Free Republic

Newt Gingrich has ramped up his attacks on Mitt Romney as a heartless leveraged buyout executive for his years at Bain Capital, asking reporters in Manchester on Monday, “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? Or is that, somehow, a little bit of a flawed system?” But Mr. Gingrich was himself on an advisory board for a major investment firm that had a similar business model, Forstmann Little, a pioneering private equity firm co-founded in 1978 by Theodore J. Forstmann...

Sarah Palin’s husband is endorsing Newt Gingrich for president, Todd Palin told ABC News today. But Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and John McCain’s 2008 Republican running mate, has yet to decide “who is best able to go up against Barack Obama,” Todd Palin said. Palin said he has not spoken to Gingrich or anyone from the former House speaker’s campaign. But he said he respects Gingrich for what he went through in the 1990s and compared that scrutiny in public life to what Sarah Palin went through during her run for the vice presidency.

Santorum's so-called surge is all but gone. Huntsman is catching up.

GOP New Hampshire primary debate tonight on ABC at 9pm ET By Nate, on January 7th, 2012 Tonight will mark the first of two debates this weekend focused on the New Hampshire Republican primary. This evening's debate will take place at Saint Anselm College and is sponsored by ABC News, Yahoo! and WMUR. Sunday morning will feature a GOP debate broadcast on NBC at 9am ET (yes, am) but look for more details on that later today. Air Time: Saturday, January 7th at 9pm ET / 6pm PT on ABC Live Stream: WMUR and Yahoo! News Participants: Santorum, Romney, Paul,...

"It has recently come to our attention that your station has either been asked to run, or may soon be asked to run, various advertising spots produced by the Mitt Romney aligned SuperPAC “Restore Our Future” or Romney for President, the principal campaign committee of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Included among the Romney advertisements submitted to your station for broadcast are likely to be various advertisements which specifically mention Speaker Gingrich and purport to quote or reference the findings of a 1997 report issued by the House Select Committee on Ethics (the “Report”). The content of these advertisements state...

This is an appeal to all long-time conservatives. Let's start lining up behind Newt Gingrich, as Thomas Sowell, Art Laffer, JC Watts, Jim Robinson (Free Republic honcho) and others have. The hazzard of holding back an endorsement is that the media, pudits and PAC TV commercials will continue to shape negative opinion against Newt and we may lose our best conservative warrior. The result of the media, pundit and PAC TV onslaught may cause the nominee to be Romney or Santorum. Romney is a moderate and Santorum does not have the experience to Push the conservative agenda in the general...

Just days after praising his rival GOP presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich took aim at Rick Santorum’s congressional record and said he would be considered the “junior partner” in a match-up between the two Republican hopefuls. “If you think of us as partners, he would clearly in historical experience have been the junior partner,” Gingrich said Thursday on the campaign trail. “He’s not a bad person, I want to be clear about this, but I don’t know that he has any track record of being able to organize a large-scale campaign.”

"Restore Our Future, a super-PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, will run full-page ads attacking Newt Gingrich in the New Hampshire Union Leader and The State in Columbia, S.C., the most prominent newspapers in the next two primary states. The decision to attack Gingrich is a curious one, as Rick Santorum has emerged as Romney’s top rival for the GOP nomination after he virtually tied Romney on Tuesday in Iowa’s caucuses. Post-voting analysis shows much of Gingrich’s support in that state ended up going to Santorum."

As the results of the Iowa caucus dribbled in, Americans got to see how the GOP candidates greeted victory and defeat. Top vote-getter Mitt Romney was gracious toward Rick Santorum, who came in second by eight thin votes, but uninspiring as he pledged to get America back to work. Santorum pronounced, "Game on," then hailed his Italian grandfather's decision to leave Italy to dig coal, if that's what it took to bring his family to the United States. Ron Paul, who came in third, saluted the work of his enthusiastic volunteers and credited his success to his role as a...

The “unlike some people” part isn’t stated, merely implied. But c’mon. He’s laying it on with a trowel here. ----------- Less than 12 hours after finishing in fourth place in the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich opened a new, more aggressive chapter in his campaign, taking pointed shots at rivals Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, who both finished ahead of Gingrich. At one point, Gingrich hinted he would make Romney’s personal wealth an issue, telling a reporter “I’m not rich.”… When asked why he chose to congratulate Santorum and not Romney on his caucus success, the former House speaker said, “I...

As Matthew Boyle noted, the ad wars for New Hampshire are about to heat up. Here is the full-page Union Leader ad that Mitt Romney can look forward to seeing when he arrives New Hampshire tomorrow…

SEE AD AT SITE Newt Gingrich has a message for John McCain: Welcome to the 2012 race. On Wednesday, a super PAC backing Gingrich welcomed McCain’s endorsement of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) by seizing on a Web ad, “Two Mitts,” that the Arizona Republican had run against Romney during the 2008 GOP nominating battle. The spot juxtaposes clips of Mitt Romney stating contrasting positions on issues including abortion rights and gun control throughout his political career. The salvo from the pro-Gingrich “Winning Our Future” super PAC comes as Gingrich is vowing to step up his campaign-trail attacks on...

The Iowa caucuses may not have much predictive value, but they did a wonderful job of unmasking both elitist whingers on the left and incompetent whiners on the right. As they do every presidential election cycle, progressives of pallor wore their indelible disdain for Middle America on their sleeves. Pale-faced University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom launched a 6,000-word jeremiad, littered with factual errors, against his home state's residents. The abridged version: Raaaaaaaacists! Hicks! Christians! Argggh! In the safe harbors of The Atlantic just a few weeks before Tuesday's electoral event, Bloom sneered: "Those who stay in rural Iowa...

Des Moines, Iowa (CNN) – Newt Gingrich will hit GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney as a "timid Massachusetts moderate" in a New Hampshire newspaper ad on Wednesday. The full-page ad, set to run in the influential Union Leader, comes less than one week before the state's first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 10. The Gingrich campaign intends to release television ads in the same vein this week. On Tuesday, Gingrich also said he will run ads in the early primary voting states of South Carolina and Florida, which hold their contests later this month. Calling himself a "bold Ronald Reagan conservative," Gingrich...

When Gingrich’s senior advisers resigned en masse last spring, Gingrich cast the ensuing negative coverage as a misreading of his historic bid for the presidency. “It’s going to take a while for the news media to realize that you’re covering something that happens once or twice in a century,” the former speaker said, “a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas. I expect it to take a while for it to sink in.” .... Each Gingrich setback, it seems, has been a historic event. Remember when his campaign compared its failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot to the Pearl...

There's been a fair amount of chatter/concern that the importance of Florida's Republican primary could be dramatically diluted if the RNC further penalizes the state for its early primary by allocating its delegates proportionally, rather than winner-take-all. After all, divvying up 50 delegates four or five ways would make the state a lot smaller prize for the winner. On a conference call with reporters today, however, RNC officials all but dismissed the prospects for Florida losing its winner-take-all status. As it is the state's number of delegates will be slashed from 99 to 50, and there is no mechanism to...