Game on in Iowa as GOP attacks target Gingrich

THOMAS BEAUMONT

Asso­ci­ated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Invit­ing con­trasts with thrice-married reli­gious con­vert Newt Gin­grich, Mitt Rom­ney cast him­self as a man of con­sis­tency in reli­gion and mat­ri­mony Wednes­day as he and other GOP can­di­dates went after the lat­est front-runner in a strik­ingly aggres­sive new phase of the Repub­li­can campaign.

“I’m a man of steadi­ness and con­stancy. I don’t think you’re going to find some­body who has more of those attrib­utes than I do,” the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor said in a new TV ad that included grainy home videos of his wife and five sons. There was no men­tion of equiv­o­ca­tions and pol­icy rever­sals that his crit­ics have pointed out.

Also on Wednes­day, in an effort to revive a flag­ging rival cam­paign, Texas Gov. Rick Perry launched an ambi­tious effort to com­pete against Gin­grich for the sup­port of Chris­t­ian evan­gel­i­cals by empha­siz­ing his Chris­tian­ity in a flood of new com­mer­cials in the lead­off cau­cus state of Iowa. Sep­a­rately, Texas Rep. Ron Paul pressed his con­tention that for­mer House Speaker Gin­grich was sim­ply a Wash­ing­ton insider who would even­tu­ally flame out.

“He’s the fla­vor of the week,” Paul said dis­mis­sively on CNN. “Our growth is steady.”

The sharper tone — lim­ited to TV for now — marked a pro­nounced shift in the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial race away from pol­icy dif­fer­ences and toward char­ac­ter dis­tinc­tions, with the new GOP leader in state and national polls — Gin­grich — clearly the focus a month before the Jan. 3 Iowa cau­cuses. The for­mer Geor­gia law­maker is get­ting a sec­ond look from Repub­li­can vot­ers across the coun­try after his cam­paign imploded ear­lier this sum­mer, and time is run­ning short for his oppo­nents to slow him before the vot­ing starts.

Polls sug­gest some Repub­li­cans are start­ing to con­clude they may have to embrace Gin­grich as the con­ser­v­a­tive they’ve been wait­ing for — despite per­sonal and pro­fes­sional blem­ishes — if they want to stop Rom­ney, who has the back­ing of much of the GOP estab­lish­ment but irks many conservatives.

“At the end of the day, peo­ple are going to have to decide what they can live with,” said Amy Kre­mer, the Tea Party Express chairwoman.

She was among the group of con­ser­v­a­tives that grilled Gin­grich dur­ing a pri­vate two-hour meet­ing in Wash­ing­ton on Wednes­day over his busy post-congressional con­sult­ing career, a poten­tial lia­bil­ity as the Repub­li­can base yearns for an outsider.

“It wasn’t a walk in the park for him,” Kre­mer said, adding that the free-wheeling dis­cus­sion touched on Gingrich’s dis­ci­pline as a can­di­date, his sup­port for cli­mate change leg­is­la­tion and his acknowl­edged mar­i­tal infidelity.

But, she said, Gingrich’s frank responses — he says he is chas­tened and more dis­ci­plined than before — turned some skeptics.

Gin­grich wasn’t the only can­di­date in Wash­ing­ton. His rivals also were in the city that’s home to the White House they seek, most of them rail­ing against Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s Israel pol­icy before the Repub­li­can Jew­ish Coalition.

But some of the real action was 1,000 miles to the West in Iowa, where the air­waves crack­led in the can­di­dates’ absence ahead of Saturday’s nation­ally tele­vised GOP debate in Des Moines.

This week in Iowa alone, Gin­grich, Paul, Perry, Rom­ney and a polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee sup­port­ing Perry are spend­ing a com­bined $630,000 on tele­vi­sion ads. The Texas gov­er­nor and his allies have by far have the most ads on the air, and the can­di­date plans to com­mit even more money to ads in the com­ing weeks. Not includ­ing this week or next, Perry alone has pumped more than $2 mil­lion into TV adver­tis­ing in the state over the past six weeks, indi­cat­ing he’s still com­pet­ing heav­ily for a strong show­ing in Iowa despite polls that show him in the sin­gle digits.

A major ques­tion is how soon Rom­ney allies will dip into their mound of cash to start run­ning ads against Gingrich.

A new New York Times/CBS News Poll this week showed Gin­grich, whose sud­den rise has come faster than his once-shaky campaign’s abil­ity to orga­nize in Iowa, with sup­port from 31 per­cent of likely cau­cus­go­ers. Gin­grich led Rom­ney, who was at 17 per­cent, with Paul in third at 16 per­cent. The sur­vey is con­sis­tent with a CNN poll out Wednes­day show­ing Gin­grich lead­ing in Iowa with sup­port from a third of likely caucusgoers.

Gin­grich rivals sense oppor­tu­nity given that the race in Iowa is highly volatile. Most poten­tial Iowa cau­cus­go­ers say they could still change their minds about whom to sup­port; influ­en­tial evan­gel­i­cal con­ser­v­a­tives remain split, and vot­ers here haven’t yet been made fully aware of Gingrich’s decades of per­sonal and polit­i­cal baggage.

That’s start­ing to change.

Iowans for Chris­t­ian Lead­ers in Gov­ern­ment, whose back­ers are unknown, wrote anony­mously this week to the leader of a social con­ser­v­a­tive group in Iowa, The Fam­ily Leader, to urge it not to endorse Gin­grich in light of his divorces and extra­mar­i­tal affair with the woman who is now his wife. The group also has cir­cu­lated a new Web video that reminds Repub­li­cans that Gin­grich once appeared with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to advo­cate action on cli­mate change, a sore sub­ject for some con­ser­v­a­tives, and it cir­cu­lated fliers ear­lier in the year con­demn­ing Gin­grich for his two divorces.

It’s not just out­side groups.

Rivals, them­selves, also now are dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing them­selves from Gin­grich in ads — though not always overtly.

“I’ve been mar­ried to the same woman for 25 — excuse me, I’ll get in trou­ble — for 42 years,” Rom­ney is shown say­ing in the new ad, air­ing in both Iowa and New Hamp­shire. “I’ve been in the same church my entire life. I worked at one com­pany, Bain, for 25 years. And I left that to go off and help save the Olympic Games.”

The spot doesn’t men­tion Gin­grich but makes the con­trast by paint­ing Rom­ney as a strong fam­ily, church and busi­ness leader, com­pared with his chief rival — three times mar­ried, a Catholic con­vert and the for­mer U.S. House speaker. Gingrich’s divorces and fall from grace over ethics charges in Con­gress more than a decade ago still give some influ­en­tial social con­ser­v­a­tives in Iowa pause.

Gin­grich spokesman R. C. Ham­mond declined to com­ment on the ad.

Rom­ney stepped up his Iowa cam­paign this fall, hav­ing kept his dis­tance as the field assem­bled through the sum­mer. After fin­ish­ing a dis­ap­point­ing sec­ond in 2008 in Iowa after spend­ing $10 mil­lion there, he wanted to con­trol expec­ta­tions this time.

How­ever, see­ing an open­ing in the past two months, he has spo­ken of win­ning Iowa, only to now see Gin­grich emerge.

With lit­tle left to lose, Perry sig­naled he would com­pete aggres­sively for the same pool of vot­ers Gin­grich is woo­ing — Chris­t­ian con­ser­v­a­tives who make up the base of GOP pri­mary vot­ers in Iowa and else­where — launch­ing a month-long, $1.2 mil­lion ad cam­paign in the lead­off cau­cus state.

“I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Chris­t­ian,” Perry says in a new ad. “But you don’t need to be in the pew every Sun­day to know there’s some­thing wrong in this coun­try when gays can serve openly in the mil­i­tary but our kids can’t openly cel­e­brate Christ­mas or pray in school.”

“As pres­i­dent, I’ll end Obama’s war on reli­gion. And I’ll fight against lib­eral attacks on our reli­gious her­itage,” Perry adds. “Faith made Amer­ica strong. It can make her strong again.”

He rolled out the ad, his sec­ond focused on reli­gion, ahead of bus tours in South Car­olina on Thurs­day and Iowa on Sun­day — two states filled with evan­gel­i­cals and cul­tural conservatives.

Paul, for his part, put on TV a ver­sion of an Inter­net video that talks of “ser­ial hypocrisy” and assails Gin­grich on a host of fronts. They include the more than $1.5 mil­lion his con­sult­ing firm got from fed­er­ally backed mort­gage lender Fred­die Mac, his joint call with Pelosi for con­gres­sional action to limit cli­mate change and his past sup­port for requir­ing that Amer­i­cans obtain health insurance.

Posted by AP News on Dec 7 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.