URBANDALE, IOWA — Newt Gingrich is turning the other cheek.
Faced with a barrage of attacks from the Mitt Romney campaign in the lead up to Saturday night’s debate in Des Moines near here, the surging Gingrich told supporters at the grand opening of his first Iowa headquarters that he will not tolerate any negativity against his Republican opponents.
“We will not engage in negative ads,” Gingrich said. “We’re not going to engage in tearing people down.”
But in his professed plan to take the high road, of course, Gingrich is putting Romney directly in his sights. Rather than going with negative attack ads, Gingrich is choosing to push back at Romney with a little public shaming.
The Romney operation started attacking Gingrich last week as he surged to the top of the polls here with less than a month to go before the Jan. 3 caucuses. In conference calls with reporters over the past several days, Romney surrogates have attacked Gingrich’s record on the Ryan Budget and hinted that the former House Speaker is just a little too out there to be the nominee.
A Romney-aligned Super PAC has launched a scathing attack ad against Gingrich in Iowa, buying up huge swaths of airtime to tear the current front runner down.
This is where the shaming comes in. Rather than respond directly to the attacks, or even attack Romney for running them, Gingrich promised to be the bigger person and see to it no one does the same thing to Romney on Gingrich’s behalf.
“If anybody does go out and create any kind of super PAC using my name, if they run any negative ads, we will attack them and we will encourage people to give them no money,” Gingrich said.
As for those surrogates Romney is rolling out to attack Gingrich daily, Gingrich said you’re not going to see any of that coming from his team, either.
“None of my surrogates are going to be encouraged to go out and attack anybody,” Gingrich said. “We have lots of good positive things to talk about.”
Will it work? Supporters at the Gingrich event seemed unconcerned that Gingrich was planning on letting Romney’s attacks go unanswered.
“I think that’ll work for him,” Ron Mallard of West Des Moines told TPM. Being negative is “not in his personality” Mallard said of Gingrich, hastily adding, “well, not anymore.”
Asked if it was dangerous to not respond to the blows coming his way from Romney, Doyce Lord, also of West Des Moines, said Gingrich is playing Romney exactly right.
“I think [he’ll] come across as a gentleman,” she said.
