Only former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman among the leading candidates has endorsed the agreement.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania used the debt-ceiling vote Tuesday to attack Reps. Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, rivals for support on the right, just two weeks before an important test of strength at the Ames, Iowa, straw poll.
Bachmann and Paul voted Monday against the deal, just as Santorum said he would have, but he maintained that they were ineffective in leading the opposition to it.
"I didn't see their input at all in this whole process," Santorum said during an interview with Radio Iowa. "So how can you say you want to be the leaders of the country if you can't even lead the Congress?"
At an ice cream store in the town of Indianola, Santorum told voters that if elected, he would insist on a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. A proposal that would have linked an increase in the debt ceiling to such an amendment failed before the deal was reached with the White House.
Bachmann, of Minnesota, and Paul, of Texas, had been steadfast in opposing a debt-limit increase from the beginning. Bachmann, for instance, who heads the Congressional Tea Party Caucus, said she would never vote to raise the borrowing authority of the federal government for any reason.
Santorum's gambit shows the potential symbolic power of the vote, at least in Iowa. A Des Moines Register poll in late June found that 49 percent of likely voters in the Iowa GOP caucuses would consider a candidate's support for raising the debt ceiling a "deal killer." Only support for raising taxes, with 51 percent, and for same-sex marriage, with 59 percent, rated higher as negative marks.
Huntsman is not competing in Iowa and has staked his campaign on a strong showing in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary election in the nation; it generally draws a larger and more moderate electorate than the caucuses.
