As the remaining Republican presidential candidates pivot from South Carolina to Florida, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have two very different purposes. Gingrich is trying to capitalize on all the themes that handed him a 13-point victory Saturday in South Carolina while Mitt Romney is trying to undo the damage and hit the reset bottom.
Making the rounds on the Sunday talk shows, Gingrich went all in as the anti-establishment candidate. “In Florida my case is going to be very simple,” Gingrich said on Meet The Press. “You have a clear establishment candidate in Mitt Romney. … And you have somebody whose entire career has been a Reagan populist conservative.”
Gingrich tailored his anti-establishment rhetoric to a Florida audience, providing a preview of what issues he will be hitting over the next ten days leading up to the Florida primary on Jan. 31. One key issue that is likely to dominate — and which Gingrich raised several times on Sunday — is the housing crisis and the high foreclosure rate in Florida in particular. Calling himself a “Reagan populist,” Gingrich noted on that Florida has endured “one of the most painful periods with housing mortgages and the price of housing and the difficulties in the housing area. Drawing an implicit line from Romney to the housing crisis, Gingirch said, “As they look at the big boys on Wall Street they look at the guys in Washington, they know none of that help got down to average everyday Floridians. And I think that gap creates a real anger against the national establishment.”
Gingrich, who received a standing ovation last Thursday when he began CNN’s presidential debate by decrying the media, is also beating the “elite media” drum. “People are just sick and tired of being told what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say,” Gingrich told NBC’s David Gregory. “The highest, the most intense passion in both debates was a head-on collision about what the news media was doing. And I think there’s something real and deep there.”
Romney, meanwhile, tried to take his South Carolina loss in stride.
“Well, Speaker Gingrich had a good day. I think his debate sparring with Juan Williams was a great opportunity for him to show some strength,” Romney said on Fox News Sunday. “It was not a great week for me. We spent a lot of time talking about tax returns and, of course, the change in the vote in Iowa. And, you know, it is a time when we faced a setback.
“You know, in my experience, a lot of people face setbacks, and you come back from them. And that’s the way to be successful, is to come back from the inevitable downturns. We’re hoping and expecting to do that down the road.”
Romney also said: “You know, I realize that South Carolina is in Newt’s neighborhood. This is a state very close to his home state, and he had a good strong starting place here. I indicated from the very beginning. We thought it would be an uphill climb here in South Carolina. We did a lot better this time than we did four years ago.”
In the wake of his South Carolina collapse — he had a double digit lead in the TPM Poll Average less than week before the primary — Romney reversed course and announced he would release his 2010 tax return and estimates of his 2011 taxes within days.
Calling his prior resistance to releasing his tax returns a “mistake” and distraction, Romney said he would release more information than he’d originally planned and do so sooner. “Given all the attention that’s been focused on tax returns, given the distraction that I think they became in these last couple of weeks — look, I am going to make it clear to you right now, Chris. I will release my tax returns for 2010 which is the last returns that were completed,” Romney said. “I’ll do that on Tuesday of this week. I’ll also release at the same time, an estimate for 2011 tax returns.
“So, you’ll have two years and people can take a look at it. We’ll put them on the Web site and you can go through the pages. This, I think, we just made a mistake in holding off as long as we did. If it was a distraction, we want to get back to the real issues in the campaign — leadership, character and vision for America, how to get jobs in America, and how to rein in the excessive scale of the federal government.”
Gingrich applauded Romney’s decision to release his returns and said he considered the case closed. Democrats were not letting it go. On a conference call with reporters Sunday, DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida stressed that two years of returns was insufficient.
Romney also continued his recent more focused criticisms of Gingrich, the candidate who until just a few days ago Romney had been free to ignore. “Look, this is a critical time for America. We are choosing someone who will lead our country at a very critical time. People are suffering in this country right now. And I spent my life in the private sector. I understand how to create jobs and how to get America strong again,” Romney said.
“And I’m running against, in the case of Speaker Gingrich, someone who has never worked in the private sector, who spent his life Washington and has been working as a lobbyist. And he doesn’t call it officially a lobbyist, but that’s what it is. And I simply cannot imagine America being led by a person whose sole experience is not inside the private sector, but is inside Washington. I just don’t think Washington can fix Washington.”
