Fresh gaffe dogs Romney campaign

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has received backing from major Republican figures after a big win in Illinois, but an aide’s gaffe reinforced qualms about his campaign.Former Florida governor Jeb Bush – whose father and brother are both former US presidents – threw his considerable weight behind Romney after the frontrunner romped to victory in Tuesday’s Illinois primary.“Now is the time for Republicans to unite behind governor Romney and take our message of fiscal conservatism and job creation to all voters this fall,” Bush said in a statement.“We face huge challenges, and we need a leader who understands the economy (and) recognises more government regulation is not the answer,” he said.But a senior adviser’s comparison of the former Massachusetts governor’s strategy to an “Etch A Sketch” toy reinforced core Republican doubts about Romney’s conservative credentials.Asked on CNN whether the primary had pushed Romney too far to the right for general election voters, adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said: “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”Conservative underdog Rick Santorum, unbowed by Romney’s lead after Illinois, vowed to take the fight all the way to the Republican convention in August and was quick to seize on the gaffe at a campaign stop in Louisiana.“The reason governor Romney hasn’t been able to seal the deal” is because “a lot of voters” know “he will say what he needs to say to win the election”.As the mocking from Santorum, fellow candidate Newt Gingrich and Democrats piled up, Romney went into damage control mode.“Organisationally, a general election campaign takes on a different profile,” he told reporters, but “the issues I’m running on will be exactly the same”.“I’m running as a conservative Republican, I was a conservative Republican governor, I’ll be running as a conservative Republican nominee for president.”With many states awarding delegates proportionately and with rivals refusing to quit, analysts say it could take Romney until June to win sufficient delegates to clinch the nomination.Romney meanwhile portrayed himself as the virtual nominee at a stop in Maryland, which holds its primary on April 3.Not once did he mention his Republican rivals, instead training his sights on the economic failings of the man in the White House.“I see our president attacking economic freedom, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” he told hundreds of supporters at an American Legion hall in the town of Arbutus, as he drilled into President Barack Obama’s failed policies and explained why Romney’s economic chops would bring about a fuller recovery.“When the president interferes with the free marketplace, he substitutes the heavy hand of government for the invisible hand of the market, to the peril of economic freedom. That must end.”