MITT ROMNEY is starting to tack back into the political centre as the presidential election campaign begins in earnest, pitching to women and Hispanics whose votes will be pivotal in the November election against President Barack Obama.
Following the withdrawal of Rick Santorum on Tuesday, Mr Romney faces the tricky task of trying to win over the conservatives who had supported his closest rival, at the same time as appealing to moderates and independents dismayed by the bitter primary contest.
With his path to the Republican nomination clear, Mr Romney is also coming under fire from Mr Obama’s re-election team, which yesterday released a video of the Republican’s most cringe-worthy gaffes from the trail.
“We’re getting started with a general election campaign and people will get to know me better and they’ll get to know [the president] better as well,” Mr Romney said on Fox News yesterday when asked about Democratic attempts to portray the multimillionaire former private equity executive as out of touch.
Mr Romney sought to strike a presidential tone and unite Republicans around him as he continued campaigning yesterday, saying he and Mr Santorum would “hit the trail together”.
“We’re on the same page on these issues,” he told Fox, in remarks that jarred with attacks each man had launched against each other in recent months.
“We share very much the same beliefs about the course this country must take.” Mr Romney, a former Republican governor of the Democratic-leaning state of Massachusetts, has long been considered too moderate by the party base. Trying to prove his conservative credentials while seeking the nomination, Mr Romney has backtracked on his previous stances on social issues, including abortion and same-sex marriage.
In a sign that Christian conservatives were starting to rally around him, the National Organisation for Marriage, which opposes gay marriage, endorsed Mr Romney yesterday, calling him a “true champion”.
As he courts Mr Santorum’s endorsement – something that would give him a big boost in the eyes of the conservative base – Mr Romney dangled the carrot of the vice-presidency before his erstwhile rival.
Asked about who he was considering as his running mate, Mr Romney said “there’s no list yet” but added that there were many possibilities, “including some of those who have run in this contest with me”.
But Mr Romney’s statements on the campaign trail, such as a promise that he would cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood, a women’s healthcare provider, have alarmed moderates and independents and have alienated women.
He is now seeking to mitigate such statements, visiting a Delaware steel factory with a female chief executive on Tuesday night to insist to its workers that “the real war on women has been waged by the Obama administration’s failure on the economy”.
He repeated that message yesterday, saying that more than 92 per cent of the jobs lost during Mr Obama’s time in office had belonged to women.
Polls show Mr Romney faring badly among female voters, with an ABC News/Washington Post survey published this week showing 57 per cent of women support Mr Obama, while only 38 per cent said they would vote for Mr Romney.
The presumptive Republican candidate is also trying to make amends with the crucial Hispanic electorate, despite taking a tough anti-illegal immigration stance over the past six months.
Hispanics “did not come to America for a cheque, they came to America for an opportunity, for a job, for a better future”, he said on Fox, adding that people should vote for Mr Obama if they wanted a handout but Mr Romney if they wanted a job.
Mr Obama has been gearing up for a fight against Mr Romney for months, and has begun targeting him by name in recent weeks as it became clear that he would clinch the nomination.
The president’s team released a new two-minute web video entitled “Mitt Romney: Memories to Last a Lifetime”, aimed at making it harder for the Republican to pivot back to the political centre.
It shows clips of some of Mr Romney’s most damaging mis-steps from the campaign trail, from his assertion that “corporations are people, my friend” and that he was “severely conservative,” to his poorly worded remark that “I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me”.
Separately, newspapers in Salt Lake City reported that Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker running a flailing campaign for the Republican nomination, reported that he might not be on the ballot for the June 26th Utah primary because a $500 cheque his campaign wrote for his application had bounced.