MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — As Mitt Romney campaigns through South Carolina, which will hold the South's first presidential primary on Jan. 19, he evokes Ronald Reagan in almost every airplane hangar rally, every restaurant back room, everywhere he can.

It seems like a surefire way to appeal to the diehard conservatives that the former governor of liberal Massachusetts needs to win the Republican presidential nomination.

In Myrtle Beach, at the end of a long campaign day one night last week, he was more emphatic than ever about the Great Communicator as a crowd of about 200 listened.

"I take inspiration from the strength Ronald Reagan talked about," Romney said. "It was his view that the right way to overcome challenges was for the country to strengthen itself."

Yet Romney wasn't always such a Reagan fan.

In 1994, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, he said, "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

Romney spent years in the state registered as "unenrolled," or unaffiliated with a political party, and in 1992 he voted for former Sen. Paul Tsongas, a liberal Democrat, in the Massachusetts Democratic presidential primary.

Romney was considered a moderate in those days, losing the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race in 1994 and winning the governorship in 2002. He voiced support for abortion rights, allowing gays to serve openly in the military and other positions that led activists to think he was a centrist.

Romney refused repeated requests to talk about his links to Reagan. Campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said that Romney's 1994 "independent" quote is out of context, that the vote for Tsongas was a vote against Bill Clinton and that not enrolling in either major party was common in Massachusetts.

Critics, however, charge that Romney's enthusiastic embrace of Reagan is another convenient, expedient Romney lunge to the right.

"He didn't support Ronald Reagan," said Mark Salter, a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of Romney's rivals. Romney's promise to carry on Reagan's legacy is more evidence of "Mitt Romney's bizarro world," Salter added.

"This guy didn't even support Ronald Reagan," former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said disdainfully on an MSNBC show last month.

Fehrnstrom urged looking at the entire 1994 exchange between Romney and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., whom Romney was challenging at the time.

Kennedy had criticized Republicans, saying that "under your economic program, under the program of Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush, we saw the growth in terms of the unemployment, the growth in the number of children living in poverty, the growth in terms of those children out of wedlock."