South tests GOP rivals

MOBILE, Ala. -- Newt Gingrich sees victory in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday as a chance - perhaps his last - to show he remains a viable contender for president.

For Rick Santorum, wins in the Deep South hold the potential to drive the former House speaker out of the race, strengthening him for the battle to topple GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

As for Romney, Alabama and Mississippi are an opportunity to diminish, if not crush, the insurgent candidacy of Santorum with an aggressive ad campaign.

The three colliding goals are in play as Tuesday's vote nears. But if the stakes are high in the two states, so is the peril. The Republican presidential candidates have been crisscrossing the South for days, calibrating their messages for an audience far more conservative than the swing voters who will decide in November whether to replace President Barack Obama with one of them.

At times, Alabama and Mississippi have proved irresistible settings for the candidates to play up appeals to the religious right, a tactic that could backfire for the Republican nominee in the fall.

Gingrich has taken the biggest gamble, in terms of strategy and rhetoric. He abandoned a six-stop swing across Kansas, where caucuses are being held Saturday, to focus this week solely on the South. Even though he has captured Georgia and South Carolina, his disappointing third-place finishes in Tennessee and Oklahoma this week cast doubt on his prospects.

In Mississippi, he went hard to the right. At a rally on Thursday in Jackson, he ripped into Obama's patriotism and religious bearings in an effort to draw support from the evangelical Christians who dominate Southern primaries.

He accused Obama of "declaring war on the Catholic Church and every right-to-life institution" with a rule requiring religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals, to include contraception in their employees' health plans. That line of attack - which Romney and Santorum have also used - has left many Republicans fretting that the party is alienating women, whose support they will need in the fall.

Gingrich told the crowd that "the right to bear arms came from God," through the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He described the 2010 laws that overhauled health care and imposed rules on banks and investment companies as a "repudiation of the Declaration of Independence."

In Montgomery, Ala., the day before, Gingrich used still stronger rhetoric to cast Obama as an un-American "food-stamp president." In a state where many question whether the Christian president is a Muslim, Gingrich used a cultural and religious framework to promote his vow to cut gas prices by expanding domestic energy supplies.

"If you want $9-a-gallon gasoline and bowing to Saudi kings, vote for Obama," he said. The president, he added, apologizes "to radical Islamist fanatics while attacking the Catholic Church," so "if you want somebody who believes in religious freedom in America and is willing to say to the Saudis they ought to have religious freedom in Saudi Arabia too, vote for Newt Gingrich."

Santorum, too, has made religion a prime focus. At a banquet Thursday here in the Gulf Coast port city of Mobile, he renewed his criticism of John F. Kennedy for saying during his 1960 presidential campaign that he believed "in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute."

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/03/10/2686962/south-tests-gop-rivals.html

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