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On good-bye tour, Gingrich touts ability to be Romney surrogate By NBC's Andrew Rafferty MOORESVILLE, NC -- Even though his presidential campaign "will go bye-bye," Newt Gingrich on Thursday said he and his wife plan to campaign through the fall to help presumptive nominee Mitt Romney. "I'm going to look at how I can be helpful, because I suspect people will still show up to hear me," Gingrich told voters at luncheon here. "Callista and I are going to campaign through October." Though today, just 25 people attended the midday event here, leaving a roomful of empty chairs. Some of...

If you haven’t been reading this blog regularly, you may have been shocked by Newt’s confession today on Fox News Sunday: “Unfortunately, our guys tried to match Romney,” Gingrich said of the Florida match-up. “It turned out, we didn’t have anything like his capacity to raise money.” Gingrich said he has a little less than $4.5 million in campaign debt, and he’s operating on a shoestring budget. I was there when it happened, although nobody realized it at the time, and it took another seven weeks to learn the truth. On Feb. 21, the day after his January FEC report...

Richard Viguerie, a veteran conservative activist and top Santorum supporter, tells National Review Online that Santorum is “reengineering” his presidential campaign. “You can’t repeat the same behavior and expect different results,” he says. “We’ve got to do things different. We’ve got to reengineer the campaign. We’ve got to add things, take things out, and make changes. Everyone recognizes that, from the candidate on down.” Earlier today, Viguerie, along with a group of movement leaders, met with Santorum at an office in northern Virginia. For over an hour, they discussed ways to revive his bid. “We came up with a number...

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Thursday took GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney to task for his past as a self-described “independent” who claimed he did not want to “return to the days of Reagan-Bush. Santorum, speaking to supporters at the Jelly Belly factory – which had honored President Ronald Reagan in the past for promoting the jelly bean – asked which candidate would be pull together the “Reagan coalition” and win swings states, which are “vitally important” for winning the presidential election.(Snip) “Governor Romney said that after the Etch-a-Sketch flap that he was going to run as a conservative in...

Newt Gingrich's campaign has asked the Tennessee Republican Party....to not seat Knoxville state Sen. Stacey Campfield as a Gingrich delegate at the national convention. Campfield, who served as a state co-chair for Gingrich's campaign, abruptly switched his support to Santorum days before the March 6 "Super Tuesday" election. "Please be advised that Stacey Campfield does not have the consent of the Newt Gingrich for President Campaign to be seated as a delegate at the Republican National Convention," wrote John Fluharty, the campaign's director of delegate access, in a Thursday letter to the state GOP committee. "As a matter of information,...

Rick Santorum's latest attempt to use a Mitt Romney aide's "Etch-A-Sketch" remark against the Republican front-runner instead gave his rival a chance to fire back on Thursday, after Santorum seemed to say he'd rather see President Obama reelected than send Romney to the White House. Speaking at an event in Texas, Santorum again made the case that Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom's comments Wednesday on CNN about a "reset" of the campaign if Romney clinched the nomination showed the former Massachusetts governor's efforts to appeal to conservatives were insincere. "You win by giving people the opportunity to see a different vision...

The media is smearing Gingrich right and left while going relatively light on Santorum. We don't know who he is, we haven't examined his record thoroughly, we blindly believe in faith the statements he as a Christian family man uses to make a quick point, and he is the last one standing to experience the negative carpet bombing from Mitt Romney.

Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich says Rick Santorum’s double-digit loss in the Illinois primary shows he is not the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney — and he can’t defeat President Barack Obama..... “Governor Romney had a pretty good day — I think he took a step towards clearly proving he was the front-runner. Senator Santorum didn’t have a particularly good day,” Gingrich said. “This is the third time now he has tried an industrial Midwestern . . . state and not succeeded. And I think that the conservatives have to think through the right strategy if they hope to stop Romney....

In 2008, Republicans argued that Barack Obama couldn't be an effective president because he had never run anything. Since his inauguration, they have never let go of this argument. In a typical exchange during the BP oil spill, Sean Hannity and GOP strategist Ed Gillespie agreed that the feeling America was on the wrong track could be traced "back to the fact that [Obama] doesn't have executive experience." Indeed, when Rick Santorum was praising Sarah Palin as a vice presidential pick in 2008 at a speech at Ave Maria (yes, the same speech where he talked about Satan), he cited...

CHICAGO — On the issue Republicans tell pollsters is the most important of 2012, Rick Santorum these days has very little to say. His typical stump speech, an almost hour-long mixture of Orwellian fears of government overreach, history lessons about the French and Middle Eastern revolutions and suggestions that President Barack Obama would rather side with Islamists than Americans, has evolved into a tour de force of building fear in his listeners. Since winning primaries in Alabama and Mississippi, Santorum’s standard remarks have generally excluded an economic plan — the heart and soul of the message his chief GOP rival,...

<p>Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Tuesday that Rick Santorum "probably didn't mean to" say that he doesn't care about the unemployment rate but that it still illustrates a broader problem with the former Pennsylvania senator.</p> <p>"I know that Santorum probably didn't mean to say it, but it's what he said," Gingrich said. "And, you know, when you're going to take on an incumbent President of the United States you better know what you believe. You better be able to say it very vividly. Can you imagine a Barack Obama dealing with somebody who says he doesn't care about the unemployment rate?"</p>

The Santorum campaign appears to be taking a slightly new tack on Newt Gingrich’s continued presence in the race. Instead of calling on Mr. Gingrich to drop out of the race, they called for Mr. Gingrich’s supporters to come to their side. “It’s time for Gingrich supporters to get behind us if they truly want to have a conservative candidate; it’s up to Newt Gingrich to decide what his future is,” John Brabender, Mr. Santorum’s top strategist, told reporters after Mr. Santorum and a crowd of about 200 people had left the hotel ballroom here where Mr. Santorum had conceded...