Santorum wants one-on-one debate

Rick Santorum has lambasted Mitt Romney, calling him a flawed candidate and asking for a one-on-one debate with the former Massachusetts governor.

“I’d love to be able to get one-on-one with governor Romney and expose the record that would be the weakest record we could possibly put up against Barack Obama,” said Santorum. “We can’t nominate such a weak candidate.”

Santorum lashed out at Romney for “hiding” behind billionaires and for his similarities to Barack Obama.

“The more I look at the record of governor Romney and match it up against Barack Obama, I feel like I am doing a training run for the general election,” said Santorum.

“The same issues I’m out there campaigning on against governor Romney are the same issues I’m going to campaign against Barack Obama on.”

The former senator from Pennsylvania argued that Obama and Romney shared similar positions on healthcare, “cap and trade” and “the bailouts”.

“Unfortunately, governor Romney and Barack Obama are in the same place,” Santorum said. “Governor Romney’s on the same page as Barack Obama on all of these issues.

“We can’t be out there nominating someone who gives away the most important issues that conservatives care about in this election.”

Santorum says he is in the race for the long haul, even though Romney has a big edge in delegates, cash, and organisational resources.

Santorum says conservatives want a chance to nominate a conservative to take on the Democratic incumbent and “we’re going to give them an opportunity”.

The former Pennsylvania senator hasn’t qualified for the ballot in all the states on the election calendar and sometimes has had trouble fielding full slates of delegates in some states. But he says he is doing pretty well with scarce resources, compared with the deep-pocketed Romney campaign.

The millions of dollars spent by Romney’s allies on television ads attacking his two main rivals have helped Romney pull ahead in the Republican presidential race. The resulting bitterness, however, is making it hard for him to lock down the nomination and end the party fighting that delights Democrats.

Republican insiders say Santorum and Newt Gingrich are fuming over the hard-hitting 30-second spots that sent them tumbling after they gained early leads in Iowa, Florida, Michigan and other states.

Campaign veterans say Santorum and Gingrich feel the commercials were pointedly unfair. That is a big reason they keep fighting despite Romney’s significant lead in delegates and pleas from some Republican leaders to close ranks and focus on Obama.

“The Romney folks have run a pretty ugly campaign,” said Mike McKenna, a Republican strategist and pollster who is unaffiliated in the presidential race. “It’s been very personal, it’s been very ugly, it’s been very hostile. There’s a lot of bad blood.”

Santorum and Gingrich, or political action committees that back them, have mounted their own attacks against Romney. However, a pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, has swamped them in fundraising and spending.

First it buried Gingrich in an avalanche of attack ads in Iowa and Florida, then it hammered Santorum in Michigan, Ohio and elsewhere.

One or two ads in particular seemed to infuriate them, and their bitter complaints failed to persuade the former Massachusetts governor to demand an end to the ads.

An ad repeatedly aired by the pro-Romney committee claimed that Gingrich had co-sponsored legislation “that would have given $60m a year to a UN programme supporting China’s brutal one-child policy”. The strong implication was that Gingrich, as speaker of the House of Representatives, had promoted abortions in China.

The legislation, however, specifically barred US funds from being used for “the performance of involuntary sterilisation or abortion or to coerce any person to accept family planning”.

Gingrich is also angry over ads saying he paid a $300,000 fine to settle the House ethics case filed against him in the mid-1990s. Gingrich says it was a negotiated reimbursement of the investigation’s costs.