Newt goes nuclear: Gingrich slams 'pro-abortion, pro gun-control, pro tax-increase moderate' Mitt Romney
The obituaries for his campaign are already being written and Newt Gingrich doesn't like it one bit. Yesterday,
an event at a Spanish-speaking
church billed as a "Hispanic town hall" drew about 80 people, a number of
whom had left by the time the candidate rolled in 55 minutes late.
Gingrich looked crestfallen. He spoke desultorily for just over six minutes and then abandoned the Question and Answer format, instead deciding that "Callista and I will come down and get pictures with each and every one of you and have a chance to say hi".
At the back of the hall, the small band of travelling reporters were in open revolt over chaotic arrangements that had left some facing bills of several thousand dollars just to fly from Orlando to Palm Beach and then on to Tampa.
Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista at a Hispanic event in Orlando. Photo: Toby Harnden.
Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond, unshaven, exhausted and evidently under pressure, was peppered with questions about botched campaign logistics and poor organisation. Initially, he insisted that his tetchy responses were all off the record but he gave up as more and more tape recorders came out.
Politically, it was an event suffused with the sickly stench of death. The next stop in Orando, at an evangelical church, had an enthusiastic crowd of over 1,000 who gave Gingrich several standing ovations.
But there is not getting away from the fact that Gingrich is not getting the crowds he did when he arrived as the conquering hero of South Carolina. And the polls now seem to spell doom next Tuesday: NBC/Marist has Romney up 15 and Miami Herald/Mason-Dixon has Romney up 11.
Just as he did when he began to tank in December after briefly leading the polls in Iowa and nationally, Gingrich has become increasingly, visibly frustrated. His language about Romney has got tougher and more extreme and, at times, uncontrolled. On Saturday, he was seething and today he blew his top and went nuclear.
When asked by Jake Tapper of ABC News on the This Week programme whether Romney had the character to be president, Gingrich said that his opponent had a "very serious problem" in this area and "would not be where he is today" (presumably Gingrich meant leading in the polls) "if he had told the truth".
He groused about Romney's "relentlessly negative campaign" and the "carpet-bombing" of him with attack ads that were "breathtakingly dishonest".
And then he went even futher in a media availability after attending a service in a megachurch in Lutz, Florida this afternoon."I believe the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-abortion, pro gun-control, pro-tax increase moderate from Massachusetts." The phrase was deliberate because he repeated it minutes later.
He thundered: "I have had a long record as a very hard-hitting Reagan conservative and the idea that that record would be deliberately falsified by a Massachusetts moderate using money from Wall Street, from the very companies who have been getting money from the federal government, is really about as big an outrage as I've had in my career."
At the next stop at The Villages, a swathe of intrer-connected retirement communities in which sun-tanned seniors zip around on golf carts, Gingrich decided that he was mincing his words by calling Romney moderate and instead branded him "liberal".
This seems to be about where the Romney campaign wants Gingrich - steam blowing out of his ears and hyperbole spitting from his lips as he rails against the unfairness of it all.
A central part of Romney's strategy this week has been to rattle Gingrich - "rushing the quarterback", as Romney adviser David Kochel put it - by goading him with congressmen Jason Chaffertz and Connie Mack (the so-called "proxies with moxie") goading his staff at events, and Romney teasing him as being like Goldilocks and the like on the stump.
Pushing Gingrich into casting aspersions on Romney's character was exactly what Team Romney wanted. Given Romney's sober lifestyle, 42-year marriage and unquestioned wholesomeness, his character is always going to be a strong point with voters, especially when compared to the tempestuous life of the thrice-married Gingrich.
Just as George W. Bush responded that John McCain was "over the line" when he said in a 2000 campaign ad that Bush "twists the truth" like Bill Clinton, Romney's surrogates came out one by one today to express faux horror that Gingrich would attack Romney's character. Tim Pawlenty used the term "over the line".
To goad your opponent into saying something intemperate and then smack him in the chops the moment he does it is an old trick in politics. And Stuart Stevens, the Bush campaign ad man who cut the 2000 Bush ad hitting back at McCain, just happens to be chief strategist of the 2012 Romney campaign.
http://harndenblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/01/newt-goes-nuclear-gingrich-slams-pro-abortion-pro-gun-control-pro-tax-increase-moderate-mitt-romney.html/
Gingrich looked crestfallen. He spoke desultorily for just over six minutes and then abandoned the Question and Answer format, instead deciding that "Callista and I will come down and get pictures with each and every one of you and have a chance to say hi".
At the back of the hall, the small band of travelling reporters were in open revolt over chaotic arrangements that had left some facing bills of several thousand dollars just to fly from Orlando to Palm Beach and then on to Tampa.
Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista at a Hispanic event in Orlando. Photo: Toby Harnden.
Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond, unshaven, exhausted and evidently under pressure, was peppered with questions about botched campaign logistics and poor organisation. Initially, he insisted that his tetchy responses were all off the record but he gave up as more and more tape recorders came out.
Politically, it was an event suffused with the sickly stench of death. The next stop in Orando, at an evangelical church, had an enthusiastic crowd of over 1,000 who gave Gingrich several standing ovations.
But there is not getting away from the fact that Gingrich is not getting the crowds he did when he arrived as the conquering hero of South Carolina. And the polls now seem to spell doom next Tuesday: NBC/Marist has Romney up 15 and Miami Herald/Mason-Dixon has Romney up 11.
Just as he did when he began to tank in December after briefly leading the polls in Iowa and nationally, Gingrich has become increasingly, visibly frustrated. His language about Romney has got tougher and more extreme and, at times, uncontrolled. On Saturday, he was seething and today he blew his top and went nuclear.
When asked by Jake Tapper of ABC News on the This Week programme whether Romney had the character to be president, Gingrich said that his opponent had a "very serious problem" in this area and "would not be where he is today" (presumably Gingrich meant leading in the polls) "if he had told the truth".
He groused about Romney's "relentlessly negative campaign" and the "carpet-bombing" of him with attack ads that were "breathtakingly dishonest".
And then he went even futher in a media availability after attending a service in a megachurch in Lutz, Florida this afternoon."I believe the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-abortion, pro gun-control, pro-tax increase moderate from Massachusetts." The phrase was deliberate because he repeated it minutes later.
He thundered: "I have had a long record as a very hard-hitting Reagan conservative and the idea that that record would be deliberately falsified by a Massachusetts moderate using money from Wall Street, from the very companies who have been getting money from the federal government, is really about as big an outrage as I've had in my career."
At the next stop at The Villages, a swathe of intrer-connected retirement communities in which sun-tanned seniors zip around on golf carts, Gingrich decided that he was mincing his words by calling Romney moderate and instead branded him "liberal".
This seems to be about where the Romney campaign wants Gingrich - steam blowing out of his ears and hyperbole spitting from his lips as he rails against the unfairness of it all.
A central part of Romney's strategy this week has been to rattle Gingrich - "rushing the quarterback", as Romney adviser David Kochel put it - by goading him with congressmen Jason Chaffertz and Connie Mack (the so-called "proxies with moxie") goading his staff at events, and Romney teasing him as being like Goldilocks and the like on the stump.
Pushing Gingrich into casting aspersions on Romney's character was exactly what Team Romney wanted. Given Romney's sober lifestyle, 42-year marriage and unquestioned wholesomeness, his character is always going to be a strong point with voters, especially when compared to the tempestuous life of the thrice-married Gingrich.
Just as George W. Bush responded that John McCain was "over the line" when he said in a 2000 campaign ad that Bush "twists the truth" like Bill Clinton, Romney's surrogates came out one by one today to express faux horror that Gingrich would attack Romney's character. Tim Pawlenty used the term "over the line".
To goad your opponent into saying something intemperate and then smack him in the chops the moment he does it is an old trick in politics. And Stuart Stevens, the Bush campaign ad man who cut the 2000 Bush ad hitting back at McCain, just happens to be chief strategist of the 2012 Romney campaign.
http://harndenblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/01/newt-goes-nuclear-gingrich-slams-pro-abortion-pro-gun-control-pro-tax-increase-moderate-mitt-romney.html/
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