US Republican Mitt Romney assailed presidential rival Rick Santorum late Thursday for abandoning his conservative principles, pushing a line of attack that polls show is helping him close the gap on his rival in the battleground state of Michigan. Romney fired a new burst of criticism at the former Pennsylvania senator one day after he repeatedly put Santorum on the defensive in an Arizona debate for backing big spending bills in Congress. “One of the candidates last night described voting against his principles,” Romney told a Tea Party meeting in Milford. Politicians, he said, “go to Washington and vote for things they don't believe in.” Arizona and Michigan are the next battlegrounds in the state-by-state battle to pick a challenger to US President Barack Obama in the Nov. 6 general election, with crucial nominating contests next Tuesday. In Phoenix, Romney lampooned Santorum's comments during Wednesday's debate that he sometimes had to vote for bills he did not like – including spending programs, education reforms and increases in the federal debt – because politics was a “team sport.” “He talked about this as taking one for the team,” said Romney, a former Massachusetts governor and venture capitalist. “I wonder which team he was taking it for? My team is the American people, not the insiders in Washington.” While Santorum, a Catholic social conservative, has courted controversy with comments about abortion, birth control and the role of women in the military, Romney seems to have struck a chord with his portrayal of Santorum as a supporter of big spending. Romney, fighting to regain the top spot in the Republican presidential race, trailed Santorum slightly in two new polls in Michigan Thursday after lagging his top rival there by as much as double digits in some polls a week ago. A comeback by Romney would be well-timed, with 10 Super Tuesday primaries scheduled on March 6. In Milford, Romney played up his Michigan roots - how he was born in a Detroit hospital and lived in a home in Palmer Park, and how much he would like to reinvigorate the economy because “it seems like Michigan has been suffering a one-state recession.” He won a restrained endorsement from Michigan's newspaper, the Detroit Free Press - with the caveat that he stop “chest-beating” to prove his conservatism and return the focus to his record and collaborative leadership. The primary in Michigan, where Romney was born and raised and where his father was an auto executive and popular governor, has become critical for him. A loss there would set off alarm bells about Romney's ability to win the allegiance of conservatives and would ensure a long and costly battle to find a challenger for Obama in the general election. But a win in Michigan and Arizona would put Romney back in command in a race that has seen a series of conservative rivals rise to challenge him only to fall back into the pack.
