Posted on 11/04/2011 6:31:27 PM PDT by presidio9
Newt Gingrich predicts the race for the GOP nomination will come down to two weary candidates: "This will end up being Mitt and Newt."
Gingrich, the former Georgia congressman and speaker of the U.S. House, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday that his campaign is now where it needs to be and that by December he'll have the resources to compete head to head with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
"And Romney is the real competitor," Gingrich said in his Buckhead campaign headquarters, where he rallied two dozen volunteers before heading to Duluth for a town hall meeting sponsored by the 7th District Republican Party.
An obviously upbeat Gingrich said he survived June and July, which he called the darkest two months of his 53-year political career, and is poised to make a serious run at the nomination.
It's a remarkable turnaround for a candidate many pundits and news outlets had declared out of the race earlier this year. And while polls have shown Gingrich inching into sole possession of third place -- including a Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday that had him distancing himself from fourth-place Rick Perry -- he's still at least 10-12 percentage points behind Romney and Atlanta resident Herman Cain.
But Cain has suffered through four days of brutal news coverage over allegations of sexual harassment from when the former Godfather's Pizza CEO was head of the National Restaurant Association. Polls have yet to reflect any impact of the charges, and it's unclear whether Cain will slip from the top tier as have past challengers, such as Perry, the governor of Texas, and U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachman, R-Minn.
Gingrich, who suffered through his own bouts of scandal earlier in his career, said Cain needed to hole up somewhere and figure his way out of this mess.
"My first advice is what he hasn’t done, which is say nothing until you sit down with your lawyers and with the people who know the facts," Gingrich said. "You thoroughly and completely understand them and you go through a period where everybody asks you -- in your team -- every possible negative question so you thoroughly understand what will happen."
Gingrich said Cain is going through "a rough patch" and whether or not Cain survives Gingrich said he is ready to eclipse Cain.
"We just had the two best days," Gingrich said. "We raised more money Monday than we ever had before and we raised more money Tuesday. Those two days we raised 50 percent more than we raised in July."
As for critics who say he lacks the resources or organizational strength to compete in Iowa, whose caucus will be held Jan. 3, Gingrich said there's more than enough time.
"That’s part of what’s funny all summer," he said. "I work back from victory. Victory in Iowa starts about the 10th of December. Everybody else was saying, ‘Oh my gosh, look at August, look at September.' I’m like, well, it’s not the 10th of December."
The American people, Gingrich said, are tough and expect their leaders to be tougher.
"The job of the political leader is to reach past the distractions and to continue to communicate what they think matters, and to try and do it in a way that the American people decide they offer a better future," he said.
In Duluth, before about 300 local Republicans, as well as several local tea party leaders, Gingrich unveiled plans that he said could save the federal government trillions of dollars. His plans include turning Medicaid into a block-grant program that would allow states to tailor plans for its needs.
Questions from the audience dealt with national security, federal spending, concerns about the Environmental Protection Agency and border control.
Newt is really growing on me.
Can you actually remove it if so how? Or do you mean you will ask the Mods to remove it?
Could be Newt.
Won’t be Mitt — the flip-flopper
I don’t think we know who the running mate is yet.
I have this uncanny feeling that the whole field isn’t out there yet.
As a co-author of the 1994 Contract with America, Gingrich was in the forefront of the Republican Party’s dramatic success in that year’s Congressional elections and subsequently was elected Speaker of the House. In 1995, Time magazine named him “Man of the Year” for his role in leading the Republican Revolution in the House, ending 40 years of the Democratic Party being in the majority. During his tenure as Speaker, he represented the public face of the Republican opposition to President Bill Clinton. Under his Speakership, Congress passed and Clinton signed the 1996 reform of welfare, a capital gains tax cut and the first balanced budget since 1969.
Cain will not benefit from the Black vote. The vast majority of decent, religious, hardworking Black folks (like white folks), will not endorse someone with a shady background that could emerge to haunt him in the white House.
Cain seems to think he can get away with saying anything if he turns it into a joke and if his “recall” is so poor, he won’t make an intelligent leader. Perhaps power went to Mr. Cain’s head during his rise to fame.
As a co-author of the 1994 Contract with America, Gingrich was in the forefront of the Republican Party’s dramatic success in that year’s Congressional elections and subsequently was elected Speaker of the House. In 1995, Time magazine named him “Man of the Year” for his role in leading the Republican Revolution in the House, ending 40 years of the Democratic Party being in the majority. During his tenure as Speaker, he represented the public face of the Republican opposition to President Bill Clinton. Under his Speakership, Congress passed and Clinton signed the 1996 reform of welfare, a capital gains tax cut and the first balanced budget since 1969.
Please tell me you DO know how funny that sounds given the current occupant of the White Hut...
This tells us nothing until we know how much he raised in July. I suspect it wasn't much.
Unfortunately, multiple millions of voters didn’t know much about Obama before the election. He simply wasn’t vetted by the media or anyone else. Cain is being vetted and no one likes it. Can’t have it both ways.
I think the "smarter than us" RINOs in Washington have already chosen him for us. So has the liberal media, too, because to them he's the "lesser of all evils." He's more liberal than anything else.
Notice NO ONE is going after Romney.
They're all protecting him. He has so many political skeletons in the closet he should have been long gone by now.
I think he's being forced on us. They do this to us every election, because they know no matter who they choose for us, we'll vote for that person - "otherwise, the democrat wins."
Not this time. I'm not falling for their head games again. I'm voting with my heart. I'm going to the most conservative.
That would be our last nominee....
"I am just saying that we need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment. I would feel better if the people who favor this would just be honest about the scale of change.
"I agree ... this is very close to Maastrict [the European Union treaty by which the EU member nations have surrendered considerable sovereignty], and twenty years from now we will look back on this as a very important defining moment. This is not just another trade agreement. This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940s and once in the 1950s, the U.S. Congress rejected. I am not even saying we should reject it; I, in fact, lean toward it. But I think we have to be very careful, because it is a very big transfer of power."
—Newt Gingrich, House Ways and Means Committee hearings during June 1994.
Mitt and Newt, two RINO peas in a pod.
I’m voting for the conservative Cain.
Ask, and you shall receive! See post 23 NOW!
It would seem that you take your marching orders from ‘Politico’. Could you please give me the specific FACTS that back up your ‘shady’ background allegation?
I don’t take orders from anyone. Least of all rabid political groupies.
How exactly can you make that statement after the result of the 2008 Presidential election, in which 90 to 95 percent of the black electorate voted in mass for a candidate with NO known background, except twenty years of Rev Wright's God-damn America Church? Were you asleep in Nov 2008?
Not ONE DIME. People are stupid.
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