No letup on Gingrich by Romney before Florida vote

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date, for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts Gov. Mitt Rom­ney cam­paigns at Pio­neer Park in Dunedin, Fla., Mon­day, Jan. 30, 2012. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Charles Dharapak)

THOMAS BEAUMONT

Asso­ci­ated Press

MIAMI — Cheered by new polls, Mitt Rom­ney is all but pre­dict­ing vic­tory in Tuesday’s Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial pri­mary. Newt Gin­grich is look­ing past Florida to regroup, vow­ing he won’t stay buried long.

“With a turnout like this, I’m begin­ning to feel we might win tomor­row,” an upbeat Rom­ney told a crowd of sev­eral hun­dred at a stop in Dunedin on Mon­day as he and Gin­grich zipped across the state mak­ing their final appeals.

Gin­grich, in turn, acknowl­edged that his momen­tum had been checked but promised not to back down. He char­ac­ter­ized Rom­ney as an imposter, and his team started to plot a strat­egy for upcom­ing contests.

“He can bury me for a very short amount of time with four or five or six times as much money,” Gin­grich said in a tele­vi­sion inter­view. “In the long run, the Repub­li­can Party is not going to nom­i­nate … a lib­eral Republican.”

GOP offi­cials in Florida were antic­i­pat­ing a big turnout, more than 2 mil­lion vot­ers, up from a record 1.9 mil­lion in the Repub­li­can pri­mary in 2008. More than 605,000 Florid­i­ans had already voted as of Mon­day, either by vis­it­ing early vot­ing sta­tions or by mail­ing in absen­tee bal­lots, ahead of the total com­bined early vote in the GOP pri­mary four years ago.

In the span of a volatile week, the tables have turned in this poten­tially piv­otal pri­mary state.

Gin­grich rode a tri­umphant wave into Florida after a South Car­olina vic­tory nine days ago. But since then, Rom­ney and his allies have pum­meled the for­mer House speaker on TV and on the cam­paign trail. Rom­ney turned in two strong debate per­for­mances, while Gin­grich fal­tered. Now opin­ion polls show the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor with a com­fort­able lead here.

Rom­ney and Gin­grich have been the only two can­di­dates to com­pete in Florida in earnest. Nei­ther for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. Rick San­to­rum nor Texas Rep. Ron. Paul cam­paigned much in the state, and they were else­where on Monday.

Clearly in com­mand, Rom­ney flew to stops in media mar­kets in north­ern Florida and the pop­u­lous swing regions of cen­tral Florida, deter­mined to keep Gin­grich from surg­ing late.

Rom­ney renewed attacks on his rival as an untrust­wor­thy, Wash­ing­ton influ­ence ped­dler at the out­set of two sep­a­rate appear­ances Mon­day. He claimed that Gingrich’s ties to fed­er­ally backed mort­gage giant Fred­die Mac have hurt the for­mer speaker in a state wracked by the fore­clo­sure crisis.

“He made $1.6 mil­lion in his com­pany, the very insti­tu­tion that helped stand behind the huge hous­ing cri­sis here in Florida,” Rom­ney said in Dunedin. Gingrich’s con­sult­ing firm received more than $1.5 mil­lion from the fed­er­ally backed mort­gage giant over a period after he left Con­gress in 1999.

Gin­grich plowed ahead, fly­ing to stops in north­ern Florida start­ing in Jack­sonville — near his home state of Geor­gia — before touch­ing down in con­ser­v­a­tive Pen­sacola and then Tampa.

Along the way, he tried to rally con­ser­v­a­tives by cast­ing Rom­ney as an imposter and him­self as the true GOP stal­wart. His claim to con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples wasn’t lim­ited to eco­nomic issues.

“No politi­cian, no judge, no bureau­crat can come between you and God,” Gin­grich told an audi­ence in Tampa. “I’m a lit­tle bit tired of being lec­tured about respect­ing every other reli­gion on the planet.”

Gin­grich, who has sought to wrap him­self in the man­tle of Ronald Rea­gan, cam­paigned with the late president’s son Michael. He was also joined by for­mer GOP pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Her­man Cain, who endorsed him Sunday.

A win by Rom­ney would again reset the 2012 GOP race, seen early this month as his to lose, then thrown into doubt by Gingrich’s come-from-behind win in South Carolina.

Rom­ney eas­ily won the New Hamp­shire pri­mary after nearly win­ning the in lead­off Iowa. The South Car­olina set­back behind him, Rom­ney sought to aggres­sively stop Gin­grich, aided by a well-funded polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee that sup­ports him and is run by for­mer polit­i­cal aides.

Together, Romney’s cam­paign and the sup­port­ive group Restore Our Future have com­bined to spend $6.8 mil­lion on tele­vi­sion ads in the final week of the Florida cam­paign, about three times what Gin­grich and a group sup­port­ing him have spent.

Rom­ney capped his Iowa, New Hamp­shire and South Car­olina cam­paigns with upbeat spots. Noth­ing doing in Florida, where he was run­ning out the clock with ads attack­ing Gin­grich over Fred­die Mac and an ethics vio­la­tion in Congress.

But Rom­ney dropped any ref­er­ence to Gin­grich at his final stop Mon­day at The Vil­lages in cen­tral Florida. And instead of recit­ing the lyrics of “Amer­ica the Beau­ti­ful,” as he typ­i­cally does, Rom­ney — on pitch — broke into song and led the crowd in a rev­er­ent rendition.

Rick Tyler, a for­mer top Gin­grich aide now run­ning a pro-Gingrich polit­i­cal action com­mit­tee, showed up at Romney’s kick­off event in Jack­sonville on Mon­day, steal­ing a page from Romney’s Florida playbook.

“I’m here to get as many cam­eras and micro­phones so I can talk about Mitt Romney’s inces­sant fail­ure to tell the truth,” Tyler said.

Gin­grich said he was con­fi­dent he could nar­row Romney’s mar­gin in pub­lic voter sur­veys, even as he and his cam­paign began try­ing to soften the blow a defeat in Florida might bring.

Gin­grich aides tried to dimin­ish the state’s impact on the quest for the nom­i­na­tion by issu­ing a memo from his polit­i­cal direc­tor, Mar­tin Baker.

It noted that by Wednes­day morn­ing, only 5 per­cent of the 2,288 national con­ven­tion del­e­gates will have been awarded.

Gin­grich, who has promised to cam­paign through the national con­ven­tion this sum­mer, was clearly look­ing to regroup after Florida.

“The cam­paign is shift­ing to a new phase where oppor­tu­ni­ties are not lim­ited to a sin­gle state,” Baker wrote.

Gin­grich had not announced his plans for Wednes­day. Rom­ney, who has already begun adver­tis­ing in next-up Nevada ahead of the state’s Feb. 4 cau­cuses, was trav­el­ing there Wednes­day, and to Min­nesota, which holds its cau­cuses on Feb. 7.

Posted by AP News on Jan 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.