attention to President Obama and the general election. Rick Santorum is trying to remain relevant. And Newt Gingrich has downsized his campaign.

Ron Paul remains mostly an afterthought, electorally – a candidate pushing a message more than a candidacy. By at least one metric – his chance of occupying the Oval Office – Mr. Paul is doing no better than he did in 2008. But by most other yardsticks, Mr. Paul this year has far exceeded the accomplishments of his 2008 campaign, reflecting, perhaps, how much the mood of the country has shifted.

Rick Santorum’s days as a paid Fox News commentator are long gone.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with the disparaging remarks he made about the network over the course of his now defunct presidential campaign — comments that angered Fox News executives and will make it difficult for him to return even if he wants to.

Mr. Santorum, in fact, was terminated about a year ago, a person with knowledge of the parameters of his contract said Tuesday. Under the terms of his three-year deal with Fox — which the person said was actually in the range of five-figures per year and not the higher six-figure amounts that had been widely reported — Mr. Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, had 60 days after the network suspended him in March 2011 to confirm that he was not running for president. He never confirmed, so his contract was canceled.

Fox placed both Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich, who were paid contributors at the time, on suspension because their continued employment would have presented a conflict of interest for the network.

Mr. Santorum complicated matters for himself further by attacking Fox News for what he deemed their biased and imbalanced coverage of him. In September, when he barely registered in most polls, he blasted the network’s coverage of Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, then a top contender. “Fox News is a dog following the squirrel,” he told Politico at the time.

Then just last month he complained of Mitt Romney ‘s advantages in the race for the Republican nomination, saying, “He has Fox News shilling for him every day.” (The Romney campaign has never had the warmest of relationships with Fox News either. They most notably soured after Mr. Romney objected on camera to a line of questioning from Bret Baier.)

Now if Mr. Santorum wants to return to Fox News as a commentator, he would have to negotiate a new contract. The likelihood of that happening seems slim now, given his public hostility toward the network and sentiments running high among executives there that he has burned that bridge.

Still, there have certainly been stranger television pairings lately. Katie Couric and Good Morning America, anyone?

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has bowed out of the race, leaving former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as the presumptive nominee.

The former Pennsylvania senator made the announcement at a news conference in Gettysburg in his home state.

“While this presidential race is over for me, we are not done fighting,” said Mr Santorum.

The social conservative had been campaigning ahead of Pennsylvania’s primary on 24 April.

But he was far behind Mr Romney in terms of funding and the number of delegates needed to seal the nomination at the Republican convention in Tampa, Florida, in late August.

It was a powerful concept, but Santorum could not manage to execute it. He fused one gimmick (a concessionary tax rate for manufacturing industry) to the generic Republican platform that favors the old and the wealthy over the young and the striving.

To some degree, Santorum was constrained by inner factors: his own strong ideological commitments.

But even more, he was constrained by the Republican campaign map. The activist economic program needed to accomplish what Santorum declared he wished to accomplish—stabilize working-class employment and thus working-class families—is simply anathema to the donors, media institutions, and activists who sway Republican primaries.

Santorum dwindled into the candidate of ideological purity. It’s a strange kind of working-class champion who also sees eye-to-eye with the Club for Growth and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Yet the need Santorum identified remains a genuine need indeed. Is there some way for the party of markets and enterprise to speak for the economic aspirations of a larger segment of the population than Santorum’s party speaks for today? For that matter, than Santorum himself was ever able to speak to?

The person who finds that way will be the next Republican president. And I greatly fear that we won’t see another Republican president until that way is found.

Now that Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign, and Newt Gingrich is focusing his efforts on the convention , Mitt Romney still faces one opponent with money: Representative Ron Paul . And on Tuesday, Mr. Paul was campaigning in Texas, his home state, which votes on May 29, to show that the Republican contest was still registering a slight pulse.

Mr. Paul was visiting Texas A & M University as part of a three-day swing through the state, which also included stops in Fort Worth and San Antonio. And showing how much the campaign is focused on collecting delegates in Texas, it produced a video before Mr. Santorum’s suspension that employs a Texas twang to take swipes at Mr. Santorum (labeling him a “big spending, debt-ceiling raising fiscal liberal”), Newt Gingrich (“the moon colony guy”) and Mitt Romney (“the moderate from Massachusetts”).

Of course, at this stage Mr. Paul is little more than a distraction to Mr. Romney, and the two candidates are said to be quite fond of each other. Until now, Mr. Santorum had also been pinning some of his hopes on Texas, which, with its 155 delegates, has the most delegates of any contest to date.

After Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, speculation turned to Newt Gingrich, whose candidacy continued despite long odds.

But Mr. Gingrich was quick to squelch any notions that he, too, would exit the Republican race.

“I am committed to staying in this race all the way to Tampa so that the conservative movement has a real choice,” Mr. Gingrich said in a statement shortly after Mr. Santorum stepped down. “I humbly ask Senator Santorum’s supporters to visit Newt.org to review my conservative record and join us as we bring these values to Tampa.”

Mr. Gingrich said Sunday on Fox News that Mr. Romney was “far and away” the likely nominee. But he also said he would remain in the race to influence the party’s platform, citing his positions on oil drilling and personal retirement accounts as an alternative to Social Security.

For more than a month, the Gingrich and Santorum campaigns traded calls for the other to withdraw so conservatives could unite behind a single alternative to Mr. Romney.

That essentially is the situation for Rick Santorum. He is all suited up and ready to go. “The clock starts tonight,” he told supporters here Tuesday night, hoping to start fresh after losses in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

But as far as supporters of Mitt Romney are concerned that clock has run out.

“Whether Rick Santorum stays in or not, it’s now basically irrelevant,” Senator John McCain said Wednesday morning on CNN. Mr. Romney has already moved to a different track and is running a different race against a different opponent — President Obama.

“Mitt has a lot of ground to make up,” Mr. McCain said. “It’s been a very nasty primary. His unfavorables are high. I’m confident that he will do very well. But the fact is that every day that goes by without being in the general election campaign mode is a day lost. He realizes that and I think you’re going to see — already you’re seeing the opening shots in a very spirited campaign.”

The question now is the degree to which Mr. Romney bothers to compete with Mr. Santorum here in Pennsylvania, Mr. Santorum’s former home state, which votes on April 24. A few other states, including New York, vote on that date too, and are expected to back Mr. Romney. But Pennsylvania will be the focal point over the next three weeks, in part because Mr. Santorum, who represented the state for 16 years in Washington, has declared it to be his firewall.

At this point, both sides are trying to manage expectations.

The latest fad seems to be articles claiming that if the Supreme Court declares President Obama’s health care bill to be unconstitutional, it would be good news for him politically. This position has been argued by the Democratic pollster Mark Penn , the Democratic strategist Bob Shrum and CNN’s James Carville, among others.

The theory seems to rest on the notion that Mr. Obama could use the health care bill to rally his base, either by railing against the Supreme Court or by trying to advance a new plan.

There are a few basic problems with it:

1. Mr. Obama does not face a major problem with his base, but his standing is tenuous with swing voters.

2. Among swing voters, the health care bill is not very popular.

3. The Supreme Court declaring the health care bill unconstitutional will not make it more popular among swing voters.

In an online town-hall-style meeting last week, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of having a presidential policy intended to “see energy prices rise,” and he mocked the president for once saying that he would like gasoline prices to “change gradually.”

“They have put in place policies that are designed to reduce our production of fossil-based fuels and drive up the cost of energy and therefore encourage people to move towards wind and solar which are of course much higher cost,” Mr. Romney said in the Google hangout .

But Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has in the past appeared much more open to the notion that rising energy costs could be good for the American economy. In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Mr. Romney described a gradual increase in the cost of energy as the kind of market-based incentive that conservatives could embrace.

While not suggesting particular policies that might lead to higher prices — like an increase in the gas tax , a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan — Mr. Romney praised the benefits that would flow from a slowly increasing cost of energy.

“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”

In the book, Mr. Romney called for greater domestic exploration and drilling. And he expressed concern about the collateral damage from higher energy prices on people who drive great distances, businesses that consume a lot of energy and people on fixed incomes.

But he acknowledged that allowing the price for gas and oil to rise could be the centerpiece of “game-changing incentives” that would alter consumer behavior when it came to buying cars and using electricity. That, he wrote, could help the country wean itself off an overreliance on foreign oil.

By the end of April we may have a Republican nominee for president. Republicans are coalescing around Romney, as he has picked up recent endorsements from party leaders past (George H.W. Bush), present (Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan) and future (Marco Rubio). Meanwhile the primary calendar is set to give the frontrunner a boost this week.

The widespread perception is that Romney has had the steady backing of the GOP establishment. In fact, it appeared that way only because his opponents were so unappealing, or even unserious, in the eyes of most influential Republicans, that they received even fewer endorsements. By historical standards Romney has actually lagged behind past favorites. As BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller notes, “George W. Bush locked up 44 Senate endorsements before the South Carolina primary, and had more than half of the House’s 222 Republicans backing him by May of 1999—well over a year before the election. But to date, Mitt Romney has only gathered the endorsements of 91 Republican members of Congress—including just 17 senators.”

On Tuesday Maryland, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., will hold their primaries. Washington is considered such friendly territory for Romney that Santorum’s campaign claims he will be no worse off for not having even gotten onto the ballot. Maryland, being a liberal Northern state, is also Romney country. The Washington Post reports, “the often overlooked and bulging moderate middle of the Maryland GOP will be relevant—at least for a day. In the state’s first competitive presidential primary in a generation, polls and interviews suggest an overwhelming number of Republicans will vote for Mitt Romney.”

Santorum’s only chance at slowing Romney’s momentum will be in Wisconsin. Santorum has been competitive in industrial MidWest, but he has yet to score a decisive win there. MidWestern states have competing characteristics, some of which favor Romney and some Santorum. They tend to have lower education and income levels than the Northeast. That helps Santorum, who does better with less wealthy and educated voters. But they have fewer evangelicals than the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West. Generally, Santorum only wins in states where evangelical or born again Christians are a majority of Republican primary voters.

Romney is following his standard playbook in Wisconsin and massively outspending his opponents. His Super PAC, Restore Our Future, has spent $2,687,938, compared to $735,093 from Santorum’s Red White and Blue Fund.

Polls show Romney leading Santorum by an average of seven or eight points in Wisconsin. The New York Times’ statistical guru Nate Silver gives Romney a 91 percent chance of victory.

After Tuesday Santorum’s last stand will be the April 24 Pennsylvania primary. The other states to vote on April 23—Delaware, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut—are likely to favor Romney. Santorum has conceded that he must win his home state to stay viable. If Romney is able to win Pennsylvania and sweep the April primaries, the nomination could be settled and pundit fantasies of a brokered convention in Tampa would be an ancient memory by August.

APPLETON, Wis. — Refusing to concede the inevitability of Mitt Romney‘s candidacy, Rick Santorum said a contested Republican convention in August would be “energizing” for the party.

“People say going to the convention would be dangerous – no,” he told reporters on Monday, the day before Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C., go to the polls. Behind in voter surveys in all three contests, Mr. Santorum offered a view very different than that of a rising number of Republican leaders who have called for the party to unify behind Mr. Romney and pivot to take on President Obama.

And Mr. Santorum maintained that a contested convention would fire up voters and, moreover, the shortest possible head-to-head matchup with Mr. Obama before the November vote would favor Republicans.

“I would argue even if it ends up in a convention, that’s a positive thing for the Republican Party,” he said. “That’s a positive thing for activating and energizing our folks heading into this fall election.”

Rather than sundering the party, a contested convention in Tampa “would be a fascinating display of open democracy,” Mr. Santorum said, adding, “I think it would be an energizing thing for our party to have a candidate emerge who isn’t the blessed candidate of the Republican establishment. It makes this election a short election, the shorter this election in the fall, the better off we are, not the worse.”

US President Barack Obama is hosting three-way talks at the White House with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Talks usually centre on border issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

This year the summit could also touch on a disputed US-Canada oil pipeline.

President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon are meeting weeks before a broader regional summit to be held in Colombia.

The Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, is to be held in two weeks’ time.

No major agreements are expected to be signed at Monday’s summit, which will see the three leaders hold a joint news conference.

The meeting was originally planned to take place in Hawaii in November, but had to be rescheduled after a top Mexican official was killed in a helicopter crash.

A US Republican at the forefront of efforts to cut government spending has become the latest big endorsement for presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The congressional budget committee chairman has been floated as a possible vice-presidential pick for Mr Romney.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio and former President George H W Bush also backed the former Massachusetts governor week.

Mr Ryan’s endorsement comes four days ahead of a Republican presidential primary in his home state of Wisconsin.

“I think he deserves to be the nominee. I think he earned it,” Representative Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “He has emerged as the best candidate.”

Mr Ryan echoed other Republican calls to support Mr Romney and avoid a drawn-out fight for the nomination. The winner will challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in November’s election.

“I believe it’s getting to the point where it’s going to become counter-productive if the primary drags on,” Mr Ryan said. “It’s going to get much tougher to defeat Barack Obama in the fall.”

But Mr Romney’s closest rival, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, has vowed to continue fighting for the nomination until the party convention in August. Nor has Newt Gingrich, who is trailing in the race, shown any willingness to step aside.

Mr Ryan is expected to campaign in Wisconsin with Mr Romney. Polls suggest the former Massachusetts governor is leading by several points in the state.

It’s likely that some taxpayers won’t be satisfied with that answer, because Bush’s campaign cost the state on average half of what Perry’s cost, even when the figures are adjusted for inflation.

Perry’s bill works out to an average of $22,500 a day for his out-of-state political activities during the 160 days he was in the presidential race.

Before the Secret Service took over Bush’s security at the end of March 2000, the Texas Department of Public Safety spent $3.9 on Bush’s out-of-state security, state records show.

When you run that through the Commerce Department’s cost of living inflation adjustment formula, Bush’s bill was about $5.25 million in today’s money. But that was spread over 455 days from Jan. 1, 1999, to March 31, 2000 — an average of only $11,428 a day.

The Houston Chronicle reported that while Perry’s campaign generally paid for his personal travel expenses, his security detail is paid through the state gasoline tax and vehicle registration fees.

“One way to protect taxpayers’ money is by not spending it unnecessarily,” Texas House Democratic leader Jessica Farrar said in a letter to Perry in January, when the bill was still only $2.6 million, NBC station KXAN of Austin reported at the time. “If someone discovers tax dollars have been spent unnecessarily, it should be reimbursed either to general revenue or directly to taxpayers.”

Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who along with his wife has used a superPAC to pour about $15 million worth of support behind Newt Gingrich’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination, told reporters earlier this week that the former House speaker’s campaign appears to be “at the end of his line.”

Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who has been the biggest backer to a group supporting Newt Gingrich, said this week that Mr. Gingrich had reached “the end of his line” in his bid for the presidency.

Mr. Adelson, whose family has contributed more than $15 million to a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Gingrich, made the comments in a brief interview with The Jewish Journal at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas.

After singing Mr. Gingrich’s praises, Mr. Adelson responded to a reporter’s comment that the candidate was not likely to be the Republican presidential nominee.

“No, no. I know. I know. It appears as though he’s at the end of his line,” Mr. Adelson said. “Because mathematically, he can’t get anywhere near the numbers, and there’s unlikely to be a brokered convention.”

The acknowledgement came even as The Washington Times reported on Thursday that Mr. Gingrich had secretly met with Mitt Romney in Louisiana over the weekend.

Business groups that worked hard to install a Republican majority in the House equated Republican control with a business-friendly environment. But the majority is first and foremost a conservative political force, and on key issues, its ideology is not always aligned with commercial interests that helped finance election victories.

“Free market is not always the same as pro-business,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative political action committee Club for Growth.

There could be real-world consequences to the conservative rebellion. The 90-day extension of the highway trust fund that House Republican leaders say they will pass this week in lieu of a broad highway bill would keep existing projects moving for now. But business groups say few new government-funded infrastructure projects can get under way without longer-range certainty about federal backing.

Florida senator and conservative favourite Marco Rubio has endorsed Mitt Romney in the race for the US Republican presidential nomination.

Mr Rubio, speaking on Fox News, said Mr Romney would be an impressive president and an improvement over the “disastrous” Barack Obama.

He would not be drawn on frequent speculation that he could be named as Mr Romney’s vice-presidential pick.

On Thursday former President George H W Bush will also endorse Mr Romney.

Rick Santorum, who once held a wide lead in the polls in his home state of Pennsylvania, has lost substantial ground to Mitt Romney among Republican voters over the last month, according to a new poll.

He leads now by just 2 percentage points, creating an opening for the Romney team to move in with overwhelming force and try to shut down Mr. Santorum’s quest for the presidential nomination in the state’s primary on April 24.

Mr. Santorum’s support has shrunk to 30 percentage points while Mr. Romney’s has grown to 28 percentage points, putting him within the poll’s margin of sampling error of 4 percentage points. The poll was conducted March 20-25 by Franklin & Marshall College for several news organizations in the state.

In February, Mr. Santorum led Mr. Romney in the same poll 45 percent to 26 percent, a difference of 19 percentage points.

The Romney camp has expected Mr. Santorum to win Pennsylvania’s popular vote, or the “beauty contest,” while believing Mr. Romney could at least break even in the unrelated and more important race for delegates.

Mitt Romney opened a “tele-town hall” with Wisconsin voters on Wednesday afternoon with what he described as a “humorous” story highlighting his connections to the state. But not everyone found the story, about his father closing a Michigan factory, quite so funny.

“You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors and they made Ramblers and Jeeps, and they had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wis., and another one in Milwaukee, Wis.,” Mr. Romney began. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Mr. Romney continued, chuckling at points:

“And I recall at one parade where he was going down the street, he was led by a band — they had a high school band that was leading each of the candidates — and his band did not know how to play the Michigan fight song, it only knew how to play the Wisconsin fight song. So every time they would start playing ‘On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin.”

The story, however, struck some as a bit too close to home for Mr. Romney, whose opponents have said he closed factories and eliminated jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital, a private equity firm.

Democrats quickly pounced on the anecdote, citing it as another example of what they say is Mr. Romney’s inability to understand the concerns of average Americans.

“Adding to his list of completely out-of-touch moments, today Mitt Romney recounted to Wisconsin voters on a tele-town hall a ‘humorous’ story about his father closing a factory in Michigan,” Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for President Obama’s re-election campaign, wrote in an e-mail. And the Democratic National Committee also began sending out links to articles recounting the moment, saying, “File this one under the ever-growing ‘Romney wealth gaffes’ category.”

Former US President George H W Bush is to formally endorse Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the former governor’s campaign says.

The two will appear together on Thursday in Houston, Texas, Romney spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said.

There have been calls for challengers Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich to quit the race, so the party can unite behind Mr Romney as its White House nominee.

It emerged on Tuesday the Gingrich campaign had been scaled down.

Former Massachusetts Governor Romney is way ahead in the Republican race to become the challenger to Democratic President Barack Obama in November’s election.

Mr Bush, president from 1989 to 1993, said in December that Mr Romney was “the best choice” for the nomination, but stopped short of a full endorsement.

His wife, former First Lady Barbara Bush, recorded automated telephone calls for Mr Romney during the primary in Ohio.

Earlier this month, their son, Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, became the latest party heavyweight to back Mr Romney.

LA JOLLA, Calif. — If the news last summer that Mitt Romney had a $12 million expansion planned for his oceanfront property here helped portray him as a member of the top 1 percent, the new disclosure that the renovation includes elevators for his four-car garage is not likely to burnish his image as a man of the people.

Plans for the expansion, first reported by Politico and later obtained by The New York Times from a rival campaign, include a split-level, four-car garage with a “car lift,” an outdoor shower, and a 3,600-square-foot basement.

A visit to the Romneys’ beachside property on Monday — one of three properties Mr. Romney and his wife, Ann, own — revealed a modest home for the wealthy enclave (at least from a street view) at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. But an official city “Notice of Application” from April 2010 highlighted the changes to come: plans to “demolish the existing residence and construct a new, approximately 8,105-square-foot, single-family residence on a 0.41 acre site.”

Mr. Romney’s pre-expansion home, which sits perched atop a concrete seawall and is further separated from the beach by a locked gate, offers stunning views of the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Romney had spent the weekend at his La Jolla home after an event in San Diego. On Monday, no signs of Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, could be found, though a group of teenagers smoking cigarettes sunned themselves against the seawall, and a homeless man set up camp a bit further down the beach.

The Romney campaign said that a “car elevator” was simply a mechanism for storing cars in tight spaces, but that hasn’t stopped Mr. Romney’s rivals from jumping on the details of the planned expansion. In an e-mail on Tuesday, Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for President Obama’s re-election campaign, wrote, “But while Governor Romney has been quite specific about putting the finishing touches on his car elevator in La Jolla, he has hid many of his domestic and foreign policy plans under lock and key.”

Newt Gingrich is acknowledging that it is impossible for him to win the Republican presidential nomination outright and is cutting back on his staff and campaign schedule to focus on emerging victorious at the party’s convention this summer.

The change in strategy was described Tuesday night by Joe DeSantis, the campaign’s communications director, who said that one-third of Mr. Gingrich’s staff would soon leave, including the campaign manager, Michael Krull. The changes were first reported by Politico.

Mr. DeSantis said that Mr. Gingrich accepts that he cannot win enough delegates to clinch the nomination. But the campaign believes that it’s not likely for Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum to do so either. In that case, he said, the campaign will enter a “tossup period” this summer.

“We’re going to make sure Newt is ready to win that 60-day period,” Mr. DeSantis said. “What we’re going to be doing is focus on a campaign strategy that takes it to Obama.”

The idea, he said, was to convince unpledged delegates and those who have backed another candidate to see Mr. Gingrich as the best challenger for Mr. Obama in the fall.

RACINE, Wis. — Mitt Romney remains his biggest foe, but Rick Santorum is increasingly confronting an even more daunting obstacle: a rising chorus of Republicans calling for the divisive presidential contest to end so the party can turn its full attention to defeating President Obama.

A new chapter is opening in the Republican nominating fight, where patience is turning to restlessness as the contest moves into April with no conclusion in sight. Mr. Santorum on Sunday renewed his pledge to stay in the race, emboldened by a sweeping weekend victory in Louisiana, which he said proved that conservative voters “still want to see someone who they can trust.”

The question facing Mr. Santorum was not whether he intended to press forward with his candidacy, but whether he should. The delicate subject has been raised by party leaders and rank-and-file Republicans who say their motivation to defeat Mr. Obama trumps any differences between Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney.

“Pick any other Republican in the country, but he is the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama,” Mr. Santorum told supporters here on Sunday evening, saying Mr. Romney’s record on health care was disqualifying. “We need someone who can go out and rally the Republican base.”

The delegate scorecard overwhelmingly favors Mr. Romney, but Mr. Santorum has now carried 10 states, only 6 fewer than Mr. Romney. The Wisconsin primary on April 3, with a Republican electorate that is more rural and working class than many other states voting in the next month, offers one of the best opportunities for Mr. Santorum to keep his aspirations alive, even as leading Republicans hope for a resolution.

Rick Santorum has won the Republican presidential primary in the southern US state of Louisiana, US media project.

Mr Santorum is seeking to close the gap on front-runner Mitt Romney to become the party’s nominee to challenge Barack Obama’s in November’s election.

Mr Romney has so far won 21 out of 33 contests to Mr Santorum’s 10.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, now in third place, is struggling to reinvigorate his campaign, and Texan Ron Paul has yet to win a poll.

A “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney spent more than $12 million in February, most of it on ads attacking his rivals, as Mr. Romney battled them in seven primaries and caucuses that month, according to campaign filings released on Tuesday. The group, Restore Our Future, raised about $6.4 million, more than some of the candidates in the race are expected to report.

In what has become a weekly ritual, President Obama on Thursday defended his administration’s energy policy, in the face of relentlessly rising gasoline prices, to an American public that believes he can do more to ease the pain at the pump.

Mr. Obama cycled through now-familiar themes, promoting his record of increased domestic oil and gas production; stricter fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks; and investments in alternative sources of energy, like biofuels, wind and solar power. The administration’s energy policy has been the focus of many speeches the president has given in recent weeks.

But on Thursday he delivered a notably sarcastic rebuttal to his Republican presidential challengers, particularly Newt Gingrich , who has promised, if elected, to bring down gas prices to $2.50 a gallon, and has ridiculed the president’s talk of making fuel from algae .

Without naming Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Obama said these gibes – by people “who are running for a certain office” – revealed a streak of ignorance similar to those who predicted that cars would not supplant horse-drawn buggies or that television would never elbow out radio.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Mr. Obama said to a cheering crowd at Prince George’s Community College here. “They would not have believed the earth was round.”

Turning the spotlight on the remarks of his opponents may make sense because Mr. Obama’s defense of his role in rising gas prices rests on an uncomfortable claim: he cannot do much about it. It was a theme he struck again on Thursday

“There’s no silver bullet,” the president declared. “Anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t really looking for a solution; they’re trying to ride the political wave of the moment.”

The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that’s crazy.”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan – which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits – is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.

Modern-day Republicans have become, quite simply, the Party of the One Percent – the Party of the Rich.

Mitt Romney’s big victories in Illinois and Puerto Rico this week have expanded his lead over Rick Santorum by roughly 60 delegates, putting him ahead by 300 delegates over all.

Increasingly, the nomination race is entering an endgame stage in which it is less a two-man contest between Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum than one that pits Mr. Romney against himself. How certain is Mr. Romney to get the 1,144 delegates required to clinch the Republican nomination? And if he gets them, how soon will he do it?

Mr. Romney, who has 563 delegates, according to an Associated Press count, is almost halfway to the clinching threshold. But the voting calendar is now entering a slower phase that will persist for the next five weeks, until five Northeastern states vote on April 24, with 209 delegates at stake.

The soonest that Mr. Romney could officially clinch the nomination is May 22, when Arkansas and Kentucky vote. That situation would require Mr. Romney to win at least 95 percent of the delegates in Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Indiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, Oregon and the District of Columbia, and to receive endorsements by virtually all of the Republican Party’s 77 undecided superdelegates by that time.

Some of those states, of course, are not so strong for Mr. Romney. And even if he won 70 percent of the delegates in those states, as well as in Texas, which votes on May 29, he would still need to wait until June 5 — when California and New Jersey vote — to clinch the nomination.

This sort of calculation, however, can sometimes be taken too literally. Barack Obama has yet to clinch the Democratic nomination officially , for instance, but there is no real doubt about the outcome.

The more telling number, therefore, may be this one: Mr. Romney has so far won 56 percent of the delegates, according to the Associated Press count. That is, obviously, more than half — in fact, Mr. Romney’s share of the delegates as calculated on this basis has steadily been inching upward over the course of the last month.

It’s also enough to permit him some slack. Mr. Romney would need to win only 46 percent of the remaining delegates to get to 1,144.

There is no reason to think that the remaining states will be much better or worse for Mr. Romney than the ones that have already voted. He should do well in places like California and New York, but more poorly in states like North Carolina and Texas.

If the remaining states play out according to their demographics, as prior ones have, Mr. Romney should continue to win slightly more than half of the delegates on average. If he wins slightly less than half, he should still have no real problems.

Until recently, of course, the Republican race had been highly volatile — perhaps introducing the possibility that Mr. Romney could go through a pronounced slump and fail to hit his delegate targets for weeks at a time.

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul’s slim hopes of winning the Republican presidential nomination depend primarily on their ability to triumph at a contested convention in August. The idea is that if front-runner Mitt Romney falls short of the 1,144 delegates he needs to secure the nomination outright before the convention, his rivals will seize the opportunity to win over the Republican faithful during the convention process.

That long-shot strategy depends on Gingrich and Paul actually getting on the convention ballot. And it now appears that may be a problem. The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has noticed a little-known rule - No. 40(b), to be exact - that would seem to keep the two candidates from being able to participate in a floor fight.

The rule was adopted in 2008, and here’s what it says : “Each candidate for nomination for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States shall demonstrate the support of a plurality of the delegates from each of five (5) or more states, severally, prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.”

Gingrich has won a plurality in two states so far, South Carolina and Georgia; Paul has not won any states. The Republican National Convention confirms to CBS News that this means a candidate would not qualify for the first ballot at the convention unless they get, as the rule states, a plurality of delegates in five states.

On MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” Wednesday morning, RNC Chairman Reince Preibus said the rule is “important.”

“So when these candidates are adding up their delegates or when people out there have a particular issue that they would like to move at the convention, they had better make sure they at least have a plurality of five states to make these things happen,” he said.

The Gingrich camp did not immediately respond to questions about how the rule affects their strategies. Paul campaign chairman Jesse Benton said he anticipated meeting the five-state threshold, saying in an email that “we are well positioned to carry WA, MN, AK, ND and ME among several others.”

It’s possible that even if Gingrich or Paul’s delegates can’t vote for their candidate on the first ballot, they could do so on subsequent ballots if Gingrich and/or Paul garners the support of a plurality of delegates from at least five states during the fight on the convention floor. Under Republican National Committee rules, Gingrich or Paul would need to be formally nominated after the first ballot for this to happen, and demonstrate their support in five states when this happens. It’s an extremely unlikely scenario, though technically possible.

MANDEVILLE, La. – Wielding a classic red Etch A Sketch toy on stage before a crowd of Tea Party supporters on Wednesday, Rick Santorum made a mockery of Mitt Romney’s campaign, pointing out that he would not be redrawn.

“This is the first of what I’m now going to call my Etch A Sketch tour of America,” Mr. Santorum said to wild applause. He laughed; he shook the toy. He was literally playing before the crowd.

“I’m a candidate who stands firmly on the rock of freedom, not on the sands of an Etch A Sketch,” Mr. Santorum said. “Make that difference, reset this race. Give us a chance.”

“If you do that, you do your work,” he continued, “we win Louisiana. We’ll start this race again, and we’ll be on the road to nominating a conservative, and when we nominate a conservative, we will defeat Barack Obama and change this country.”

The playfulness Mr. Santorum was able to inject into his stump speech thanks to the Etch A Sketch provided some needed levity to a campaign that was slumping a bit after its second-place finish in the Illinois primary on Tuesday. Mr. Santorum began the day in Louisiana on Wednesday on a flat note, speaking to a crowd of no more than two dozen people about the economy. He stressed what he called the need for more oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to provide jobs and stimulate the local economy.

But Mr. Santorum did not hit his stride until he crossed Lake Pontchartrain and re-emerged before the Northshore Tea Party with his new Etch A Sketch.

It was his moment to seize.

Earlier on Wednesday, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign had said that Mr. Romney would “hit a reset button” for the fall campaign, and would change as a candidate, “almost like an Etch A Sketch.”

In contrast to his earlier appearance, Mr. Santorum was more animated, and the response he got from the crowd – perhaps 250 people – was much more enthusiastic.

At one point, the audience broke into a chant, screaming, “Rick, Rick, Rick!”

They laughed, too.

There is, perhaps, no more enduring critique of Mitt Romney than the one about him having shaky principles that shift with the political winds.

So it may not have been particularly helpful when one of his top advisers on Wednesday suggested that Mr. Romney’s campaign views the Republican race as an Etch a Sketch toy that can be shaken up and redrawn from scratch.

“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, said on CNN. “Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch a Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

An Etch a Sketch? The toy where nothing is permanent? Where one picture makes way for another with a few shakes by a 2-year-old?

Hours after he secured the endorsement of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney credited his brother, President George W. Bush, with keeping the country from a great depression in 2008.

“I keep hearing the president say he’s responsible for keeping the country out of a Great Depression,” Romney said at a town hall in Arbutus, Maryland. “No, no, no, that was President George W. Bush and [then-Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson.”

With the economy turning around, Romney appears intent on denying President Barack Obama ownership of the recovery, as he’s previously argued that any reduction in unemployment has occurred despite Obama’s policies.

Romney’s statement comes in the midst of a tough day for his campaign, following a self-inflicted wound by strategist Eric Fehrnstrom, who compared his candidate’s shift to the general election to shaking an Etch-A-Sketch.

Mitt Romney has secured a key endorsement for his presidential bid from former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Mr Bush, whose support comes the day after Mr Romney secured a clear victory in Illinois, called on Republicans to “unite” behind the Romney campaign.

Correspondents say the backing of the respected Republican leader suggests the party establishment could be coalescing around Mr Romney.

The eventual nominee will challenge Barack Obama in November’s election.

“Primary elections have been held in 34 states, and now is the time for Republicans to unite behind Governor Romney and take our message of fiscal conservatism and job creation to all voters this fall,” Mr Bush said in a statement.

“I am endorsing Mitt Romney for our party’s nomination.

CHICAGO — As Rick Santorum awaits the results of the Republican presidential primary here Tuesday that may or may not go his way, his campaign contends that it is gaining steam in the less visible – but more important – contest for delegates.

In a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, campaign officials asserted that it was gaining on Mitt Romney at the early district and county conventions where actual delegates are being awarded, or pledged, to candidates – regardless of how those states voted in earlier primaries and caucuses.

The campaign reported that in districts that began selecting delegates at smaller party functions in Iowa, Missouri, and Washington, it had gained 80 delegates on Mr. Romney, who, it acknowledged, is still in the lead by a wide margin. The campaign also acknowledged that its figures included projections of what it believed would happen in those states as their delegate selection processes continued in the coming weeks and even months.

The Santorum campaign is arguing, however, that at this clip, it can overtake Mr. Romney in the race to collect the 1,144 delegates needed for the nomination – and that, even if it does not, it is preventing any one candidate from getting to that magic number, forcing a convention floor fight.

Given the ongoing fight for delegates among Mr. Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Mr. Santorum, “as these contests move forward, that makes it more difficult for any candidate to ever get to 1,144,” said John P. Yob, Mr. Santorum’s delegate strategist.

The campaign is making its delegate case as it girds for a hard month in April when the electoral terrain appears – for now at least – to favor Mr. Romney; it says it expects to emerge in much better shape in May, when several Southern states vote. But should Mr. Santorum endure a string of losses in the coming weeks, he will need to point to other factors that argue in his favor, with the delegate chase at the county, district and state Republican conventions being chief among them.

The delegate count is a moving target, affected by a labyrinth of state and national party rules as well as the evolving preferences of a number of “unbound delegates” who are free to attach themselves to whomever they see fit at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., in August.

Mr. Romney’s campaign is expecting most of those unbound delegates to go with him, and has argued that Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich face impossible odds in getting to 1,144 delegates through the remaining primaries and caucuses. A win in Illinois on Tuesday would give the Romney campaign more ammunition in arguing that it is on its way to doing so.

Then again, the final results of the delegate race in Illinois will not be decided until the Republican state convention — in June.

The Santorum campaign appears to be taking a slightly new tack on Newt Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. Instead of calling on Mr. Gingrich to drop out of the race, they called for Mr. Gingrich’s supporters to come to their side. “It’s time for Gingrich supporters to get behind us if they truly want to have a conservative candidate; it’s up to Newt Gingrich to decide what his future is,” John Brabender, Mr. Santorum’s top strategist, told reporters after Mr. Santorum and a crowd of about 200 people had left the hotel ballroom here where Mr. Santorum had conceded the Illinois primary. The Santorum campaign has been saying for weeks that Mr. Gingrich was siphoning votes from Mr. Santorum and has all but called for Mr. Gingrich to drop out. Mr. Brabender said that Mr. Gingrich’s support was eroding and that some of his voters had already moved to Mr. Santorum, but he took a more welcoming approach than he had in the past. “We need not only Gingrich supporters,” he said. “We would love to have Newt Gingrich be an important voice for our campaign, quite frankly. We would like to have people who are working for Gingrich to be working for us. We would like some of his fund-raising people to be working for us.” He said those Gingrich supporters had to ask themselves if their goal was to have a conservative nominee, in which case, “it’s time to unify.”

With the Illinois loss hanging heavily in the air, Mr. Brabender stressed that the race was now an incremental one for delegates.

“People are getting too focused on winning states, and that’s not the contest anymore,” he said. “The contest is winning your share of stuff.”

Rick Santorum delivered his own Gettysburg address twice Tuesday night after he lost the Illinois primary in a blowout to Mitt Romney.

His campaign had set up in a main ballroom here at the Gettysburg Hotel that could hold about 200 people, but many more came to see him.

Instead of one speech in a big room to everyone at once, with all the cameras rolling, he first gave his speech to one crowd as he stood in a hotel hallway.

He then moved into the main ballroom. Noting that Abraham Lincoln had put the finishing touches on his Gettysburg Address at a spot nearby, Mr. Santorum said this was “the most important election since the election of 1860.”

He said his campaign boiled down to “freedom,” a word that hung on a banner behind him at the podium. “While other issues are certainly important,” he said, mentioning the economy, joblessness, national security, the family and life, the “foundational” issue was freedom.

He jabbed at President Obama’s health care overhaul, which has become his chief object lesson when he talks about freedom being threatened. Under that health care law, he said, “every single American will depend on the federal government,” adding, “that’s why this election is so important.

He scoffed at those with “Wall Street experience” but did not much dwell on either Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama. Rather, he played heavily on his blue-collar roots and that he grew up in a steel town in western Pennsylvania where, he said, he saw “how people scraped and clawed” their way to success.

Scraping and clawing is a phrase he uses often, usually in reference to his own campaign. Tuesday night he said that no one was talking about the people who, he said, wear “work clothes.”

It was at this point in his speech, at least 10 minutes into it, that he mentioned he was starting his campaign in Pennsylvania . “We have five weeks to a big win,” he said of the April 24 primary, and he returned again to his parents and grandparents who worked in the mines, “men and women who worked and scraped and clawed so their children could have a better quality of life.”

“They fought for the things that the people of this battlefield just down the road fought for,” he said of his family. “They fought for big things, things that America has always stood for.”

He said he understood “what was sacrificed in the mills and on the battlefields and that’s why we must go out and fight this fight,” and nominate him for president.

“You know in your gut big things are adrift and at stake in this election,” he concluded. He asked everyone to “saddle up,” and said he would be back to Pennsylvania where, he said, “we’re going to pick up a whole boatload of delegates and close this gap.”

Newt Gingrich said Tuesday night that “phase one” for himself and Rick Santorum in the days ahead must be stopping Mitt Romney from getting enough delegates to claim the Republican presidential nomination.

Having skipped campaigning in Illinois and faced with mounting campaign debts, Mr. Gingrich said on Fox News that he was staying in the race because he believes voters would choose him as the nominee after rejecting Mr. Romney.

If Mr. Romney fails to get the 1,144 delegates he needs to wrap up the nomination, Mr. Gingrich said that “then we’ll have a real conversation about who can best beat Barack Obama.”

Mr. Gingrich said that he believes voters would turn to him as the best person to debate Mr. Obama in the fall. He said his repeated discussion about the need to produce more energy in the United States was putting Mr. Obama on the defensive.

“If the key is who can stand here and take him on head to head, I think I’m proving every day,” Mr. Gingrich said. “He is losing this argument over expensive gasoline.”

Mitt Romney came to the University of Chicago Monday afternoon, the day before Illinoisans head to the polls to vote in their Republican primary, and assailed President Obama ’s economic policies in a 19-minute speech that was the first major policy address he has given in weeks.

“For the last three years, Mr. Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people,” Mr. Romney said. “He’s put us deeper in debt, he’s slowed the recovery, he’s harmed our economy, and he has attacked the cornerstone of American prosperity — economic freedom.”

Mr. Romney delivered his speech in a wood-paneled auditorium at the University of Chicago, a bastion of conservative economic thought, and a site right in Mr. Obama’s backyard. (In fact, some reporters drove past the Obamas’ Hyde Park neighborhood on their way to the speech.)

Mr. Romney offered a vision of what he called “economic freedom,” arguing for less regulation and less government intervention, and assailed the Obama administration, arguing that its “assault on freedom could damage our economy and the well-being of American families for decades to come.”

“As you know, this November, we face an important decision,” Mr. Romney said. “Our choice will not be one of party or personality. This election is going to be about principle. Our economic freedom will be on the ballot. And I intend to offer the American people a choice.”

Though Mr. Romney’s speech offered sharp attacks on Mr. Obama’s policies — he did not mention any of his Republican rivals — his remarks were light on new specifics of what he would do as president, instead reiterating many of his policies and proposals that had already been rolled out.

Defying almost all conventional wisdom about the 2012 election, Rick Santorum said the race would not turn on the economy and so it wasn’t important if unemployment and growth rates rose or fell.

Seeking to sharply contrast himself with Mitt Romney, Mr. Santorum waved away economics as he went after his chief rival as insufficiently conservative in his core values.

“I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be,” Mr. Santorum said on Monday, the day before the Illinois primary. “It doesn’t matter. My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. There’s something more foundational that’s going on here.”

Earlier in the day, Mr. Romney had delivered a major speech at the campus of the University of Chicago in which he lambasted President Obama’s economic policies, presenting himself as the Republicans’ best possible opponent. Mr. Santorum, in effect, dismissed Mr. Romney’s wheelhouse issue as irrelevant.

President Obama’s re-election team announced Monday that it had raised $45 million for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee in February, significantly more than the $29.1 million he raised for both committees during January. .

According to Twitter messages, 348,000 people donated last month, about 100,000 of them for the first time.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney raised $11.5 million for the month , according to his campaign, but was closely trailed by Rick Santorum, now his leading rival for the GOP nomination, who raised over $9 million, according to his campaign. Unlike Mr. Obama, who is accepting maximum contributions for both the primary and general election campaign periods, Mr. Romney has been raising only primary contributions. That suggests that his actual pace of fundraising may not be as far behind Mr. Obama’s as those figures would at first suggest, since Mr. Romney’s can return to each of this primary donors again if he becomes his party’s nominee.

Mr. Obama has been raising money at a furious clip amid signs that he has been slow to reconnect with swathes of the vast network of high-dollar donors who, along with grassroots contributors, helped power his dollar haul during the 2008 campaign. On Friday, Mr. Obama’s traveled on a five-event, $4.8 million-dollar “money run ” which included an event featuring Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey.

The candidates are required to report detailed campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission by midnight on Tuesday.

A few months later, Buchanan—by virtue of the votes he’d collected during the primaries—was given the prime speaking slot on the opening night of the Republican Convention. He gave the “Culture War” speech, which appalled independents and helped deliver the election to Clinton. It’s now most famous for the Molly Ivins joke that it “probably sounded better in the original German.”

So my vote for Buchanan in the primary may have had as much effect as my later vote for Clinton in the general. It’s something I’ll be thinking about as I decide which ballot to use on March 20.

By the way, here are some excerpts from Buchanan’s speech:

Friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat–that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.

[…]

Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choice [sic] religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.

[…]

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.

Twenty years later, I can well imagine Santorum giving that same speech.

Mr. Santorum, hurting politically in Pennsylvania because of his defense of the Iraq war and President George W. Bush, had written a book, “It Takes a Family.” It was a blistering attack on liberal “elites” and what he saw as their moral relativism as well as “radical feminists” who, he said, had devalued mothers who preferred staying home rather than going to work.

“I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” recalled David Urban, who had been chief of staff to Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and was close to Mr. Santorum. “ ‘You’re running for re-election! Why not wait till afterward?’ ”

Mr. Urban said Mr. Santorum told him that these were ideas he really believed.

”There are some guys — Paul Wellstone was one,” Mr. Urban said, referring to the liberal Democratic senator from Minnesota, “who know what they believe, they don’t take polls and they don’t worry about the consequences. For him, this book was a big marker.”

That race, which ended in Mr. Santorum’s landslide defeat, nonetheless helped him establish a persona — passionate and polarizing on issues of family and morality, hawkish on terrorism and Israel, eager to cast himself as putting principles ahead of politics.

Those very qualities may have cost him the election in 2006. But they have helped rebrand him as the face of conservatism in 2012 as he challenges Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination.

In 2006, Mr. Santorum was also dogged by criticism from the right — echoed today on the presidential campaign trail — that he was complicit in the big-government conservatism of the Bush years. First elected to Congress in 1990 as a reformer intent on challenging the ways of Washington, he found himself cast as an insider at a time when voters wanted change.

His loss, by 17.4 percentage points, was the biggest for any incumbent senator in Pennsylvania since at least the Civil War, according to G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin and Marshall College. That eyepopping margin is the chief reason that few people took Mr. Santorum seriously last year when he started running for president. How could he get elected anywhere after he had lost his own state so lopsidedly?

Mr. Santorum says he was caught in “a meltdown year” for Republicans, both in Pennsylvania and nationally. That was certainly true. In Pennsylvania, they lost most offices, including four Congressional seats. In Washington, they lost the House and control of the Senate.

But if the climate was harsh, Mr. Santorum was part of it. Always brash, he had become a more rancorous figure since he last faced the voters in 2000. He was No. 3 in his party’s leadership and responsible for its messaging, which often meant either defending Mr. Bush or going on the attack.

And he took high-visibility roles on divisive issues, including abortion, homosexuality and the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo.

”His views were not consistent with the Pennsylvania constituency,” said Mr. Specter, who was later driven from the Republican Party by conservative opposition and lost his Senate seat in 2010. ”I’m talking about women in the workplace, the book, his opposition to birth control — that’s not American, to be opposed to birth control.” (Mr. Santorum says he personally opposes contraception but he has voted to finance it.)

The voters to whom he is appealing this year — mainly conservatives and evangelical Christians — are the same core voters he appealed to in Pennsylvania. But in 2006, they were a minority in the state’s general election; now they dominate the Republican primaries. And they are drawn to Mr. Santorum’s moral certitude, his fire-and-brimstone passion, his pugilistic posture of never giving up and never giving in.

Rick Santorum on Sunday refused to say how he intends to play the endgame of his fight for delegates with Mitt Romney , even as his campaign is preparing behind the scenes for a brokered convention.

It is possible that neither candidate will be able to reach the magic number of 1,144 delegates to claim the Republican presidential nomination going into the August convention.

If Mr. Santorum cannot reach that number, he was asked on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union with Candy Crowley,” would he stay in the race and try to deny Mr. Romney the nomination?

Mr. Santorum did not answer the question. He quibbled about the actual number of delegates that each candidate has. Asked again if he would go for a brokered convention, he said that he was in the race to win and that conservatives wanted to nominate a conservative.

Eventually, Ms. Crowley gave up asking the question.

But his campaign is preparing for that possibility. As The New York Times reported Sunday: “Yet Mr. Santorum has hired a delegate specialist to comb through the patchwork of state-by-state rules and to find unpledged delegates who could swing to him in a floor fight, an effort Mr. Romney’s campaign says it is prepared to counter. Newt Gingrich ’s team is expected to hold on to its delegates even if it is clear that he has fallen short — if only to keep Mr. Romney from reaching a majority.”

Mr. Santorum’s demurring on the matter suggests some concern about how the public might react if he openly advocated for a brokered convention. Such a situation might be entertaining for the media, but it would entrust the decision-making to bosses in backrooms, not to the people at the ballot box.

Mr. Santorum’s fate at a brokered convention would depend on how many delegates he had. But so far, very few of the super delegates and party leaders who would control the process are on Mr. Santorum’s side.

On the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Santorum was similarly evasive on whether he was driving toward a brokered convention. However, when the host, Jonathan Karl, pointed out that Mr. Romney had said that such a convention would doom the party in the fall against President Obama , Mr. Santorum disagreed.

“I don’t think it dooms anybody’s chances,” he replied. He said Mr. Romney was too weak of a candidate to go up against Mr. Obama because their policies — on health care, climate change and bailouts — were too similar. In fact, he said, running against Mr. Romney now made him “feel like I’m doing a training run for the general election.”

The Romney campaign says that Mr. Santorum has repeatedly mischaracterized Mr. Romney’s stances on health care and climate change in particular: Mr. Romney does not support the federal mandate in Mr. Obama’s health care law, nor did he support cap-and-trade legislation.

In other matters, Mr. Santorum was asked about a new item on his Web site in which he says President Obama’s Justice Department “seems to favor pornographers over children and families.”

Asked on CNN to back up that assertion, Mr. Santorum said: “Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously than they are under existing law, than they are under the Obama administration. So you draw your conclusion.”

He said his own conclusion was that the Obama administration had not made these cases a priority, which, he said, means “they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm.”

Mr. Santorum reiterated his view that speaking English was a prerequisite for territories to join the United States.

In a visit last week to Puerto Rico, Mr. Santorum had told a local newspaper, regarding the island’s upcoming referendum on statehood: “They would have to speak English. That would be a requirement. It’s a requirement that we put on other states. It is a condition for entering the Union.”

There are no such requirements now, nor is speaking English in the United States Constitution.

Mr. Santorum recalibrated his comments later while he was still in Puerto Rico, saying he meant only that English was the language of opportunity. But on “This Week” on Sunday, Mr. Santorum suggested there had been such requirements in the past.

“There were requirements — yes, there were requirements put on other states when they came into the union that English be the principal language and that it be taught and spoken universally in those states,” he said. “And so it was a condition of admission to statehood.”

Rick Santorum continues to be haunted by his previous support for Arlen Specter, his one-time fellow Republican senator from Pennsylvania.

Mr. Specter was a moderate who supported abortion rights when he announced in 1995 that he was running for president. (That was the year before Bill Clinton would win re-election.)

On Sunday, on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Santorum was shown a video clip of that announcement. In the clip, Mr. Santorum, a strong opponent of abortion rights, stood behind Mr. Specter on the dais as Mr. Specter declared, “I want to take abortion out of politics.” Abortion, he said, should “be decided by women, not by big government.”

Mr. Santorum, who is in a heated campaign against Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, was asked on Sunday why he had supported Mr. Specter’s presidential candidacy, which was based largely on a single issue with which he disagreed.

Mr. Santorum said that Mr. Specter was a colleague and had asked for his support. Besides, he said, his candidacy was “going nowhere,” suggesting the endorsement was more pro forma than anything else.

“That certainly was not one of my prouder moments I look back on,” Mr. Santorum said on Sunday. “But look, you know, you work together as a team for the state of Pennsylvania. And I felt that Senator Specter had stood up and supported me when I was running in 1994, and I did likewise.”

He added: “I certainly knew that Arlen Specter was going nowhere. I certainly disagreed with a lot of things that he said, and it was something I look back on and wish I hadn’t done.”

The Romney campaign has tried to use Mr. Santorum’s support for Mr. Specter to suggest that Mr. Santorum is not as purely conservative as he claims — and that he plays by insider Washington “team” rules, like backing Mr. Specter, even if he disagrees on a major issue.

Mitt Romney and his advisers pride themselves on vigorously pursuing every delegate in every corner of the country in their quest to secure the Republican presidential nomination.

That was not the case here at the Railyard Steakhouse, where Republicans convened their Chariton County caucus on Thursday evening. They voted to pledge their full share of delegates to Rick Santorum — without a word of objection from the Romney campaign.

The Republicans here were simply following the results of the February primary, which Mr. Santorum won by 30 percentage points. The Romney campaign argued that the contest was meaningless because no delegates were at stake.

Yet Mr. Santorum’s victory has had a lingering effect. This became clear here in Brunswick, a small town about two hours east of Kansas City, which offered a peek into the process that will unfold across Missouri on Saturday when Republicans convene caucuses to begin the arduous process of selecting delegates in the presidential campaign.

A quirk of election law makes Missouri the only state this year to essentially allow voters to take two attempts at choosing their favorite candidate. The first came during a primary in February, which was dismissed as a beauty contest, but one that gave Mr. Santorum a boost of momentum. The second comes on Saturday.

In Brunswick, where Republicans decided to hold their caucuses two days early, the first question of the evening was whether to bind delegates to results of the primary. The measure passed by a wide margin and with no discussion, sending four delegates on behalf of Mr. Santorum and none for Mr. Romney or Representative Ron Paul of Texas, to the district convention in April and to the state convention in June.

“All of our county delegates will be bound to the popular vote for Chariton County,” said Andrea Rice, the county Republican chairwoman, who presided over the meeting and reminded caucusgoers that Mr. Santorum had carried the county by 58 percent.

A handful of people wearing shirts for Mr. Paul did not openly object, but chatted quietly among themselves and voted against the measure to bind the delegates. No one challenged the proposal on behalf of the Romney campaign, but Ms. Rice said a local Romney supporter was in the room.

A spokesman for the Missouri Republican Party said that all counties had the option to use Mr. Santorum’s victory in the primary as a starting point in their selection of delegates if they chose. The Romney campaign said that it would push back against using the primary result, but there was no such rebuttal offered here in Brunswick, where a reporter dropped by unannounced.

Mr. Santorum, who visited Missouri on Friday and is set to be on hand at two caucus locations on Saturday morning, is making a robust effort to win the majority of the state’s 52 delegates. It is part of the campaign’s county-by-county strategy to try to outflank Mr. Romney and catch him in the delegate race.