Gingrich not ready to fold
Former Speaker meets with Vegas casino mogul as he scrambles to fill his campaign’s war chest
LAS VEGAS— Up close and personal, it was anything but Newt Gingrich’s last stand.
Playing preacher-in-chief at an economic revival show, the former House Speaker led a barnburner of a rally at a Nevada country music saloon Friday.
You want standing ovations? There were four here on the sawdust floors of Stoney’s Rockin’ Country, including one for Gingrich’s now-daily pledge to keep Canada from China’s grasp by building the Keystone XL pipeline.
There will be no bows to any Saudi kings on Planet Newt. No regulation, environmental or otherwise, to get in the way of rapidly mending this battered country with jobs, jobs, jobs, he vowed.
No sucking up to the financial and media elite, nor coddling the economically desperate. No social safety net, but in its stead a social “trampoline” for the poor to permanently escape poverty. Oh, and gas will be $2 a gallon again.
When Newt’s mojo is working, it is a vainglorious sight to see. He can work a crowd like a jack-in-the-box, sending it to its feet in lusty applause in ways Mitt Romney simply never will.
So why, then, does this feel like the end — or something very close to the end — for the one-man wrecking ball in this least predictable of Republican presidential races?
The previous sentence offers the best clue: Gingrich may be many things, but he’s a one-man band. And he’s running out of stages.
Here in Nevada, the infinitely better-staffed Romney campaign owns the airwaves, rules the ground and appears certain to cruise to another decisive victory in Saturday’s caucuses, bringing the Republican crown that much nearer to the former Massachusetts governor’s head.
Team Gingrich, by contrast, barely exists in these parts. His campaign stops have been reduced to one or two a day as the candidate scrambles, behind the scenes, to raise cash for his depleted war chest.
Gingrich vowed again at this rally to take a people-powered insurgency all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa. Dissing Romney as “Obama lite,” he laid down the gauntlet for more debates. But none are scheduled until late February, suggesting Gingrich will struggle to stay afloat until the multi-state primaries of Super Tuesday in March, let alone the convention in August.
The determining factor, almost certainly, will be money. And so all eyes now are on whether Gingrich can draw another trump card from Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, whose family has fed more than $11 million to a pro-gingrich super PAC, almost single-handedly keeping this long-shot campaign in play.
The two men, close political friends since the 1990s in an alli- ance built on conservative values and pro-israel messaging, are believed to have met quietly this week. Gingrich told Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston that he would obey U.S. election law by refraining from discussing campaign finance with Adelson. Ralston wondered aloud on Twitter what they would they talk about instead. “Imagine: ‘Great weather, Sheldon . . .’” Ralston wrote. Adelson, whose Venetian casino empire towers over the Vegas strip, is believed to have a net worth upwards of $22 billion (U.S.) and would hardly miss another multimilliondollar donation. And he must surely be pleased with Gingrich’s repeated pledge — restated here again Friday — to order the politically explosive relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Gingrich’s fans in Las Vegas aren’t troubling themselves with the finer points of coveting billionaires. They just want to see Planet Newt continue to form. “Adelson doesn’t exist for us, outside of seeing his name every now and then in a news blurb,” said Chris Sapia, a Las Vegas retiree. She and her husband Fred have been dutifully making the rounds to catch all the candidates up close, and a lot of what Gingrich had to say hit home. “I’m kicking tires. Newt’s always painted as crazy and so I felt I needed to hear it for myself,” Sapia said. “I like some of Newt’s ideas and in the end I have to vote with my conscience.” Vegas stands as a kind of special victims unit as measured by record unemployment and home foreclosures, said Richard Reynoso, a landscaper who fell for Gingrich at Friday’s rally. “So many people just left town,” he said. “Some went back to Mexico, others went to California because you can get more free stuff there if you’re poor. “For me, Newt’s the best one to get us out of this mess. It’s going to be difficult to beat Romney but if anyone can do it, he can.”