MANCHESTER, N.H. (MCT) — Mitt Romney coolly defended his solid New Hampshire lead Saturday night in a high-stakes debate while his rivals took aim at each other as they struggled to emerge as Romney’s main challenger.
The six candidates fought, sometimes bitterly, over leadership qualities, job creation, military backgrounds and a host of other issues three days before the nation’s first presidential primary here.
Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who has a huge lead in New Hampshire polls, defended his role as a businessman and emerged from the debate largely unscathed. His opponents largely fired at each other, not him, and he concentrated his criticism on Barack Obama, cultivating his camp’s contention that he’s the Republican most able to defeat the Democratic incumbent.
Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who surged into a virtual tie with Romney in Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, promoted his record of working in Congress on issues such as Iran as a better model for presidential leadership than Romney’s record as a private-equity capitalist.
“Business experience doesn’t necessarily match up with being the commander-in-chief,” Santorum said, referring to Romney. “The commander-in-chief of this country isn’t a CEO.”
Romney, co-founder of the Bain Capital investment company, responded firmly and deliberately.
“People who spend a lot of time in Washington don’t understand what happens in the real economy,” he said. “They think people who start businesses are just managers. … Those people are leaders. My experience is in leadership.”
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich also went after Romney’s record at Bain, a company that invested in other businesses, sometimes forcing job layoffs.
“It always pained me to downsize a business to make it financially successful,” Romney said. But overall, the businesses his company invested in “have now added more than 100,000 jobs.”
