By Rick Pearson, John Byrne and Ray Long, Chicago Tribune –
CHICAGO — Illinois primary voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose nominees for the fall in races from the White House to county courthouses following a final week of campaigning that saw the Republican presidential battle overshadow lower-level candidates seeking attention.
(PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney greets attendees, Monday, March 19, 2012, after an appearance at International House at the University of Chicago.)
For a state that is home to President Barack Obama and run by Democrats, the grueling, months-long GOP battle for the nomination provides the state’s out-of-power Republicans with a real say on national politics for the first time in decades. Democratic voters, meanwhile, will decide several heated congressional contests in newly drawn districts.
At stake for Mitt Romney is not only 54 elected national convention delegates, but the chance to gain much-needed momentum with a big-state victory. For a vastly outspent and out-organized Rick Santorum, a win in Illinois would upend Romney’s slow drive to the nomination and fuel questions about the former Massachusetts governor’s electability and ability to unify core GOP conservatives.
Both candidates provided some final-day fireworks on Monday that reflected Romney’s attempt to woo fiscal conservatives and Santorum’s appeal to social conservatives.
During stops in northwestern Illinois, Santorum declared he “didn’t care about the unemployment rate” and argued that “the issue in the race is not the economy.” The former Pennsylvania senator sought to stake out a broader theme that his candidacy is about picking a Republican defender of small government and individual economic and social freedoms.
But Romney, who has focused on the nation’s economy and fiscal conservatism, used his final public stop of the day to criticize Santorum.
“I do care about the unemployment rate. It does bother me. I want to get people back to work,” Romney said to cheers from a town-hall audience at Bradley University in Peoria.
In Rockford, Santorum sought to appeal to blue-collar Republicans by engaging in a form of class warfare by mocking Romney’s financial background.
“I heard Gov. Romney here call me an economic lightweight because I wasn’t a Wall Street financier like he was,” Santorum said. “Do you really believe this country wants to elect a Wall Street financier as president of the United States? Do you think that’s the kind of experience we need, someone who’s going to take and look after, as he did, his friends on Wall Street, and bail them out at the expense of Main Street America?”
The lengthy day of campaigning definitely had a presidential atmosphere. Romney delivered an economic speech at the University of Chicago, where Obama previously taught law students. Santorum ventured to Dixon, the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan, and noted Reagan ran an “insurgent” campaign in 1976 against a candidate backed by the GOP establishment, President Gerald R. Ford.
Still, Santorum was forced to explain his remarks about the unemployment rate and the economy. “My campaign doesn’t hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. There’s something more foundational,” he said. Santorum added that his candidacy transcends economic issues to include fundamental freedoms while Romney is focused on campaigning as a government economic manager — something he said was anathema to true conservatives.
“The reason the economy is an issue in this race is because we have a government that’s oppressing its people and taking away their freedom, and the economy is suffering as a result,” Santorum said.
In his appearance at the University of Chicago, Romney begrudgingly acknowledged the nation is making an economic recovery. But he contended Obama was hampering a major economic rebound through big-government tax-and-spend policies.
It was a recalibration of Romney’s effort to try to leverage his private-sector experience into someone who would rescue the economy, much as his message last weekend was aimed at turning voter anger over higher gasoline prices into votes.
“Freedom is becoming the victim of unbounded government appetite — and so is economic growth, job growth, and wage growth. As government takes more and more, there is less and less incentive of an incentive to take risk, to invest, to innovate, and to hire,” Romney told students of the university’s Booth School of Business.
“The proof is in this weak recovery,” he said. “This administration thinks our economy is struggling because the stimulus was too small. The truth is this economy is struggling because our government is too big.”
