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ATLANTA - Mitt Romney says he's a better tea party candidate than his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.The former Massachusetts governor lashed out at Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum on Wednesday, the day after losing contests in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado.Romney says his opponents are members of a Republican Party that had lost its way. He says spending on lawmakers' pet projects doubled under Gingrich, a former House speaker. He says Santorum, a former senator, was a major proponent of that type of spending.Romney says the tea party movement was created to fight Washington insiders who spend too much...

ABC News' Amy Walter reports: A new ABC News/Wash. Post poll finds that in a head to head match-up against President Barack Obama, 70% of those who say they are Tea Party supporters say they'll vote for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president--compared to 69% for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Seeming Tea Party favorites like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, draw 61% and 60%, respectively....

NEW ORLEANS -- I just wrote about "Evangelicals for Mitt," a group of evangelical supporters of Mitt Romney who are pressing people to support Romney at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference straw poll. Afterward, I spoke to a young female delegate who said she planned to vote for Romney in the poll. I asked her how she had ended up at the conference. She said "Evangelicals for Mitt" had contacted her and offered to pay for her to have a limited-access ticket -- so long as she agreed to vote for Romney in the straw poll. Asked how "Evangelicals for...

PHOENIX (AP) — John McCain and Sarah Palin are scheduled to campaign together in Arizona next week for the first time since they conceded the presidential election in Phoenix in 2008. Palin and McCain will be at a rally and picnic in Tucson on March 26, followed the next day by a rally in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.

BOSTON (AP) - A rap star says former Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney first touched him—and not the other way around—during a confrontation aboard an Air Canada flight that was preparing to take off from Vancouver, British Columbia. Sky Blu, whose given name is Skyler Gordy, says in a video posted Friday on TMZ.com that he was trying to go to sleep when he leaned his seat back on the Vancouver-to-Los Angeles flight Monday. He says Romney loudly told him several times to straighten it and then grabbed his shoulder.

(CNN) -- Catholic, Orthodox and Evangelical Christian leaders last week issued a bold political statement. They intended to target the Obama administration. Inadvertently, they may have also hit probable Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney ought to rank atop the Republican candidates for president in 2012. He finished second in votes cast in the primaries of 2008. He is a candidate with immense private-sector economic expertise in a time of urgent economic debate. But Romney has a political problem: his Mormon religious faith. A Gallup survey in December 2007 found that 18 percent of Republicans would not vote for...