In Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday, Santorum compared contraception to deodorant and soap when making a point about why he believes birth control should not be covered by health insurers.

“Let’s mandate that every insurance policy covers toothpaste. Deodorant. That might be a good idea, right? Have everyone cover deodorant, right? Soap. I mean, where do you stop?”

Santorum also fell back on a well-worn Republican criticism that President Barack Obama and his administration are elitists.

“Don’t you see how they see you? How they look down their nose at the average Americans? These elite snobs,” said Santorum, who reported 2010 income of almost $1 million, according to financial disclosure forms.

Though he is giving Republican rival Mitt Romney a run for his money in the nomination race, Santorum’s language might be an obstacle if he wins his party’s nomination to challenge Obama in the November 6 election.

“As a frontrunner you have to watch exactly what you say,” said Donna Robinson Devine, professor of government at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. “The attention has moved to Santorum, but to me he seems very whiny. I just can’t imagine him as president.”

Santorum’s most famous equivalence came from 2003.

In an interview, he said that if the Supreme Court protected the right for gays to have consensual sex in their own homes, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

Comments in that interview that homosexuality was not as bad as bestiality raised even more eyebrows.

“That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be,” he said.

Santorum lost his 2006 re-election bid to the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania by 18 percentage points to Democrat Robert Casey.

Among those who turned against the incumbent were young voters, said Geoff Garin, a strategist who polled for Casey in that race. “Young people thought he was kind of weirdly out of sync with modern times,” Garin said.

In January, Santorum was booed by an audience of high school and college students in Concord, New Hampshire, after equating same-sex marriages, legal in the state for two years, to polygamy.

“What about three men?” Santorum said, after being asked how it affected him, personally, if two gay men or lesbians married. “If you think it’s OK for two, you have to differentiate for me why you’re not OK with three. Any two people, or any three, or four.”

Talia Stroud, a professor of communications at the University of Texas in Austin, said it was uncertain how much any one of Santorum’s individual comments would resonate.

“It depends on how much that item stays in the news cycle. A lot of issues crop up, but a lot of how it impacts public opinion depends on how much it is recirculated,” said Stroud, who studies the media’s role in shaping political attitudes.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

It’s an anti-Romney movement five years in the making, and now it’s a large and growing “Super Pack” that even plans to crash the legendary Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show this week.

Dogs Against Romney is an ad-hoc group that likes dogs (and even, when pressed, some cats) but does not like Mitt Romney. It was brought together by the now well-known story of how Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, once drove from Boston to Canada with his dog in a carrier strapped to the roof of the speeding family car.

For those unfamiliar, the story –- unearthed by the Boston Globe in 2007 — goes something like this: In 1983 Romney, then a rising star in the private equity world, loaded up the family station wagon with sons and luggage for a long trek from Boston to Ontario, Canada. Seamus, the family’s Irish Setter, was put in his dog crate and strapped to the top of the car. Poor Seamus, whether terrified or over-excited or just not given a chance for a potty break, at some point soiled himself, as the Romney boys discovered when they saw brown liquid running down the window. Romney, the turnaround and efficiency specialist, quickly pulled into a nearby gas station to hose down the car, and the dog, and get back on the road.

Not long after the Seamus story became public, dog lover Scott Crider started the dogsagainstromney.com website and blog, in time for the former Massachusetts governor’s first, unsuccessful White House run. With Romney now arguably the Republican front-runner for 2012, the website and the movement have returned with fresh vigor.

Crider, 47, is a digital creative director and social media strategist based in Gulf Shores, Alabama, who works on the website in his spare time. He calls it “a work of satire with a serious message, and totally grass-roots.” The generic brown dog — nicknamed Rusty –- in the current stars-and-stripes emblazoned “In Dog We Trust/Dogs Against Romney” poster is “a composite of all the dogs I’ve owned in my life,” said Crider.

Dogs Against Romney has some simple principles: primarily among them, that dogs aren’t luggage. The website runs regular photos of member-dogs in cars, along with the slogan, “I ride inside.”

“We’ve had literally thousands of people uploading pictures of their dogs and creating their own ‘I ride inside’ art,” said Crider.

“We want to help get the word out,” Crider added. “We’ll be anti-Mitt Romney until he explains to the satisfaction of dog owners why he thinks it’s okay to put a dog on the roof of his car.”

Dogs Against Romney t-shirts, dog bandanas, bumper stickers and car magnets are also for sale proclaiming “Crate-Gate,” “Mitt is Mean” and “Get ‘Ruff’ With Romney.” The money raised will be donated to an animal welfare organization voted on by the Pack. Membership of the Dogs Against Romney Facebook page is fast approaching 25,000.

On Tuesday, Dogs Against Romney will hold an event at New York’s Madison Square Garden on the second and final day of the famous dog show. Dogs are welcome, but not required.

Photo credit: “Dogs Against Romney” flag. Watchdog Causes LLC

Photo credit: Mitt Romney and his grandson Parker greet a dog as they arrive for a campaign stop at the Sun City retirement community in Bluffton, South Carolina, January 16, 2008. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

The former Massachusetts governor arguably has fewer effective weapons against Santorum than he was able to pull out against Newt Gingrich after getting a thumping in South Carolina from the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

As they battled for the 2012 Republican nomination, Romney attacked Gingrich on several fronts, scoring a big hit with ads focused on Gingrich’s ethics violations in Congress.

The attacks helped carry Romney to front-runner status in the race to face Democratic President Barack Obama in November -

until Santorum roared back into the winner’s circle with three victories last week in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

But his criticism of the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania has been confined to subjects like his support for spending bills and local spending projects known as earmarks.

It would be difficult for Romney to find a foothold in using social issues against Santorum, a Catholic veteran of the American culture wars who has prayed on the floor of the U.S. Senate and whose campaign events are often dubbed part of a “Faith, Family and Freedom” tour.

Santorum and Gingrich have been vying for the “true conservative” mantle to lure more conservative Republican primary voters who mistrust Romney as too moderate.

By contrast, Romney has essentially staked his White House big on one selling point: jobs.

Recently, Romney, along with his rivals, has sharpened his rhetoric in the controversy that is pitting Catholic bishops against the Obama administration over birth control.

The former venture capitalist made a mini-comeback on Saturday with a 39 percent victory in Maine’s caucuses, beating U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas by a few hundred votes in a poorly attended contest. Romney also won the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll that day.

Santorum brushed off the straw poll victory, accusing Romney on CNN of “buying” his 7-point win. The New York Times reported that the Romney campaign bussed in students from local colleges, an evergreen tactic at straw polls from Iowa to Washington.

Santorum also embraced his third-place finish in Maine. “We ended up with 18 percent, really having not appeared up there or done anything,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“BEATING THE TAR OUT OF HIS OPPONENTS”

Romney has the money to fund a campaign of negative ads against Santorum similar to the hardball policy used against Gingrich in Florida’s primary last month.

The Romney campaign and “Restore Our Future,” the Super PAC supporting him, spent an estimated $15 million on TV ads in Florida to tear down Gingrich after his South Carolina win.

“He’s been able to win in these early primary states by, you know, beating the tar out of his opponents by four- and five-to-one on television,” Santorum said on ABC.

The next test will come at the February 28 primary in Michigan where Romney’s father was a three-term governor.

Romney’s attacks have been centered on Santorum’s Senate legislative record, including support for spending earmarks and votes to raise the debt ceiling. That tactic may not be a dealbreaker for some of the conservatives Christians and others now flocking to Santorum’s campaign.

A national poll on Saturday by Public Policy Polling showed Santorum at 38 percent to Romney’s 23 percent, 17 percent for Gingrich, and 13 percent for Paul.

“Part of the reason for Santorum’s surge is his own high level of popularity,” the group said. “But the other, and maybe more important, reason is that Republicans are significantly souring on both Romney and Gingrich.”

Romney’s favorability was barely above water at 44 percent to 43 percent, a 23-point net decline from December, suggesting his response to releasing his tax returns, negative campaigning and other missteps are hurting his image.

The polling institute said Santorum was “completely dominating” the most right-leaning Republicans.

The former senator faced questions on ABC on Sunday about his book “It Takes a Family” where he seemed to suggest women were pressurized by radical feminists to work outside the home.

Years before the current Catholic birth control controversy, Santorum said that contraceptives harm women and society. He has also enraged the gay community, as recently as January, by equating same-sex marriage with polygamy.

Santorum’s conservative credentials may land him in trouble in a larger, more diverse electorate, but for the voters who typically turn out for Republican primaries, he seems to be hitting a sweet spot.

Susan Wiswell, 56, of Kittery, a nurse who said social issues should be more prominent in the national discourse, voted for Santorum in the Maine caucus.

“He’s a consistent conservative both on fiscal and social issues as well. He’s very clean-cut. It would be hard for Obama to smear him. He’s just a very solid, modest individual that I could trust,” Wiswell said.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Results of Maine’s non-binding straw poll showed the former Massachusetts governor with 39 percent support, or 2,190 votes, ahead of libertarian Texas Congressman Ron Paul with 36 percent or 1,996 votes.

Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who did not campaign in Maine, won 18 percent and 6 percent of the vote, respectively. Despite signs of higher voter turnout, the votes cast in Maine appeared to be only slightly above 2008 levels.

The outcome capped a good day for Romney, who unexpectedly lost to Santorum, a social conservative, in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado on Tuesday to generate new doubts about his appeal to party conservatives. Republicans are seeking a nominee to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in the November 6 general election.

Romney earlier won a closely watched straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, with 38 percent support to Santorum’s 31 percent.

More moderate than his rivals, Romney, a former venture capitalist, has struggled to convince conservatives he is one of them. He spoke to CPAC on Friday and called himself “severely conservative.”

“I thank the voters of Maine for their support,” Romney said in a statement after the Maine results. I’m committed to turning around America. And I’m heartened to have the support of so many good people in this great state.”

In a sign of how seriously the Romney campaign took Maine and the potential for a fourth consecutive state loss, Romney flew to Portland on Friday for a town hall meeting, and spoke at two of the state’s largest caucus sites on Saturday.

At a caucus in Sanford, Romney called Obama “a failed president” and added that he was “the one person in this race that can actually beat the president.”

“I know what it will take to make America the best place in the world for job creation,” Romney said.

He also brought some of his top surrogates, including son Tagg, to Maine to speak on his behalf.

Sensing a possible victory, Paul hosted a party in Portland on Saturday evening. After the results were announced, he told supporters that Romney’s margin of victory was so small, “it’s almost like we could call it a tie.”

Paul also forecast that when Maine’s delegates were finally assigned, “we will control the Maine caucus when we go to Tampa” for the Republican convention in August.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland in Washington; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Voting in dozens of local caucuses across Maine’s 16 counties has been going on since late January. Results of a non-binding straw poll will be released by the state Republican Party around 7:30 p.m. on Saturday.

Among the Republican contenders seeking to take on Democratic President Barack Obama in the November general election, only Romney, the former governor of nearby Massachusetts, and Paul, a U.S. representative from Texas, have significant ground operations that can spearhead a get-out-the-vote effort.

Maine’s population ranks 41st among the 50 U.S. states, but the contest is key for Romney after he lost to former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado this week.

A win could help right the Romney ship, while a loss would be another sign that Republican voters have reservations about his conservative bona fides.

Paul held several well-attended events in Maine in late January. A rally in Freeport on a frigid day attracted an estimated 1,000 Paul loyalists and curious L.L. Bean shoppers – no small feat in a state where total votes cast in the 2008 Republican caucuses was 5,491.

Paul returns to Maine on Saturday to speak at caucus locations in three towns and an evening rally in Portland.

Romney made his first 2012 visit to Maine on Friday, staging a packed town-hall meeting in Portland. Visits to two caucus sites were added to his schedule for Saturday.

Maine encompasses everything from oceanfront estates such as one owned by former President George H. W. Bush in Kennebunkport, to remote potato farms near the state’s northern border with Quebec. Obama won the state by 18 points in the 2008 election. Maine has not voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988.

Portland, the state’s largest city, is only two hours from Boston and within Republican ranks is regarded as natural territory from Romney, who easily won the primary in neighboring New Hampshire a month ago.

But north and away from the coast, Maine’s vast, sparsely populated wilderness areas are seen as Paul strongholds – areas where many residents have a frontier spirit and are wary of excessive government involvement in their lives.

Many of Maine’s rural areas are also struggling economically. Romney, the multimillionaire former venture capitalist, has not fared well with lower-income voters in most states so far.

Maine’s Republican Party has reported large, enthusiastic turnouts at its caucuses. If true, that would mark a change from other states to vote in the Republican contest, where turnout has often been below 2008 levels.

“A number of towns that have not held caucuses in several cycles have become active again, and among those towns that have caucused, attendance has increased on an average of 100 percent,” said Loretta Mikols, a committeewoman in Oxford County, on the state’s western border with New Hampshire.

(Reporting By Ros Krasny; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Republican Mitt Romney found it was not all smooth sailing in Maine on Friday night when he was heckled repeatedly at a town hall meeting in Portland at a marine storage and repair facility.

Romney jetted in from Washington to fire up his base a day before the Maine Republican Party announces the results of a week-long caucusing process. But the well-attended meeting wasn’t without some unexpected drama that showed the candidate’s testy side.

The event’s second question centered on “stashing your money away in Cayman Islands,” based on investment strategies revealed when Romney recently released his 2010 tax returns. “ First of all, first of all, I’ll have to take a look at what the trustee says,” Romney said, adding that his fortune — estimated to be as high as $250 million — has been managed in a blind trust for ten years.

When Romney later talked about the importance of increasing domestic oil production, an audience member yelled, “NO FRACKING, NO FRACKING,” referring to the technique for extracting oil and natural gas from deep underground by the injection of a highly pressurized fluid. Fracking has been linked to a number of unintended consequences, from water contamination to earthquakes. A brief, heated exchange followed, before Romney finally shot back, “don’t get so upset about it, madam. It’s not worth getting upset about.”

On the Keystone Pipeline itself, Romney said, “If you don’t want oil from Canada, vote for Barack Obama.”

Romney also endured heckling on his proposal to immediately overturn President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms if elected president. “OBAMACARE IS ROMNEYCARE,” shouted a man with a ponytail. And when Romney used one of his standard stump lines –- that U.S. household incomes have fallen under Obama’s watch, the same man yelled, “THERE’S A RECESSION GOING ON, MISTER ROMNEY!”

Another one of Romney’s regular riffs, about the need to roll back Dodd-Frank regulations on the banking sector, drew an angry retort: “IT WAS THE LARGE BANKS THAT CRASHED OUR ECONOMY, SIR. THEY NEED TO BE REGULATED.”

When the heckler continued, Romney shot back, “It’s my turn to speak now. You’ve had your turn.”

Most of the other audience members backed Romney, hissing at the hecklers and telling them to be quiet. The two were soon removed from the event by authorities.

The state-by-state Republican nominating contest goes quiet after Maine for a couple of weeks. Romney is still favored to win in Maine over Texas Congressman Ron Paul. But a little break from campaigning probably can’t come soon enough.

Photo credits: Mitt Romney at a campaign stop in Portland, Maine, February 10, 2012. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

But on Saturday, Ron Paul could get his best shot at a victory in Maine, the cold, far northeastern state that has given a warm reception to his libertarian views.

Local caucusing has been under way in Maine since January 29, and will continue in a few towns until March. Even so, the state Republican Party will announce the winner of its presidential straw poll on Saturday, and the Texas congressman’s strong on-the-ground organization could have a big impact.

Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, generally is viewed as the favorite here, and in the overall Republican race. After losing the last three state contests to Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, Romney is thirsty for a morale-boosting win in Maine, where he won 52 percent of the vote during his unsuccessful run for president in 2008.

Paul typically has been viewed as the Republican contender least likely to win the nomination, but he has a loyal following and this week was running second to Romney in a nationwide Reuters/Ipsos poll of Republican voters.

Paul has yet to translate that appeal into a victory in the state-by-state race for the nomination. His best results have been second-place finishes in Minnesota and New Hampshire, in both instances far behind the winner.

Speaking to supporters on Tuesday after his runner-up finish in Minnesota, Paul said he expected to do well in Maine.

Political analysts agree.

“If Ron Paul is going to win one state, this is the one,” said Mark Brewer, associate professor of political science at the University of Maine in Orono.

“There’s a particularly strong libertarian streak in Maine’s political culture, and Ron Paul can tap into that in a way that the others really can’t,” Brewer said. “He can generate a mass of enthusiasm, particularly among college students.”

PAUL’S AGGRESSIVE EFFORTS

Polling data is sparse for the Pine Tree State, so it is difficult to get a precise read on where the candidates stand with voters.

The betting site Intrade is predicting that Romney will win the state, followed by Paul.

Santorum and former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich have largely ignored Maine, preferring to focus on other states in the run-up to the “Super Tuesday” contests on March 6, when voters in 10 states will take part in primaries or caucuses.

But Paul’s supporters have been aggressive in their get-out-the-vote efforts, calling to make sure potential voters know when and where to caucus — no small feat given the state’s stretched-out voting calendar.

Sylvia Most, a Republican who has worked on several political campaigns, including Maine U.S. Senator Susan Collins’ successful re-election bid in 2008, said Paul’s ground troops have been out in force.

“At the caucus in my local community (in Scarborough, near Portland), they had a good organization, and that’s what I’ve been hearing elsewhere,” Most said.

CONCERNS FOR ROMNEY?

Maine has only 24 delegates at stake, a fraction of the 1,144 needed to clinch the Republican nomination.

But the symbolic importance of Maine to Romney has spiked after Tuesday, when the front-runner lost to Santorum in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

With that in mind, Romney’s schedulers had their candidate flying to Portland late on Friday for a town hall meeting, hours after a speech to the conservative CPAC meeting in Washington.

“One can speculate that his campaign is hearing some things they don’t really like out of Maine,” Brewer said. “It certainly sounds like Ron Paul is doing well so far.”

If Romney’s visit could be a sign of weakness, Paul’s two-day campaign swing in late January was a show of strength. The congressman attracted large crowds despite frigid weather, and favorable press when he held six events in the state.

Paul met with Maine’s Governor Paul LePage, a Republican affiliated with the Tea Party, a populist conservative movement that aims to limit taxes and government.

Elected in 2010, LePage has outraged many Maine Democrats by, among other things, seeking to undermine labor unions. But LePage, who has not made an endorsement in the presidential race, is popular with the type of die-hard conservatives who typically vote in the Republican caucuses.

Maine is split into two congressional districts. The southern 1st District, which includes lively and eclectic Portland, is “right in Romney’s back yard,” Most said.

But the sparsely populated 2nd District, dominated by woods and lakes stretching hundreds of miles to the Canadian border, is quintessential Ron Paul territory because its residents tend to be wary of government excess.

Although he carried all but two of Maine’s 16 counties in the 2008 primary, “I’d be pretty surprised if Romney’s able to win a lot of towns in the 2nd District,” Brewer said. “2008 was a different contest.”

Stinging losses to Mitt Romney in Florida and Nevada within a week have sucked much of the energy from the former House speaker’s shot at the Republican nomination to challenge President Barack Obama in the November 6 general election.

Gingrich’s upset win in South Carolina on January 21 seems a lifetime ago. The candidate has appeared tired and fed-up at the very time he needs to recharge his campaign to win voters and donors with Super Tuesday, when 10 states hold nominating contests, looming on March 6.

Gingrich, 68, campaigned hard in Florida, possibly to the point of exhaustion, ran chronically late to events and cut short some speeches. In Nevada he appeared sparingly and struggled to keep up with the issues of the day, such as the positive January jobs report, a possible political game-changer that he had not seen five hours after its release.

The negative television ads so successful in siphoning Gingrich support in Florida followed him to Nevada. Romney’s well-funded campaign, and backing from a political action committee run by Romney supporters, will no doubt continue the blitz.

There might be a point beyond which Gingrich, who many observers think entered the presidential race mostly to burnish his reputation as a conservative elder-statesman, can no longer stomach the daily attacks.

Republican strategist Ford O’Connell said Gingrich had lost control of his emotions at times. “Gingrich should not have let Romney get into his head,” O’Connell said. “That was a killer. When he’s angry, he is his own worst enemy.”

NEWT’S NOTORIOUS STAYING POWER

Indeed, Gingrich does best when he displays faux anger – such as in the South Carolina debates, when he twice attacked the moderators with a theatrical flourish – but worse when he actually is angry.

“Gingrich felt very wronged by the Romney campaign. Is it worth staying in the race to prove a point?” said Krystal Ball, a Democratic strategist. “But I would say, if anyone has staying power, it’s Newt Gingrich.”

Ball said the torrent of negative television advertising in Florida – the vast majority directed at Gingrich – was unprecedented.

“It was also quite successful,” she said.

The commercials focused on Gingrich’s ethics violations in Congress and his work as a consultant for mortgage giant Freddie Mac. They also mocked his claim that he was a close associate of president and conservative hero Ronald Reagan, which has been one of Gingrich’s key campaign themes.

“Among the rank and file, the notion that Newt Gingrich was the conservative leader in Congress in the 1990s was very well established. The Romney commercials really attacked that,” said Charles Franklin, visiting professor of law and public policy at Marquette University Law School.

“In Congress, Newt has generated a lot of ideas that were important to the Republican Party,” Franklin said. “Romney’s comments cut to Newt’s reputation as a guy who creates big ideas. They cut right to his core.”

In an emotional speech to faith leaders in Las Vegas on Friday night, Gingrich let out some of the hurt. “I’m going to speak from my heart for a minute,” he said. “I am ashamed by the negativity and dishonesty that has marked this campaign.”

But on Saturday, in a defiant news conference after the Nevada vote, Gingrich said he had no choice but to go negative to keep pace with Romney’s “level of ruthlessness and the level of dishonesty.”

GOT DISCIPLINE?

Strategists said Gingrich’s biggest challenge is that he never laid the foundation of a campaign in the first place, especially after much of his staff quit in early June.

“The best opening for him between now and Super Tuesday is money, discipline and organization,” O’Connell said.

The seat-of-the-pants organization helped doom Gingrich’s whirlwind campaign in Nevada. A scheduling snafu caused him to miss a meeting with Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s popular first-term governor. Sandoval had earlier endorsed Texas Governor Rick Perry for the Republican nomination.

On Friday, Gingrich held a rally at a popular country music bar located in a strip mall. Outside, billboards read “George Strait After-Party, Feb 4″ and “God Bless USA.” No Gingrich signs or fliers were in evidence.

Ball said Gingrich’s problems show that a traditional campaign structure still matters – even in the age of campaigning on Facebook and Twitter and posting free ads on YouTube.

“The laws of political gravity still do apply,” she said. “Gingrich wouldn’t have a prayer without (billionaire benefactor) Sheldon Adelson. At some point, the fundraising and the ability to attract more donors is critical.”

Money is an issue with six states holding nominating contests before Super Tuesday. The margin of Gingrich’s losses, especially the 14-point deficit in Florida, could make a continued funding of his efforts a hard sell to donors.

Adelson, who with his wife has put $10 million into the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning our Future, might not be as committed to the man as the millions suggest. The New York Times reported on Sunday that Adelson has relayed assurances to Romney that he would provide even more support to him if he wins the nomination in order to defeat Obama.

But Franklin said the bare-bones nature of Gingrich’s campaign could help him stay in the campaign for months on a relatively small budget and hope for a change in luck.

In recent days, Gingrich has more aggressively twinned Romney and Obama, and is likely to ramp up that tactic as a way to undermine Romney’s perceived electability and to portray himself as the better choice for conservatives.

“Our job is to go to every contest and suck out as many delegates as we can, until the party and the country realize that Mitt Romney will crumble on the stage next to Barack Obama,” said Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond. “Let’s see that, and at that point we will have the nomination.”

Gingrich is likely to hone that message at the CPAC 2012 conference in Washington, a who’s who of conservative agenda-setters that starts on Thursday. His appearance on Friday could be the speech of his political life.

On Saturday he promised that “the contrast with Governor Romney will get wider and wider and clearer and clearer in the next couple of weeks.”

“I’m actually pretty happy with where we are,” he said.

(Reporting By Ros Krasny; editing by Mary Milliken)

“I am a candidate for president of the United States. I will be a candidate for president of the United States,” Gingrich said in Las Vegas. “We will continue to campaign all the way to Tampa,” the party’s nominating convention in late August.

The former U.S. House speaker suffered a second straight defeat to Mitt Romney, this time in the “first of the west” caucus in Nevada.

With 43 percent of precincts reporting, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, had secured 44 percent of the Nevada vote to Gingrich’s 26 percent.

“I think I will do better than John McCain did three years ago,” Gingrich said of the Nevada outcome. McCain, who went on to be the Republican nominee, received only 13 percent of the vote to Romney’s 51 percent in 2008.

Some of Romney’s success at the ballot box has been attributed to massive spending on negative television ads against Gingrich, especially in Florida.

“Although we will be outspent, we think we can communicate through the clutter,” Gingrich said.

“The vast majority of Republicans in this country want an alternative to a Massachusetts moderate. I think you can count on us being competitive in every state of the country.”

A Republican candidate needs to amass 1,144 delegates to win the nomination. Only a relative handful has been allocated in the first five states to vote: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and now Nevada.

“We will seek to find a series of victories which by the end of the Texas primary (scheduled for April 3) will leave us roughly equal to Governor Romney,” Gingrich vowed.

Gingrich spoke at the Venetian Casino, owned by magnate Sheldon Adelson, who has sunk an estimated $11 million of his own fortune into a political action committee that has bankrolled a series of attack ads against Romney.

Gingrich was upbeat, telling reporters they should “take a few hours off from politics” to watch Sunday’s NFL Super Bowl, and quipping “did you miss me?” when asked about his sparse campaigning schedule in Nevada this week.

(Reporting By Ros Krasny; editing by Christopher Wilson)

Gingrich made his comments on Friday in a speech to a coalition of religious leaders in Las Vegas ahead of Nevada’s Republican presidential caucuses on Saturday, as he tried to boost support among the state’s social conservatives.

His speech, held at Nevada’s largest non-denominational church and also webcast, was heavy on rhetoric against what the former U.S. House of Representatives speaker called “secular intellectuals.”

The Nevada caucuses mark the fifth contest in the state-by-state competition for the Republican presidential nomination to face President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in the November 6 election. Polls show Gingrich far behind front-runner Mitt Romney in Nevada.

“An anti-religious bigotry defines much of our intellectual elites,” Gingrich said. He also scorned certain judges trying to cause “the end of America as we know it” and decried Obama’s White House for “a direct war on freedom of religion.”

Gingrich, as he has throughout the campaign, accused Obama of anti-religious actions, including “declaring war on the Catholic church.”

An evangelical Christian church in New York’s Bronx recently lost a years-long battle to force the city to continue allowing religious worship services in public schools on weekends. The case was petitioned all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in December declined to review a lower-court decision.

In response, the city has said it will move to end prayer services held in public schools by dozens of churches and religious groups by February 12.

“This is nonsense. I don’t know why Mayor Bloomberg is so anti-religious,” Gingrich said, referring to New York’s three-term mayor. “I challenge Mayor Bloomberg to open up schools on the weekends.”

Some New York state lawmakers and religious groups are trying to enact emergency legislation that would allow the practice to continue.

Throughout his Nevada swing, Gingrich has stepped up attacks on the nation’s “elites.” At a country and western bar earlier on Friday, Gingrich cited newspaper editors who live in Manhattan high-rises and “ride the subway” as being oblivious to high gasoline prices.

It also was not the first time Gingrich has criticized Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman turned politician. In December, Gingrich said Bloomberg “just wrote a check and bought” the post of New York mayor.

(Reporting By Ros Krasny; Editing by Will Dunham)