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excerpt... Turning to Romney, Adelson sounded frustrated by the former Massachusetts governor's unwillingness to commit to his causes. "He's not the bold decision-maker like Newt Gingrich is," Adelson said. "He doesn't want to - every time I talk to him, he says, 'Well, let me think about it.' " Adelson said he had talked to both Romney and Gingrich about agreeing to choose the other as a vice presidential nominee. Gingrich, he said, rebuffed the idea because it would make it harder to gain much-needed support from governors in other states.

Clearly it's his campaign manager and the staff who are the problem.Alternate headline: “Gingrich finally approaching the fifth stage of grief.” It’s largely a strategy of necessity: The former House Speaker is a distant third in delegates, behind Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. His campaign-finance report for February, released last week, showed more debt ($1.55 million) than cash on hand ($1.54 million).DeSantis said the former Speaker will continue to visit states with primaries, but will have a less intense campaign schedule. DeSantis promised that the campaign will be “more positive and ideas-focused,” eschewing attacks on Republican rivals. The aide said...

April will be a tough month for Rick Santorum. The primary schedule has nine contests next month ... three on Tuesday, a non-binding caucus in Missouri (again!), and five primaries on the 24th. The two most likely states for a Santorum win are winner-take-all Wisconsin on the 3rd and the candidate's home state of Pennsylvania on the 24th. Santorum trails in the latest Wisconsin polling, and a new poll by Frank & Marshall College suggests that his support back home has declined significantly: Rick Santorum appeared to be the Republican presidential candidate to beat in Pennsylvania a month ago.With the...

CHICAGO — On the issue Republicans tell pollsters is the most important of 2012, Rick Santorum these days has very little to say. His typical stump speech, an almost hour-long mixture of Orwellian fears of government overreach, history lessons about the French and Middle Eastern revolutions and suggestions that President Barack Obama would rather side with Islamists than Americans, has evolved into a tour de force of building fear in his listeners. Since winning primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, Santorum’s standard remarks have generally excluded an economic plan — the heart and soul of the message his chief GOP rival,...

As Rick Santorum desperately tries to make a dent in Mitt Romney’s formidable delegate lead, he faces an unlikely obstacle on the primary calendar: his home state of Pennsylvania. Yes, Santorum is currently favored — though hardly a lock — to win the popular vote in the state he represented in Congress for 16 years. But Pennsylvania’s non-binding primary rules for distributing delegates raise the prospect that Santorum, who has said he’ll win the vast majority of the state’s delegates, could actually come away from next month’s primary empty-handed at a time when he can ill-afford it. Which means the...

Rick Santorum may have won more primaries but the Republican National Committee's current delegate count shows former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has more bound delegates than Mr. Santorum in the race for the party's presidential nomination. Frontrunner Mitt Romney has earned 339 delegates to the August nominating convention in Tampa, Fla., or more than the rest of the field combined, according to a chart the RNC sent to its members on Thursday. Mr. Gingrich is second with 107 delegates, topping Mr. Santorum's 95 delegates and the 22 delegates pledged to Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. Winning the nomination will take...