He Said WHAT?

Romney’s team is pushing hard to win the Midwest gucci handbags industrial state to claim its delegates and crowing rights as the only contender capable of winning swing states Republicans will need in the fall.

“I’m not an economic lightweight — President Obama is,” Romney told voters at Charlie Parker’s Diner in Springfield.

“We’re not going to be successful in replacing an economic lightweight with another economic lightweight,” Romney said, circling back to bash Santorum.

“We’re going to have to replace him with someone who knows how to run this economy,” he added, sticking with his trump card .

An American Research Group poll released Monday showed Romney leading Santorum by 14 points and Public Policy Polling had him ahead by 15.

But Romney’s camp has repeatedly seen double-digit poll leads evaporate, and sources with the campaign put more stock in a Chicago Tribune/WGN poll that has Romney’s lead a mere four points.

Santorum spent the day trying to capitalize on what his camp called Romney’s enthusiasm gap, painting the former Massachusetts governor as a multimillionaire venture capitalist unable to connect with ordinary, working Americans.

“I heard Gov. Romney here called me an economic black gucci belt lightweight because I wasn’t a Wall Street financier like he was,” Santorum said in Rockford.

“Do you really believe that this country wants to elect a Wall Street financier as the President of the United States?” Santorum asked, claiming Romney “bailed out” his friends at the banks “at the expense of America.”

But he baffled his opponents by focusing his campaign speeches in Illinois on his social conservative cred, more than his ability to fix the economy.

“The issue of this race is not the economy,” but issues such as the President’s health care program, Santorum told one crowd.

During a television appearance Santorum went on to say the unemployment rate was not a key talking point either — prompting a gleeful response from the Romney machine.

“He Said WHAT?!” was the subject line of an attack e-mail showing the snippet of the television video in which Santorum said: “I don’t care what the unemployment rate’s going to be. Doesn’t matter to me.”

Santorum, though, is working from a disadvantage.

He has already forfeited 10 of the state’s 69 delegates by failing to place his supporters on some ballots, an organizational failing that also happened louis vuitton sunglasses in Ohio and Virginia.