Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry clashed with his main rival Mitt Romney over entitlement programs on Monday as the party's White House hopefuls squared off in a debate in Florida.
Eight candidates hoping to challenge President Barack Obama next year took the stage at the sprawling state fairgrounds in Florida, which has a huge proportion of elderly voters, and should be key in the 2012 US national vote.
Perry, the Texas governor who shot to the top of Republican polls the moment he entered the race late last month, has tarred Social Security as a failed "lie." Former frontrunner Romney said Perry's extreme tone was off.
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"Listen, this is a broken system," Perry said, referring to Social Security, most of which goes to payments to US senior citizens.
ROW OVER SOCIAL SECURITY
"It's time to have a legitimate conversation" about entitlement reform, he argued.
Romney, a millionaire businessman and ex-governor of Massachusetts, slammed Perry for alarming seniors.
"The term Ponzi scheme (used by Perry) is over-the-top," Romney said, arguing that Perry's view that Social Security was a "failure" and "unconstitutional" were out of the mainstream.
"It has been called a Ponzi scheme by many people long before me," Perry shot back. "But no one's had the courage to stand up and say, here is how we're going to reform it."
"We're going to fix it so that our young Americans that are going out into the workforce today will know without a doubt that there were some people who came along that didn't lie to them," Perry stressed.
PERRY IN THE LEAD
A poll out Monday by CNN and ORC International showed Perry with a wide lead over Romney, with 30 percent of Americans saying they would support him to be the Republican nominee, compared to 18 percent for Romney.
Asked which candidate has the best chance to defeat Obama, 42 percent of those polled said Perry, and 26 percent chose Romney.
As the largest state to host an early nominating contest for the presidential race, as early as January 31, Florida may well wind up being the turning point in the Republican fight to challenge Obama in November 2012.
"Florida will be the deciding factor in both the Republican primary race and the general election," Javier Manjarres, editor of the Shark Tank, a conservative blog about Florida politics, told AFP.
It is a stronghold of the growing bloc of US Hispanic voters, many of whom want to rein in government spending.
But the retirement-haven state also critically has the highest proportion of elderly voters in the country - as high as one in three, by some counts - so candidates' words on Social Security will be carefully weighed.
FIGHT TO STAY IN
Six others taking part in the debate - congresswoman Michele Bachmann, businessman Herman Cain, ex-House speaker Newt Gingrich, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, Representative Ron Paul and ex-senator Rick Santorum - sought to flex their political muscle to try to remain relevant - and in the fight.
In the so-called "Tea Party Republican Debate," moderated by CNN at the invitation of the pro-small government conservatives, candidates slammed Obama's health care law, criticized the Federal Reserve and weak US dollar, and took turns painting Obama's efforts at stimulating economic growth and job creation as an agonizing flop.
"I recognize that America's economy is in crisis," Romney said. "I spent my life in the private sector. I understand how jobs come to America and why they go."
Huntsman tried to rally support behind himself with a jab at Perry and Romney, portraying them as failing to lead.
"This party isn't going to win in 2012 unless we get our act together and fix the problem. We all know that we've got entitlement problems, we've got Medicare, Social Security - the fixes are there," Huntsman said.
But "we are of no value to the rest of the world if our core is crumbling, which it is," added Huntsman, who served as Obama's envoy to China.
Fourteen months before election day, both Democrats and Republicans are gearing up to conquer Florida, a state of 18.8 million people and 29 of the 270 electoral votes a candidate needs to win the White House - the highest number of some eight to 12 swing states that often decide national elections.
In a state in which tourism is an economic pillar and lower-paying service jobs the norm, the jobless rate hovers at 10.7 per cent, above the national average.
Florida is eager to move on from the tarnished reputation it earned when it was the scene of a controversial and embarrassing vote recount following the 2000 presidential election. That recount was halted by the US Supreme Court, in effect awarding the presidency to George W. Bush over Al Gore.
As a sign of the state's growing political sway, the Republican leadership decided to hold its national convention next August in Tampa.
Democrats outnumber Republicans by some 700,000 voters in Florida, but Manjarres said Republicans are a more organized voting bloc and can outnumber their rivals at the polls.
