Los Angeles Times...
Top tier emerges as GOP nomination race enters a defining phase
By Paul West and Seema Mehta
August 15, 2011 

Also at link below...

Rick Perry sets out to court wary New Hampshire voters

On Sunday shows, Michele Bachmann outlines economic cures for U.S.

Mitt Romney, the $250-million man 

With Rick Perry declaring his candidacy and Michele Bachmann winning the Iowa straw poll, the two go head-to-head for the GOP’s social and religious conservatives and against establishment front-runner Mitt Romney. 

Reporting from Des Moines and Waterloo, Iowa— The new top tier of Republican presidential contenders has emerged to reset the 2012 race and raise new questions about exactly where an angry GOP base will take the party in next year’s election. 

The contest is now a three-way, multilayered match, with Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann rising to challenge each other and national front-runner Mitt Romney, after the Texas governor formally declared his candidacy and the Minnesota congresswoman won the year’s biggest organizing test. 

Bachmann and Perry capitalized on their new prominence by appearing together for the first time at a party dinner in Waterloo, Iowa, late Sunday. The event opened a new and potentially defining phase of the nomination race: their head-to-head battle for the social and religious conservatives who dominate early-state caucuses and primaries. 

Those tests, it seems increasingly clear, will be decided by an electorate fed up with Washington’s dysfunction and deeply worried that the U.S. is in decline economically and as a world power. 

Party activists in Iowa, in a warning to the establishment of both major parties, forced Tim Pawlenty to abruptly quit the race Sunday, by dealing him a weak third-place finish in a straw poll Saturday that boosted Bachmann to the head of the field in the leadoff caucus state. 

Pawlenty said on ABC’s “This Week” that voters were “looking for something different” from what he was offering as “a rational, established” two-term Minnesota governor with a “strong record of results, based on experience governing.” Other Republicans said his low-key, guy-next-door image was no match for Bachmann’s crowd-pleasing fire. 

Bachmann said Republican voters were sending “a strong message to Washington.” They “want us to get our house in order, financially speaking” and “they want someone who is going to fight for them,” she said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” 

Candidates from the party’s establishment wing who had been expected to challenge for the nomination have been faltering in the early going. Besides Pawlenty, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. have failed to take off, though the latter two remain in the race. 

Read the rest of the story at the Los Angeles Times