Mitt Regains MoJo; Newt’s Unforced Error

24 January 2012 |permalink | email article

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich exchanged fire in Monday night’s GOP debate in Tampa but the former Massachusetts governor got in the first direct hit within the minutes with a full-out attack on the former House speaker. Mitt said the presidential election is about leadership, assailing Gingrich for having to “resign in disgrace” from the House of Representatives, and for being an “influence peddler in Washington.” Gingrich responded by saying, “This is the worse kind of trivial politics.” Gingrich in recent debates has played audiences like a fiddle but his responses Monday might have worked better with a real round of applause. Romney, when asked how he would get rid of illegal immigrants without deporting them, weakly said he would rely on “self-deportation. He also did a walkback on saying he would veto the DREAM Act, amending to say he would sign it if it was focused on military service. Romney failed to capitalize on a Gingrich unforced error, a major second day media story. Newt was adamant that he wasn’t a lobbyist as he tried to explain why he released one year of his Freddie Mac contract which dated back to 1999. He volunteered that at his firm they’d brought in a “lobbying expert” to explain to his team what qualified as lobbying and what didn’t. Incredibly, Romney did not pounce. As predicted here Gingrich received a second $5 million infusion of “Super PAC” cash from Dr. Miriam Adelson. She’s the wife of mega-billionaire Las Vegas gaming owner Sheldon Adelson whose $5-million made Gingrich’s huge South Carolina win possible. 

What They Said

The buzz in Washington now is that the Republican Establishment fears Gingrich will cause them to lose the House and not get the Senate. Put another way, the current Republican leadership fears that the man who helped the GOP take back the House for the first time in 40 years and his allies in the tea party who helped take back the House in 2010 will cause the GOP to now lose.—Erik Erickson, Red State.com

In a January ABC News, Washington Post poll, 23 percent of Republicans said they definitely would not support Gingrich for the nomination. Just 8 percent said that about Romney.

National Review editor Rich Lowry on Romney’s too-good-to-be-true persona brought to mind what British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said of his counterpart: William Gladstone—“He had not a single redeeming defect.”

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