Republican presidential candidates were given one last chance to pounce on front-runner Mitt Romney in a televised debate on Sunday, just two days before voters in New Hampshire head to the polls.
Attacks on Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, were teed up in the NBC/Facebook debate in Concord, New Hampshire, when other candidates were asked whether Romney would be able to defeat President Barack Obama.
Wasting no time, former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich said Romney would "have a very hard time getting elected."
"There’s a huge difference between a Reagan conservative and somebody who comes out of the Massachusetts culture who essentially has a moderate record," Gingrich said.
Opinion polls show Romney holds a wide lead in New Hampshire, which holds its first in the nation primary election on Tuesday, and also leads in South Carolina, the next state in the nominating process.
"If his record was so great as governor of Massachusetts, why didn’t he run for re-election," Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, said of Romney, who launched his unsuccessful 2008 White House bid just weeks after leaving the statehouse after one term.
Santorum has been riding a wave of popularity after a narrow second-place finish to Romney in the first Republican presidential nominating contest in Iowa last week.
Romney defended himself as "a solid conservative" who was in politics as a detour from his business career as a venture capitalist, and kept his focus more on Obama than on his Republican rivals.
"I happen to believe that if we want to replace a lifetime politician like Barack Obama … we’ve got to choose someone who is not a lifetime politician, who has not spent his entire career in Washington."
