Newt Gingrich continued his OWS-themed campaign against Mitt Romney in Mt. Dora, FL
If Newt Gingrich can pull off something
like this directly to Mitt Romney's face during tonight's debate, Mitt's going to have a long, long night:
"We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who have foreclosed on Florida and is himself a stock holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about," Gingrich declared in a preamble to a decidedly angry stump speech.
"In 1992, he gave money to Democrats for Congress," he added at another point. "He voted in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. This is the man who stood up the other night and questioned my credentials as a Reaganite? This is the kind of gall they have, to think we are so stupid and we are so timid that we will let someone who voted for Paul Tsongas -– in 1994 he is running for the U.S. Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Do you know how hard it is to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy? And he says, 'You know, I don’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, I was an independent then.'"
"He won't tell you that now, because he is counting on us not having YouTube," Gingrich said. "That's how much he thinks we are stupid. And we are not stupid. The message we should give Mitt Romney is: we aren't that stupid and you aren't that clever."
Yes, I know some of this is bullshit: Paul Tsongas wasn't the most liberal candidate, and Mitt Romney wasn't running to Ted Kennedy's left. But if you're Mitt Romney, a Republican primary debate isn't when you don't want to be explaining why you were voting in the Democratic primary in 1992 or how it was only on some issues that you were trying outflank Kennedy. And if Newt Gingrich is able to respond to Mitt Romney's attacks tonight with as much focus as he mustered earlier today and against the media in prior debates, Mitt Romney is going to find himself in a world of hurt.