The race for the Republican presidential nomination entered an aggressive new phase as Mitt Romney launched an ad inviting comparisons between his personal life and his main rival Newt Gingrich, a thrice-married religious convert.
Though the ad did not name Gingrich, the sharper tone marked a shift away from policy differences and toward character distinctions.
It comes as Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, has surged past Romney, a former Massachusetts Governor, in many polls with less than a month to go before the Iowa caucuses, the first Republican nominating contest.
The ad, featuring home videos of his wife and five sons, painted him as a strong family, church and business leader. "I'm a man of steadiness and constancy. I don't think you're going to find somebody who has more of those attributes than I do," Romney says.
His critics, however, have long pointed out Romney's equivocations and policy reversals.
