Republicans look over horizon to Super Tuesday - AP - msnbc.com

WASHINGTON — Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, battling furiously for the most conservative perch before the critical Michigan primary vote on Tuesday, also are looking just over the horizon a bonanza of delegates in the 10-state nominating contests that fall on one day just a week later.

Romney and Santorum are virtually tied heading into the critical Michigan vote where the outcome could further boost Romney's tenuous front-runner position or upend the race for the party's nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in November. Michiganders vote on the same day as Arizona Republicans. Polls show Romney with a clear lead in the conservative far-Western state.

The Michigan showdown will be a warmup to the one looming March 6 in neighboring Ohio, one of the 10 states that hold nominating contests on what is know as Super Tuesday.

Santorum, who is banking on a move to the hard right, called Obama a "snob" over the weekend for promoting higher education for all young Americans who want to continue their education.

"President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob," Santorum said. "There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh I understand why he wants you to go to college he wants to remake you in his image."

Speaking at the White House to Democratic governors on Monday, Obama took up the education issue but did not mention Santorum.

Obama said many states are cutting too deeply into education funding as a way to balance their budgets, and he urged governors to hire more teachers and restore funding to public education.

Obama said that education funding is critical if the U.S. is to remain competitive with other nations, saying that other countries are "doubling down" on education funding.

Santorum also again played to conservative Christian Republicans on Monday. He said Obama had turned freedom of religion "on its head."

"I'm for separation of church and state. The state has no business telling the church what to do," Santorum said in a speech to a business organization in suburban Detroit.

Romney, meanwhile, shifted his line of attack from the cultural issues and conservative rhetoric he used over the weekend and instead insisted that Santorum doesn't know how to create jobs.

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"I understand why jobs go, why they come, I understand what happens to corporate profit, where it goes if the government takes it," Romney told a crowd at an electrical warehouse.

Romney currently leads in the race to amass the most delegates with 123. Santorum has 72, while former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich and Texas Rep. Ron Paul have 32 and 19, respectively. The totals include endorsements from Republican National Committee members who will automatically attend the party's national convention and can support any candidate they choose.

A candidate needs 1,144 delegates to secure the nomination.

Both Arizona and Michigan each lost half their delegates for defying the national Republican party by holding their votes before March 6.

The winner in Arizona, where Romney is favored, will take all 29 of the state's delegates. But Michigan will divide its 30 delegates by giving 2 to the winner of each of the 14 congressional districts in the state. The final 2 delegates are awarded in proportion to the statewide vote, probably to the top two candidates, if both get more than 25 percent of the vote.

Before Super Tuesday, Washington state holds caucuses on Saturday. Forty delegates are at stake. In the March 6 Super Tuesday vote 419 delegates are up for grabs.

The vote in Michigan on Tuesday will test former Pennsylvania senator Santorum's far-right message on social issues and determine how badly Romney has damaged his chances in his native state by continuing to insist that Obama was wrong to bailout the U.S. auto industry, the heart of the state's ailing industrial base.

The auto giants General Motors and Chrysler Corp. have come roaring back from near-collapse after a huge infusion of federal money, managed bankruptcy and wrenching reorganization. Romney's opposition to that Obama program has hurt him in Michigan, where even the Republican governor and GM chief, also a Republican, flatly disagree with Romney. Polls show Obama with a double-digit lead over both Romney and Santorum in the Midwestern state.

As the Republicans battle for the nomination, all of them, including Gingrich and Paul, now trail Obama in national polls. The president has seen his approval ratings improve in tandem with signs that the struggling U.S. economy is finally on the way toward a robust, albeit still shaky, recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

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Karl Rove 'super PAC' won't favor any 2012 candidate during primaries (The Christian Science Monitor)

Washington – Supporters of Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the Republican presidential field, have launched a “super PAC” to raise money to promote his candidacy, even as leaders of American Crossroads, the biggest of the Republican super PACs, promised Friday to remain neutral during the primary season.

That signals that American Crossroads intends to save most of its fire for the general election, when the GOP nominee will be up against a well-funded President Obama, and will not choose a horse in the GOP nominating race.

The wrinkle in that scenario is that the new pro-Romney PAC and American Crossroads share a key executive – an overlap that had reporters closely questioning the Crossroads leaders about the neutrality assertion when they appeared Friday at a Monitor-sponsored breakfast gathering.

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Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision that opened the door to campaign spending by a wider array of contributors, so-called super PACs (political action committees) have been springing up. It's now permissible for these super PACs to raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, and unions, as long as the donors are disclosed and the groups do not coordinate their spending with federal candidates.

According to a Washington Post report, Romney supporters have launched Restore Our Future PAC. It is not known how much Restore Our Future has already raised to support the Romney campaign.

American Crossroads, a group founded by Karl Rove, former President Bush's political adviser, among others, insists it will remain neutral during the 2012 primary season.

“It is important for us to clearly state that Crossroads … will not be involved in the Republican presidential primary. We are just not going to do that,” said the group's chairman, Mike Duncan. Though the group says it will not spend money to advance the cause of any primary candidate, it might spend as the primary season ends if Democrats attack the GOP's presumptive nominee, its executives said.

Reporters asked Mr. Duncan and Steven Law, the group’s president and CEO, pointed questions about American Crossroads' neutrality. The Washington Post story about the pro-Romney super PAC noted that its board of directors includes political operative Carl Forti, who was political director for Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Forti is now political director of American Crossroads.

“Carl is a contract employee with American Crossroads. He has other clients; we knew he had other clients. But clearly none of us are going to be involved personally in presidential campaigns. And he is not either,” Duncan said.

“The only thing I would add to that,” said Mr. Law, “is the work that Carl does for us is work that every contender for the Republican nomination would be supportive of, which is that he is helping find ways to make sure President Obama does not return to office.”

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