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ORLANDO, Fla. -- Nine Republicans sparred on a stage here Thursday night as part of a three-day conservapalooza designed to galvanize the GOP base, winnow an unwieldy roster of candidates, and flesh out the issues to use against President Obama in next year's general election.

To date, the unforgiving metrics of funding and poll numbers place Rick Perry and Mitt Romney as the front-runners in the 2012 Republican presidential field, with the Texas governor leading the former Massachusetts governor in every national poll, and most of the state-by-state matchups.

Nothing that occurred Thursday night would necessarily alter that state-of-play, but the dynamics of the two-hour debate seemed to consist of Perry lambasting Romney, while all of the other candidates took turns swinging at Perry.

“Governor Perry was under constant assault,” Mike Haridopolos, president of the Florida state Senate, said afterward. “It was a tough night for him.”

Haridopolos is undecided about whom he favors, but Dean Cannon, his counterpart in the lower house of the Legislature in Tallahassee, is a confirmed Rick Perry man. “Yeah, they came after Perry pretty good,” Cannon said. “But he gave as good as he got.”

Perry’s outspoken condemnation of Social Security was the flashpoint for Romney’s onslaught. In a book published earlier this year, Perry suggested that Social Security was always unconstitutional, and that it is a failure and a fraud -- “Ponzi scheme” is the phrase he used -- and in three successive debates Romney has now thrown this language in Perry’s face.

The first two times, at debates in California and Tampa, the Texas governor doubled down on his rhetoric. But when Romney pressed the issue here, Perry seemed to back off just a bit. Romney crowded him, however, pressing the point repeatedly and even telling reporters after the debate, “You can’t go around attacking Social Security if you want to run for president. It’s part of the social fabric of our country.”

Team Romney clearly feels this is a winning issue. First, they believe it will help Romney in all-important Florida because of the high number of retirees. Second, as long as they keep the focus on Perry’s perhaps impolitic language, Romney and his advisers have so far gotten away without saying how they would fix Social Security, which does indeed have long-term structural problems.

“But calling Social Security ‘a failure’ is radical rhetoric unlike anything we haves seen from a candidate for national office,” Romney adviser Eric Fernstrom said after the debate. “It would be a disaster to nominate him.”

Perry was pressed on two other issues Thursday night: Texas’ immigration policies and Perry’s decision to require the vaccination of junior high school girls against human papillomavirus (HPV) in an attempt to combat cervical cancer.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann led the anti-Perry charge on immigration, accusing the three-term governor of being reluctant to build a fence the length of the border with Mexico and criticizing him for offering taxpayer benefits to illegal aliens, a policy she said was a “magnet” that attracts illegals into the United States.