Obama, in campaign form, rips into GOP

WASHINGTON -- In combative campaign form, President Barack Obama accused Republican leaders yesterday of having become so radical and dangerously rigid that even the late Ronald Reagan, one of their most cherished heroes, could not win a GOP primary if he were running today.

Obama, in a stinging speech to an audience of news executives, had unsparing words for Republicans on Capitol Hill as well as the man he is most likely to face off against in November, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The president depicted the election as a choice between a Democratic candidate who wants to use government to help people succeed and Republicans who would abandon a basic compact with society and let most people struggle at the expense of the rich.

He framed his address around a new House Republican budget plan, saying it represents a bleak, backward "radical vision."

"It is thinly veiled social Darwinism," Obama said to the annual meeting of The Associated Press. "It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who's willing to work for it. . . . It is a prescription for decline."

Republicans shot back that the president had offered a deeply partisan speech devoid of accountability. Campaigning outside Milwaukee just before Obama spoke, Romney said that the president "of course will look for someone else to blame."

Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus said Obama had abandoned his hope-and-change campaign slogan of four years ago. "All along, he's been a cold, calculating, big-spending politician," Priebus said.

Obama's speech removed any doubt that the general election was under way for the president, despite his professed reluctance to weigh in before Republicans settle on a nominee.

He took a couple of digs at Romney, playing up the Republican front-runner's support for a budget-slashing plan the House has approved.

That plan is doomed to die in the Senate, but Obama held it up as a sign of the disaster that would come if Republicans got their way: poor children not getting food, grandparents unable to afford nursing homes, more airline flights getting canceled and weather forecasts becoming less reliable.

For Obama, it was the latest in a string of efforts to get his message out just as voters were going to the polls to help pick his opponent, this time in primaries yesterday in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

Romney is on pace to clinch the nomination by the end of the primary season in June.