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Los
Angeles Times...
Top
tier emerges as GOP nomination
race enters a defining phase
By Paul West and Seema Mehta
August 15, 2011
Also
at link below...
Rick
Perry sets out to court wary New
Hampshire voters
On
Sunday shows, Michele Bachmann
outlines economic cures for U.S.
Mitt
Romney, the $250-million man
With
Rick Perry declaring his
candidacy and Michele Bachmann winning the Iowa straw poll, the two go
head-to-head for the GOP’s social and religious conservatives and
against
establishment front-runner Mitt Romney.
Reporting
from Des Moines and
Waterloo, Iowa— The new top tier of Republican presidential contenders
has
emerged to reset the 2012 race and raise new questions about exactly
where an
angry GOP base will take the party in next year’s election.
The
contest is now a three-way,
multilayered match, with Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann rising to
challenge
each other and national front-runner Mitt Romney, after the Texas
governor
formally declared his candidacy and the Minnesota congresswoman won the
year’s
biggest organizing test.
Bachmann
and Perry capitalized on
their new prominence by appearing together for the first time at a
party dinner
in Waterloo, Iowa, late Sunday. The event opened a new and potentially
defining
phase of the nomination race: their head-to-head battle for the social
and
religious conservatives who dominate early-state caucuses and primaries.
Those
tests, it seems increasingly
clear, will be decided by an electorate fed up with Washington’s
dysfunction
and deeply worried that the U.S. is in decline economically and as a
world
power.
Party
activists in Iowa, in a warning
to the establishment of both major parties, forced Tim Pawlenty to
abruptly
quit the race Sunday, by dealing him a weak third-place finish in a
straw poll
Saturday that boosted Bachmann to the head of the field in the leadoff
caucus
state.
Pawlenty
said on ABC’s “This Week”
that voters were “looking for something different” from what he was
offering as
“a rational, established” two-term Minnesota governor with a “strong
record of
results, based on experience governing.” Other Republicans said his
low-key,
guy-next-door image was no match for Bachmann’s crowd-pleasing fire.
Bachmann
said Republican voters were
sending “a strong message to Washington.” They “want us to get our
house in
order, financially speaking” and “they want someone who is going to
fight for
them,” she said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Candidates
from the party’s
establishment wing who had been expected to challenge for the
nomination have
been faltering in the early going. Besides Pawlenty, former House
Speaker Newt
Gingrich and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. have failed to take off,
though
the latter two remain in the race.
Read
the rest of the story at the Los
Angeles Times
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