Mitt Romney is making the homestretch of the Florida primary race in part a battle over Newt Gingrich’s mental state.
Greg Sargent snagged a copy of a Romney mailing going out in Florida that paints this in stark terms: Gingrich is “Unethical. Erratic. Reckless.” the mailer reads.
But this is just the latest in a string of less-than-veiled hits on Gingrich’s mental condition coming from Romney surrogates and Romney himself.
At a press conference in Tampa, FL Monday before the NBC News debate, Romney described Gingrich this way:
“I think as you look at the speaker’s record over time, it’s been highly erratic…You know, he voted in favor of establishing the Department of Education, and yet he gets in a debate and says we should get rid of the Department of Education and send all the education issues back to the states. He’s opposed vehemently to the Massachusetts health care system, and yet just a couple years ago wrote about what a superb system it was.
He’s gone from pillar to post almost like a pinball machine, from item to item in a way which is highly erratic…It does not suggest a stable, thoughtful course, which is normally associated with leadership.”
So that’s Romney calling Gingrich unstable and “erratic,” but couching it just a little in the guise of a conversation about his policy stances.
Romney’s surrogates have been more direct. In a series of conference calls since Gingrich first surged in Iowa polling, Team Romney has rolled out a number of Republican politicians who served under Gingrich as Speaker to tell horror stories of working with Gingrich in the 1990s.
The Romney campaign is not shy when it comes to getting the message of these calls across. A transcript of one of them with Rep. Peter King (R-NY) on Jan. 19 carried the subject line: REP. PETER KING: “IT’S ALL THE ERRATIC, SELF-SERVING NARCISSISM OF NEWT”.
Here’s the quote from the Romney campaign transcript:
“We had over–well over–200 others–well over 218–Republicans in the Congress when Newt was the Speaker, and you can’t find more than a handful who will come to his defense. And it has nothing to do with ideology, nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all the erratic, self-serving narcissism of Newt.”
It’s worth noting here that the “Newt’s an unstable political maniac” line has been a part of the coverage of his campaign for weeks. Politico published a widely-read in early December titled “The Return of Bad Newt” that was essentially a list of political observers weighing on on Gingrich’s mental state when it comes to politics.
In the mailer Sargent obtained, team Romney has clearly decided to jump past the reporters with this kind of talk and take the message straight to the voters.
