Rick Santorum compromised his principles, Mitt Romney says (Video)

PHOENIX — Mitt Romney took new aim at Rick Santorum’s image as a devoted conservative Thursday, accusing his rival of compromising his own principles by repeatedly voting for legislation he didn’t believe in.

Romney noted that during Wednesday night’s heated GOP debate the former senator said he had voted for President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education bill because “sometimes you take one for the team.”

“I wonder which team he was taking it for?” Romney asked during a speech to an Association of Builders and Contractors meeting in Phoenix. “My team is the American people, not the insiders in Washington.”

During the debate, Santorum was forced to defend several votes on issues such as a right-to-work measure that clashed with his conservative philosophy. He explained at length why he backed bills that included targeted spending called “earmarks,” saying it was better to have Congress decide where to send the money than to let executive branch departments have complete authority.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a politician explain in so many ways why he voted against his principles,” Romney said Thursday.

Romney and Santorum are powering into a crucial stretch of Republican primaries and caucuses over the next 13 days.

Later Thursday, Romney was turning his focus to tea partyers in Michigan, his birthplace, where cash-strapped Santorum is waging an unexpectedly strong challenge. Romney’s been put on the defensive in the auto-building state over his opposition to the government’s bailout of car makers.

Romney took a pounding on the auto issue in the debate, and President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign piled on Thursday. Obama released a TV ad in Michigan accusing Romney and the other GOP candidates of turning their backs on an industry that supports more than 1 million workers in the state by opposing the bailout.

A tea party rally Thursday night in Milford, Mich., will give Romney another chance to explain why he opposed the rescue of GM and Chrysler amid the economic crisis but supported bailouts for banks.

Santorum, flourishing in the polls, trails in the money chase and is concentrating on beefing up his campaign treasury in hopes of an upset in Michigan’s primary on Tuesday. That would cap a rebound that began two weeks ago when Santorum won caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado and a nonbinding primary in Missouri.

The 20th debate of the nomination race offered the GOP hopefuls their final face-to-face outing on a national stage before contests that may well winnow the four-man field.

The debate was staged in Arizona, which also votes Tuesday and where Romney is so confident of victory he hasn’t aired any television ads.

After the Arizona and Michigan primaries come Washington’s caucuses four days later. Then 10 states cast ballots on Super Tuesday, March 6.

Polls show Santorum leading the field nationally and in several states. Romney and rivals Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich used the televised debate to challenge Santorum, who repeatedly found himself in the hot seat over his record on spending, home-state projects known as earmarks and support for a federal education law.

Romney criticized Santorum for support of spending programs when he represented Pennsylvania in Congress, where he served both in the House and Senate. Romney said Santorum voted five times to raise the government’s ability to borrow, supported retention of a law that favors construction unions and supported increased spending for Planned Parenthood. He said federal spending rose 78 percent overall while Santorum was in Congress.

Santorum retorted that government spending declined as a percentage of the economy when he was in the Senate, and he noted that when Romney was asked last year if he would support a pending debt-limit increase, “he said yes.”

The former Massachusetts governor also went after Santorum on earmarks, the specialized spending bills directed to a particular state or program.

“You voted for the Bridge to Nowhere,” Romney said to Santorum, referring to an infamous bridge proposal in Alaska that would have been built with millions in federal funds. “I would put a ban on earmarks.”

Paul went further, calling Santorum a “fake” conservative. Gingrich dismissed the argument over earmarks as “silly” but said his years as House speaker made him best equipped to bring reform to such Washington practices.

Santorum, for his part, said he had differentiated between “good earmarks and bad earmarks” and supported only those that funded defense and other needed projects.

He also noted that Romney had sought earmarks to fund the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. And he blamed Romney anew for championing a health care law in Massachusetts that became the prototype for Obama’s health care law, which is detested by conservatives.

“It would be a difficult task for someone who had the model for Obamacare — the biggest issue in this race — to be the nominee of our party,” Santorum said.

In rebuttal, Romney said Santorum actually bore responsibility for passage of the health care law that Obama won from a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010, even though he wasn’t in office at the time. Romney said that in a primary battle in 2004, Santorum had supported then-Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who later switched parties and voted for the law Obama wanted.

Santorum also took his lumps from the audience, which booed when he said he had voted for the No Child Left Behind education law even though he had opposed it.

“Look, politics is a team sport, folks,” he said of the measure backed by Republican President George W. Bush and other GOP lawmakers.

Santorum’s rise in the race has left Paul and Gingrich as outsiders looking for a way in.

Paul has yet to win any primaries or caucuses. He is airing an ad in Michigan, though, challenging Santorum’s claim of taking a conservative line against federal spending.

Gingrich, the former Georgia congressman, is pinning his hopes for a comeback on that state on March 6. He was campaigning in Washington state on Thursday and Friday.