“But don’t act like it’s only Santorum who will bring up family values. President Obama will do so, and he’ll do it with a vengeance.”
Let the “Infanticide President” make it a family values election. The guy said that he would abort his own grandchildren for Pete’s sake.
I think we are too pre-occupied with potential “baggage”. Obama has far more baggage than any of our candidates. What we need is someone with the cajones to call Obama on it. Newt has shown that he can do that better than the others.
Fair point, and that's probably the tack that we as Republicans are going to have to take if Newt Gingrich is the nominee. We can assume on the abortion issue that Obama will say “every child should be a wanted child” and he'll be an advocate for adoption, saying “hate is not a family value.”
We need to be prepared to respond to that.
I've said many times that if Gingrich wins the nomination I will almost certainly support him. I like a lot of things about Gingrich's views and I like his demonstrated record of accomplishing the impossible by taking back the House of Representatives.
If you believe Gingrich is the best candidate to defeat President Obama this fall, then please work for him as hard as you can, but don't dismiss the importance of dealing with the family values argument since Obama will use the “family values” argument this November.
Part of his appeal in the 2008 Democratic primary was that unlike Hillary Clinton's marital problems and John Edwards sex scandals (which at that point were mostly tabloid fodder which hadn't yet been proved true), Obama presented himself to Democrats as a clean-cut family values guy.
We'd better get used to responding to that sort of attack on Gingrich, because even if Republicans don't do so, the Democrats definitely will.