Romney seeking to shift focus from gay rights and picking on a classmate to economy and jobs

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —

Republican Mitt Romney is trying to return the focus of his campaign to the sluggish economic recovery

and his vision for America after spending a day restating his opposition to gay marriage and shrugging

off a report that he had bullied a gay classmate in prep school.  His schedule isn’t making it

easier.

On Friday, Romney is set

to discuss jobs and the economy in North Carolina, the state that just approved a constitutional ban on

same-sex unions that helped turn attention to gay rights. Also likely to raise cultural rather than

economic issues is Romney’s commencement address Saturday at Liberty University, the Virginia

institution founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell and the nation’s largest evangelical

university.

While raising money Thursday in Kansas City, Mo.,

Romney all but ignored the discussion of gays and lesbians prompted by President Barack Obama’s

endorsement of gay marriage.

“This is a time when we can follow

this president down a road of decline and weakness or we can take a course that is based on a positive

dynamic and a bold vision for this country,” he said.

Earlier,

during a fundraiser and a public appearance in Omaha, Neb., he hammered his vision for economic

greatness, telling supporters, “This could be the beginning of an extraordinary century for

America.”

Obama’s unexpected embrace of gay marriage continued

to overwhelm the presidential campaign on Thursday as liberals and conservatives debated the political

merits of his endorsement of an issue over which a president has little practical impact.

For Romney, the discussion of gay rights turned personal when The

Washington Post published a story recounting how he and several schoolmates held down classmate John

Lauber and cut off his bleached blond hair after seeking him out in his dorm room at their boarding

school in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

The Post said Lauber was “perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed

homosexuality” and that he screamed for help as Romney held him down and forcibly hacked off his hair.

The paper recounted another incident in which Romney shouted “atta girl” to a different student at the

all-boys’ school who, years later, came out as gay.

At no point

on Thursday did Romney volunteer comments about the report, nor did he wade into Obama’s views on gay

rights. But he did apologize for what he characterized as tomfoolery when asked by reporters.

“I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some

may have gone too far. And for that I apologize,” Romney told Fox News during a hastily arranged radio

interview.

Romney said he didn’t remember the Lauber incident,

but he didn’t dispute that it happened. He stressed that he didn’t know either student was homosexual

and moved quickly to counter any suggestion he had targeted students because they were gay.

“That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was

not the case,” he said, adding that the students involved “didn’t come out of the closet until years

later.”

In a second interview Thursday, Romney laid out what he

said was his long-held position on gay rights: While opposed to gay marriage, he said states should be

allowed to grant various domestic partnership rights to same-sex couples, including the right to adopt

children.

“States could have their own decisions with regards to

the domestic partnership rights,” Romney told Fox News in the network’s second interview that day with

the candidate. “But my preference would be to have a national standard for marriage and that marriage

would be defined as being between a man and a woman.”

He said he

would go as far as supporting gay couples who want to adopt children, saying: “If two people of the

same gender want to live together, want to have a loving relationship and even want to adopt a child —

in my state, individuals of the same sex are able to adopt children — in my view, that’s something

which people have the right to do.”

The renewed attention on gay

rights came as Obama thrust the issue into the forefront. He became the first president to give a

full-throated support for gay couples to wed and shifted the campaign to social issues, where Romney

faces skepticism among his own party’s base.

Romney’s advisers

signaled they planned to campaign on the issue in November’s election but acknowledged they would have

to tread carefully. “I think it’s important to be respectful in how we talk about our differences, but

the fact is that’s a significant difference in November,” Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney adviser, said

Thursday on MSNBC.

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Hunt reported from Washington