GOP candidates reveal last-minute strategies

Several storylines emerged Monday on the last full day of campaigning before Tuesday's Iowa caucuses. Front-runner Mitt Romney is trying to tamp down an upstart threat from Rick Santorum. Santorum was trying to shoulder past Ron Paul, who has been running a close second to Romney but now has Santorum nipping at his heels. Paul is calling his rivals' attempts to discredit his foreign policy and other views as desperation and demagoguery. Rick Perry is to trying to keep Santorum from pulling away from a three-way tie with him and Newt Gingrich by questioning Santorum's voting record on earmarks in the Senate. Gingrich is questioning his strategy of trying to stay positive against a withering onslaught of negative ads and attacks by rivals. And Michele Bachmann, running at the back of the pack, is predicting a "miracle" finish in the state that launched her campaign over the summer. No Republican contest has had the volatility of this one with candidates moving from the top to the bottom of polls. Iowa Rep. Steve King, whose endorsement is a coveted one, characterized the race as a game of "king of the hill." "If you're at the top of the hill, everybody has to try to pull you down and your negatives get illuminated and a lot of scrutiny goes on," King told CNN's Soledad O'Brien on "Starting Point." "If you have five or six people trying to pull you off the hill, eventually they do that, someone else takes the top of the hill." King said Romney has hung around the top of the hill. "He hasn't actually claimed the top of the hill and decide he was about to own it until about now." Romney, who for the most part has focused his attacks on President Barack Obama and left attacks on Republican rivals to surrogates and political action committees that support him, took shots at the other candidates in the GOP field and contrasted his record with that of Santorum at an event in Atlantic on Sunday, attention that proves Santorum's surge in polls is getting the front-runner's attention. Insiders survey: 2 out of 3 think Romney will win "Like Speaker Gingrich, Senator Santorum has spent his career in government, in Washington," Romney told reporters. "Nothing wrong with that, but it is a very different background than I have." Romney also reminded voters and members of the media that Santorum backed his first White House bid during the last presidential election. The former Massachusetts governor has a series of rallies across the state on Monday. Santorum addressed the endorsement Sunday during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying he backed the former Massachusetts governor in 2008 to prevent Sen. John McCain from securing the GOP nomination. In another example of the changing climate, Santorum took aim Sunday at Paul's foreign policy positions. "Like the president said when he was campaigning and I predict, that if the president has four years where he's not looking for reelection, his foreign policy will not be any different than Ron Paul's foreign policy," Santorum said in Sioux City. Santorum will hold "meet and greets" with voters at five locations across the state on Monday. With Paul's rise to the top tier, rivals have attacked his noninterventionist views on foreign policy and less aggressive stance on Iran's nuclear program. They've also resurrected newsletters published under Paul's name in the 1990s that included racist comments. Paul has said he was unaware of the content of the newsletters at the time and rejected the content. In an interview with CNN's Candy Crowley on "State of the Union," Paul drew contrasts between what he called his consistent positions and those of his rivals, and said opponents are desperate to find ways to attack him. "They've been all over the place. They've been flip-flopping and they can't defend themselves," he said. "They're having a little trouble finding any flip-flops on me, so they have to go and dig up and distort and demagogue issues." As to assertions that he would be unelectable in the general election, Paul countered, "I've been electable. I was elected 12 times once people got to know me in my own congressional district. So I think that might be more propaganda than anything else." Paul took the weekend off to return to Texas to be with his wife but is back on the trail Monday, when he'll appear with his son Sen. Rand Paul, a tea party favorite, at four whistle stop locations across the state and Rand Paul will attend a fifth. Gingrich appears to be taking off the gloves in the final hours leading up to the caucuses, obviously smarting from the battering he's taken over the past month. Gingrich's rise in the polls, fueled by strong debate performances and a conservative wing of the party that still has reservations about Romney, was met with a barrage of negative ads from political action committees that support Romney. "For a state this size, to spend that number of dollars in negative ads aimed at one candidate is pretty amazing," Gingrich said. And he said that if he had the opportunity to do anything differently, "I would have pulled the plug on Romney's PAC." Asked if he felt he had been "swift-boated," a reference to the attacks on John Kerry's military record during the 2004 presidential campaign, Gingrich replied, "No, I feel Romney-boated." The former House speaker sounded as if he might ready to take off the gloves after his pledge to stay positive, what he called an "interesting experiment," if not on Monday then certainly in New Hampshire, which votes a week after Iowa. "New Hampshire's the perfect state to have a debate over Romney-care," he said, referring to the health care reform law passed in Massachusetts when Romney was governor, which contains an individual mandate that conservatives despise and say was the model for President Barack Obama's federal health care reform law. Gingrich's campaign bus will be on the road on Monday and he'll hold two town hall meetings and another tele-town hall meeting. Perry sought to downplay expectations of how he'll finish in Iowa, saying in an interview on "Fox News Sunday" that he got into the race late while "some of these folks have been running for years." Other candidates "may do OK in Iowa, but when it comes to running a national political campaign, they're going to falter." Perry is enlisting his most prominent supporters for a major rally on the eve of the caucuses. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, both of whom endorsed Perry early in the race, will join the Texas governor during his last event of the day. Joining them on stage will be former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, the chief proponent of Perry's flat-tax proposal, and Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, a longtime Perry ally in Austin. South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney, one of the most popular conservatives in the early southern primary state, will also appear. Bachmann has heightened her rhetoric and optimism amid Hawkeye State poll figures that list her near the bottom of the pack in the state. During an interview Sunday with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Bachmann reiterated her expectations that Iowans "are going to see a miracle" when the caucuses are over. She also said she is the only candidate with the resolve to perpetuate former President Ronald Regan's legacy and become "America's iron lady," a reference to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Despite a consistent decline since winning the Ames straw poll in August, Bachmann has suggested the Iowa caucuses are unpredictable. "We don't know who will come to the caucuses [or] who won't," Bachmann said on CNN. "You can take poll tests, but everything that matters is who shows up and who do they support." Bachmann, one of the most frequent of Iowa visitors in the race to the White House, is a strong social conservative and often touts her history as a foster parent as well as her Iowa roots during campaign stops. She will once again hit the campaign trail Monday with two stops in the state: a restaurant stop in West Des Moines and an event at her campaign headquarters in Urbandale. Former Utah governor and ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, the other major Republican candidate in the race, isn't competing in Iowa but instead focusing his efforts on New Hampshire, which votes a week after Iowa. On Sunday, Huntsman sent a letter to supporters offering to match dollar-for-dollar contributions to his campaign. Huntsman's poll numbers have edged upward in New Hampshire in recent weeks but he has failed to break into the top tier. Romney has consistently held a large lead in polls there.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45849127/ns/local_news-houston_tx/

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