Rick Santorum faced with strategy shift that will test his shoestring campaign

POWELL, Tenn. — Rick Santorum does not plan to abandon the fiery Christian rhetoric or the shoestring campaign that got him to where he is today. But as a slate of high-stakes Republican presidential primaries approaches, he is being forced to shift his strategy to beat back perceptions that he is obsessed with controversial social issues and harbors outdated ideas about women.

The shift will test Santorum’s skills as a candidate as well as his bare-bones campaign operation, which is struggling to match his status as a top-tier candidate. The operation’s priority this week is to hold on to the candidate’s lead in polls in Ohio, which will vote on Tuesday.

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Mitt Romney outperformed Santorum by large margins among women and men in Arizona, according to exit polls. But in Michigan, Santorum lost women to Romney by five percentage points, an edge that provided the former Massachusetts governor with his narrow margin there.

Although Santorum sought to spin the Michigan results as a tie, it is clear that the contest revealed a significant challenge for him. He has been outspoken about contraception, abortion and his wife’s decision to leave her career as a lawyer to home-school their seven children.

Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, seemed to recognize the problem even before the final results were tallied in Michigan, and in at least three speeches in recent days, he has made appeals to women, recalling not only his wife’s career, but also that of his 93-year-old mother. On Wednesday, in Tennessee, he described his daughter Elizabeth as “one of the great women” in his life. That was a subtle shift from what used to be a routine introduction of his eldest child, who often travels with him.

Aides noted that Santorum’s campaign includes women in senior positions and they promised a greater effort in coming days to flesh out the candidate’s biography beyond some of his more controversial positions on social issues.

They insist that their economic message is being overshadowed by questions about Santorum’s social platform.

“There’s a lot that’s written about Rick that he feels is not really who he is,” said John Brabender, a top adviser. “Instead of letting perceptions become the reality based upon what we would consider images that are pushed by his opponents or segments of the news media that might be less favorable, he wants to provide a fuller picture of the reality.”

To that end, Santorum is moving to expand the biographical portions of his stump speeches. In talking about his mother in an address in Ohio, he presented her as a woman ahead of her time.

“She worked all of my childhood years. She balanced time as my dad did, working different schedules and she was a very unusual person at that time,” Santorum said. “She was a professional who actually made more money than her husband. I grew up with a very strong mom, someone who was a professional person who taught me a lot of things about balancing work and family and doing it well, doing it with a big heart and commitment.”