Romney Takes Fire in Second New Hampshire Debate

At Washington Post, "Mitt Romney under attack in final N.H. debate":

CONCORD, N.H. — Mitt Romney’s opponents, seizing upon what could be one of their last opportunities to blunt his accelerating momentum toward the GOP presidential nomination, trained their fire on the front-runner Sunday morning in their final joint appearance before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.

One by one, Romney’s opponents took the parts of his résuméthat he touts as strengths and portrayed them as evidence that he lacks authenticity, conviction and consistency.

“Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney?” former House speaker Newt Gingrich asked Romney, after the former Massachusetts governor once again portrayed himself as a career businessman with a disdain for lifelong politicians.

“The fact is, you ran in ’94 and lost. That’s why you weren’t serving in the Senate,” Gingrich said. “You had a very bad reelection rating [as governor]. You dropped out of office. . . . You were running for president while you were governor.”

Gingrich added: “Now you’re back running. You have been running consistently for years and years and years. So this idea that suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind, just level with the American people. You’ve been running for — at least since the 1990s.”

When Romney touted his record cutting taxes and balancing budgets as governor, former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), who fought him to a virtual tie in last week’s Iowa caucuses, retorted: “If you didn’t want to even stand before the people of Massachusetts and run on your record, if it was that great, why did you bail out?”

And where Romney had cited his 1994 Senate bid against the late Edward M. Kennedy as a heroic and quixotic challenge to “the policies of the liberal welfare state,” Santorum said Romney’s loss resulted from a failure of spine.

“He wouldn’t stand for conservative principles,” Santorum said. “He ran from Ronald Reagan. And he said he was going to be to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights, on abortion, a whole host of other issues.”

And former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, defending himself against Romney’s barbs about Huntsman’s service as President Obama’s ambassador to China, suggested that Romney puts partisanship and ambition above country.

“He criticized me, while he was out raising money, for serving my country in China, yes, under a Democrat, like my two sons are doing in the United States Navy,” Huntsman said, in an oblique reminder that none of Romney’s five sons has ever been in the military. “They’re not asking who — what political affiliation the president is. I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and this country: I will always put my country first.”

Huntsman’s struggling campaign is looking for a breakout in New Hampshire. He did not compete in Iowa so that he could stay in this state and compete for the votes of independents, who are allowed under the state’s open system to vote in the GOP primary. Meanwhile, Santorum, Gingrich and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) are attacking Romney from the right.

Still, in the latest polls, Romney has been maintaining a more than 20-point lead over his rivals.

More at Legal Insurrection, "“Pious Baloney” is the word."