Santorum, Romney Cleave Party In Michigan Race

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mitt Romney faces a critical primary battle with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum in Romney’s native state of Michigan Tuesday, a showdown that could reset the race to challenge President Barack Obama.

Romney was seen just weeks ago as an easy winner in the industrial Midwestern state of Michigan, where his father once served as governor and chief of a now-defunct carmaker. But that was before Santorum swept contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri earlier this month.

Throughout the Republican campaign, Romney has had trouble winning favor with the deeply conservative party base, and distrust of his moderate background has only grown under Santorum’s hard-right campaign message ahead of the Michigan vote.

Whoever wins Michigan will gain crucial momentum just a week before the 10-state battle known as Super Tuesday.

Arizona, which also holds its primary on Tuesday, has essentially been ceded by Santorum. Over the weekend Romney, already the clear favorite, won the endorsement of the state’s conservative governor. He is heavily supported because of his tough stand on illegal immigration, a key issue in the far Western state with a long border with Mexico.

The Republican establishment, which backs Romney, fears that Santorum — should he amass the needed 1,144 delegates needed for the nomination — would be unable to defeat Obama in November. Polls seem to back that fear, with independent voters moving back into the Obama camp. Those voters — members of neither party — were critical to Obama’s victory in 2008. But they abandoned Democrats in droves in the 2010 election that saw Republicans reclaim the majority in the House of Representatives.

The return of support from independents has boosted Obama’s approval rating. He has regained ground in tandem with signs that the U.S. economy is regaining steam after a prolonged period of high unemployment and low growth. But the rebound remains fragile.

In Michigan, latest polling shows Romney and Santorum in a dead heat. A Santorum win could further fuel his momentum and validate his campaigning on core social issues rather than the economy, Romney’s strong suit. He became a multimillionaire as head of a venture capital firm before winning the governorship in Massachusetts.

Santorum is espousing strictly conservative positions on issues ranging from the role of religion to abortion, education and women in the workplace.

On Sunday night, he told a raucous rally in Flint that Obama was marginalizing religion.

And while Santorum pressed his tax plan to spur manufacturing and economic growth Monday, he returned to promoting a greater role for religion.

“Freedom to worship is not just what you do in the sanctuary, it’s how you practice your faith outside of the sanctuary,” Santorum said.

Romney, a Mormon who has treaded carefully on the subject of religion, shifted his line of attack from the cultural issues and conservative rhetoric he too was using over the weekend. He has returned to the economy.

“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.

That also was in contrast to Romney, just days ago, highlighting his own socially conservative credentials, telling an event with the small-government, low-tax tea party that he had been against abortion as Massachusetts governor and was still in that camp. Romney’s record in Massachusetts was far more moderate on the hot-button abortion issue.

Obama, meanwhile, spoke about education in a meeting of Democratic state governors at the White House on Monday, but did not mention Santorum’s statement over the weekend that the president was a “snob” for promoting the availability of higher education for all young people.

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’s remarks, while not referencing Santorum, clearly were a response to the former Pennsylvania lawmaker.

“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.”

Santorum has also said in recent days that former President John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speech explaining his Catholic faith made him want “to throw up.”

Kennedy was the first Catholic president and his religion was a major issue in that election 52 years ago. Kennedy’s speech back then assured voters he would hold fast to the U.S. Constitution’s directive on the separation of church and state.

Santorum, also a Catholic, questions restraint on the role of religious institutions in U.S. governance.