Scrambled GOP race heads to Florida
A drastically reshaped Republican presidential campaign begins anew in Florida as the party’s establishment confronts the likelihood of an extended and bitter leadership fight and the increasing possibility that Newt Gingrich could be its nominee.
Gingrich’s stunning victory over Mitt Romney in South Carolina on Saturday all but ensured 10 days of intense campaigning in Florida, which holds its primary on Jan. 31. Adding to the urgency: voters in Florida have already started mailing in absentee ballots.
A blitz of the television advertisements in Florida has begun and the candidates face yet another nationally televised debate on Monday night in Tampa, Fla.
For some veterans in the party, Gingrich’s victory increased the very possibility that some of them fear — that the combative and volatile Gingrich with whom they had worked in Washington would become the new face of the party.
Speaking to NBC News on Sunday, Gingrich acknowledged those concerns and said he wore them as a badge of honor as he pushed forward toward the nomination.
“The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” he said. “We are going to make the establishment very uncomfortable. We are go- ing to demand real change in Washington.”
Some of Gingrich’s former colleagues have warned — often anonymously — that he cannot be trusted to lead the party, or the country. “Newt’s absolutely brilliant,” an admirer who negotiated with him in Congress told The Daily News of New York on Saturday night. “He has 100 ideas;
97 are real good, the other three will blow up the world.”
Gingrich said he was not surprised by that kind of reaction, but he dismissed it as the same kind of nervousness that some in the party’s establishment exhibited when Ronald Reagan was first running for national office.
Gingrich and Romney also did not wait to engage each other as the Florida campaign got under way. Both men appeared on Sunday morning talk shows, seeking an advantage by hammering the other’s experience and character.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Romney said that Gingrich “has some explaining to do,” among other things, about a global warming public service announcement he taped with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Romney said that despite the results in the South Carolina primary, Republican voters will not ultimately choose as a nominee “who spent 40 years in Washington as a congressman and a lobbyist.”
The former Massachusetts governor also questioned Gingrich’s “sobriety” and “steadiness.”
But Romney conceded that Gingrich had a “good week” politically in South Carolina, while he had not. And Romney bowed to mounting pressure from Gingrich and others to release his tax returns, saying he will do so on Tuesday.
“We made a mistake in holding off as long as we did,” Romney said, adding that the issue had become a distraction. “We’ll be putting our returns on the Internet. People can look through them.”
Gingrich said on Sunday morning that Romney’s decision is “a good thing. I commend Governor Romney for doing it.”
Having last week attacked Romney for refusing to release his taxes, Gingrich said on C-span’s Morning Journal program that it was time to move on.
Gingrich’s large margin of victory in South Carolina erased whatever momentum Romney might have earned from an equally large win in New Hampshire 10 days earlier. The first three contests, including the Iowa caucuses, have provided little clarity for the fractured party, handing a victory to three different candidates, with the belated recognition last week that Rick Santorum won in Iowa.