The continuing fragility of the Romney candidacy was emphasised by reports in
Washington political circles that senior Republicans are still drawing up
emergency plans to introduce an eleventh-hour alternative candidate if Mr
Romney loses in Michigan.
One “senior Republican senator” quoted anonymously by ABC News said
the party would have no alternative but to seek another candidate,
dismissing Mr Santorum, who is an evangelical Roman Catholic as a man who
would “lose 35 states”.
“If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate,” the
unnamed Senator was quoted as saying, adding he would call publicly for a
‘saviour’ figure to step forward in the form of Jeb Bush, the younger
brother of George W Bush and two-term former governor of Florida.
However other senior Republicans cooled such speculation yesterday observing
that time was running out for any new candidate, as filing deadlines
approached for the nine primaries and four caucuses that begin in Michigan
on Feb 28 and end with ‘Super Tuesday’ on March 6.
Mr Santorum, meanwhile, continued his appeal to blue-collar, religiously
conservative voters while campaigning in the critical Rust Belt state of
Ohio over the weekend, attacking Mr Obama for an agenda based on a “phony
theology” and “not a theology based on the Bible”.
The former Pennsylvania senator later clarified his statement, telling CBS’s
Face the Nation that he was not attacking Mr Obama’s religious faith, but
his environmental beliefs that put the needs of the earth before people.
The White House said the remarks were ‘a new low’.
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