Free Republic

TARP Obama is the only person to vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program as a senator and then oversee it as president. Romney's stance? In 2010 he told Fox News' Neil Cavuto that bailing out the banks "was the right thing to do" because it was "an investment made to try and keep a collapse of our entire financial system from occurring." Stimulus Nowadays, Romney consistently sounds the common refrain that the stimulus "didn't work," but in 2009, a couple of weeks before Obama's inauguration and a couple of months before passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,...

[edit}.... The Gingrich team on Sunday started to hit Romney for voting for Paul Tsongas in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary when the former U.S. Senator for Massachusetts was in a primary with Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown. That plays into the most central rap against Romney — that he is not a real conservative, that he converted for the campaign and in essence he is a “Massachusetts moderate.” In the context of the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, that is not a compliment. The Tsongas vote has been raised before — when Romney ran the first time...

Has it really come to this? Newt Gingrich as the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney? That's what many in the punditocracy have proclaimed as the former speaker of the House has surged recently in the polls. Yet a look at his record reveals that Newt is hardly the "anti-Mitt" -- he's Mitt Romney with more baggage and bolder hand gestures. Every Gingrich profile proclaims that he's a dazzling "ideas man," a "one-man think tank." It seems that, if you clamor long enough about "big ideas," people become convinced you actually have them. But most of Gingrich's policy ideas over the...