Romney talks economics as Gingrich and Santorum go after Obama

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum each ridiculed President Obama’s record on energy and the environment on Monday, while Mitt Romney stuck to his economic agenda as the trio of Republican presidential candidates wrapped up their Mississippi and Alabama campaigns.

Gingrich, who has the most at stake in the twin Southern primaries on Tuesday, avoided taking shots at his GOP rivals.

But Santorum, who hopes the former House speaker will lose both contests and abandon his candidacy, hammered Gingrich and Romney for environmental records that he described as detrimental to the nation’s energy supplies.

And Romney, campaigning in a drenching downpour in Mobile, Ala., cast both of his opponents as Washington insiders too steeped in the capital’s rank political culture to be genuine agents of change in the White House.

“If you think that Washington’s a mess, I hope you’ll send me there so I can fix it,” the former Massachussetts governor told a crowd outside the Whistle Stop, a train-themed diner near railroad tracks that slice across Mobile.

“If you think that just having the same people go to the same place, but just in different chairs, is going to make things different, why you can vote for them,” he said.

A while later, Gingrich and Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, made back-to-back appearances at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi. The setting was apt for Gingrich, who has staked his campaign in the South on a plan to reduce gasoline prices by increasing domestic oil drilling.

He told the friendly energy-industry crowd that the left-wing environmental movement, embodied by Obama, “hates oil.”

“If you read the president’s energy speeches, he is in cloud cucckoo land,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich mocked the Justice Department for suing oil companies over North Dakota energy operations that were leaving birds soaked in oil, saying the administration has many thousands of bird deaths caused by wind turbines.

“Nobody in the Justice Department has thought about going after wind, because wind is green, and therefore dead birds on behalf of green is good, but dead birds in an oil patch are bad,” he said.

Gingrich also poked fun at a tax break on the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid electric car, calling it a “reverse distribution of wealth.”

“All the guys who buy pickups are now subsidizing the rich guy who’s buying the Volt,” he said. “But it’s not going to be a popular car, because you can’t put a gun rack in it.”

Santorum, too, took the administration to task over energy exploration, saying it had been too unfriendly to oil and gas drilling. He promised to open up more federal lands to drilling, along with oil and gas fields off the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Santorum also went after fellow Republicans. Unlike Gingrich and Romney, Santorum said, he was “someone who didn’t buy the last environmental hoax, man-made global warming.”

“I stood up and said the science is bogus,” Santorum said, drawing a contrast with GOP opponents who once advocated steps to address climate change.

“When times were tough, they were not,” he said. “And I was.”

michael.finnegan@latimes.com

Original source: Romney talks economics as Gingrich and Santorum go after Obama