Newt: "Make some popcorn—I'm ready to go negative" (Jeff Haynes/Reuters)
Newt Gingrich's claims he was running a "relentlessly positive" campaign have been ...
questionable. That meant he was restricting himself to meta attacks on his competitors for the Republican presidential nomination: they were nasty lying cowards who should be ashamed of themselves for attacking a relentlessly positive gentleman such as himself, but he wasn't really going after their records.
But that was last week's Newt Gingrich. Now, as he sinks in the polls:
"I think New Hampshire is the perfect state to have a debate over Romneycare and to have a debate about tax-paid abortions, which he signed, and to have a debate about putting Planned Parenthood on a government board, which he signed, and to have a debate about appointing liberal judges, which he did," said Gingrich, starting in Marshalltown, Iowa, the case he'll take to the Granite State and beyond next week.
New York magazine spells out what Gingrich is saying there:
So there you have it: Gingrich, who trails Romney badly in the Granite State, plans to use the week between the caucuses here and the primary there to rip Romney a new one; and in doing so, weaken him in South Carolina, where Gingrich (for the moment) is polling strongly and is at the head of the pack. Now flush with a decent fundraising haul in the last quarter of 2011—around $9 million, he claims—Gingrich apparently intends to take to the airwaves to make his case, in addition to hammering Romney as a dreaded (and self-described, albeit long ago) moderate in the two debates scheduled for this weekend in New Hampshire.
About time one of Mitt Romney's Republican opponents tried to put a dent in him rather than just battling the rest of the field for the title of Not-Romney. Even if Gingrich's plan goes as he hopes, though, it's unlikely to affect the outcome in Iowa—and a poor showing there might mean New Hampshire and South Carolina come too late for him. Things will start to become clear Tuesday night at 8:00 ET, so tune in here.