Focus on Electability as Caucuses Near

At New York Times, "In Final Days in Iowa, Focus on Who Can Defeat Obama":

DES MOINES — Rick Santorum and Ron Paul defended themselves on Sunday against claims that they could not win in November as a new poll suggested that they were now the primary threat to Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, with two days left before the Iowa caucuses.

Appearing on several Sunday news programs, Mr. Paul waved aside the findings of a poll by The Des Moines Register that suggested nearly a third of Iowa voters believed he would be the least able of the candidates to defeat President Obama.

“Maybe it’s not true,” Mr. Paul, a congressman from Texas, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “I’ve been pretty 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.”

On the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” Mr. Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, criticized Mr. Santorum as a “big-government type of moderate” who will not fare well as people learn more about his record.

“A lot of people don’t know that because he hasn’t surged to the top yet, so he hasn’t had much scrutiny,” Senator Paul said. “When he has the scrutiny, I think he’s going to have some of the same problems that some of the other fair-weather conservatives have had.”

Mr. Santorum, whose support tripled in the latest Register poll, predicted that his campaign would emerge from Iowa with “a big jump” because voters wanted someone who could defeat the president in the fall.

“The people of Iowa, the more they look, the more they are going to see the person who is exactly the right person,” Mr. Santorum said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press.” He said that if he could finish higher in caucuses than Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, “we’d be in good shape, and we’re moving towards that right now.”