Romney targeted by Obama side as race shifts focus

Mitt Romney’s campaign has made a practice of tearing down fellow Republicans in the race for the presidential nomination, but now he’s coming under heavy assault himself as president Barack Obama’s team revs up its campaign for the November election.

With Romney forecast to win today’s primary in Wisconsin, a victory that would all but end the Republican nomination battle, vice-president Joe Biden began the Democratic attack, calling Romney “out of touch” with the lives of middle-class Americans.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton criticised the former Massachusetts governor for holding backwards-looking views on foreign policy, and Biden said he was “stuck in a Cold War mentality”.

Even so, a fresh set of prominent Republicans rallied behind Romney as the contest shifts from primary elections to the nomination, to the real contest for the White House.

A defiant Rick Santorum said he was not giving up just because the Republican party establishment believed voters “need Mitt Romney shoved down their throats”.

The Wisconsin vote will be Santorum’s last chance, however, to prove his strength in the US heartland, where he has said he can challenge Obama but where Romney has beaten him consistently.

Party heavyweights are pushing to end the contest.

“I think the chances are overwhelming that [Romney] will be our nominee,” senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said. “It seems to me we’re in the final phases of wrapping up this nomination.”

With losses piling up in other industrial states such as Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, Santorum acknowledged the results from Wisconsin will send a “strong signal” about the direction of the Republican contest. Maryland and Washington DC also hold contests today.

Meanwhile, a major donor to Barack Obama has been accused of defrauding a businessman and impersonating a bank official, creating new headaches for the US president’s re-election campaign as it deals with the questionable history of another top supporter.

The New York donor, Abake Assongba, and her husband contributed more than $50,000 (€37,500) to Obama’s re-election effort this year, federal records show.

But Assongba is also fending off a civil court case in Florida, where she is accused of stealing more than $650,000 to help build a multimillion-dollar home in the state — a charge her husband denies.

Obama’s campaign also returned $200,000 last month to Carlos and Alberto Cardona, the brothers of a Mexican fugitive wanted on federal drug charges.

Obama’s campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said 1.3m Americans have donated to the campaign, and that it addresses issues with contributions promptly.