A 'full-frontal assault' on Newt Gingrich has left the fight for a Republican presidential candidate wide open, write MICHAEL SHEARand JEREMY PETERS
A FURIOUS and sustained barrage of criticism aimed at Newt Gingrich appears to be reshaping the volatile Republican nomination contest once again, with just two weeks left before voters begin weighing in.
Attack ads are blanketing Iowa, fuelled by millions of dollars from Gingrich’s rivals and a group supporting Mitt Romney. Mailboxes are filling up with anti-Gingrich leaflets. And on the stump, his rivals have stepped up their assault on Gingrich’s time in Congress and his commitment to conservative causes.
Gingrich, the former House speaker, emerged in early December with a strong lead in some national polls and with commanding leads in Iowa and South Carolina. New surveys suggest political gravity could be dragging him down, opening the race up again and highlighting once more the fickle search among conservatives for an alternative to Romney.
“It’s definitely a full-frontal assault,” said John Stineman, a Republican strategist who managed the 2000 presidential campaign of Steve Forbes in Iowa.
He said the criticism of Gingrich has been impossible to avoid in Iowa. “The fact is, he’s getting killed,” he said.
For most of December, Gingrich has refused to push back aggressively against the attacks, promising a positive approach and pursuing a relatively limited schedule of traditional campaigning.
He spent last weekend largely off the trail, attending a concert in Virginia where his wife, Callista, played the French horn.
But even Gingrich, who is not one to keep thoughts to himself, acknowledged that staying positive in the face of such relentless attacks was difficult. “Every once in a while I slip when they get my goat and I can’t quite help it,” he said at an appearance in Iowa on Monday evening.
A case in point – earlier in the day, Gingrich assailed the behaviour of his rivals and pledged to respond with “the best ideas” during a bus tour in Iowa starting shortly after Christmas.
His campaign also purchased an additional $250,000 (about €190,000) worth of time for commercials in Iowa.
“The only person who profits from Republican ads attacking other Republicans is Barack Obama, and I think that’s pretty reprehensible behaviour from the point of some of the candidates,” Gingrich said in Davenport, Iowa.
A daily tracking poll by Gallup released on Monday showed his lead has all but evaporated, leaving him in a dead heat with Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
A CNN survey also showed the race tied nationally. And an automated poll of Iowa voters showed an even steeper drop for Gingrich, although many news organisations have reservations about its methodology.
His decline highlighted the unsettled nature of a contest in which Republican voters say they are still open-minded about whom they will vote for; a New York Times/CBS News poll this month found two-thirds of likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa were still willing to change their minds.
On Monday, Sarah Palin said on Fox Business Network that “it’s not too late” for “folks” to jump into the Republican contest.
Even in parts of the country where campaign ads are not yet commonplace, intense media scrutiny has helped chip away at Gingrich’s support.
And two nationally televised debates this month exposed Gingrich to tough questions before a broad audience.
But the onslaught has been especially intense in the early voting states.
In Iowa, residents can hardly turn on a television without seeing an ad that is critical of Gingrich.
According to figures from Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, Iowans have been shown commercials with a negative message about Gingrich more than 1,200 times in the past few weeks.
The biggest player by far in the state has been Restore Our Future, a so-called super PAC (political action committee) supporting Romney. So far it has spent $2.6 million on television ads depicting Gingrich as tainted by scandal, soft on illegal immigration and corrupted by decades of work in Washington.
And the campaign for Texas governor Rick Perry, continuing to be aggressive about assailing both Gingrich and Romney in television ads, has produced a new 30-second commercial that it could start running in Iowa this week.
“Newt got rich; made millions off of Freddie Mac,” the ad says, slamming Gingrich for his work on behalf of the federal mortgage lender that conservatives hold up as an example of wasteful and inefficient government.
Direct-mail firms are churning out pieces like the one from Romney’s campaign that links Gingrich with Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, and asks: “With allies like this, who needs the left?”
And on the stump, Gingrich has become the primary target of his rivals as they travel from diner to coffee house to pizza joint.
Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has hammered Gingrich on an array of issues, including his work for Freddie Mac, and has questioned his commitment to ending the procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion.
“Newt has been backing the individual healthcare mandate for 20 years,” she told a small crowd, invoking an aspect of the 2010 healthcare law rejected by most conservatives. “This is exactly what I’ve been fighting.”
Perry, racing across Iowa on his own bus tour that continues this week, repeatedly called Gingrich the “granddaddy of earmarks”.
Steve Grubbs, a veteran Iowa Republican who helped run Herman Cain’s campaign in the state, said Gingrich must find a way to respond to what he called the “sheer volume of negative mail and the magnitude of negative ads”.
“Gingrich has to either make some new strategic decisions and restore faith in Republicans that he is electable next fall,” Grubbs said, “or be satisfied being an intellectual voice adding to the debate”.
Iowa veterans said the assault on Gingrich was not unlike previous attempts by Republican candidates to stop a rival winning the state’s caucuses, the first to be held in the US for each election.
In 1996, Forbes dipped into his personal fortune to run a blizzard of television ads depicting senator Robert J Dole as a Washington insider who raised taxes and was too cozy with special interests. The ads worked in driving down Dole’s poll numbers, but later backfired on Forbes, who was perceived by Iowa voters as too negative.
“They tend to penalise who they perceive is the one who led the charge,” said Stineman, referring to those Iowa voters.
In the current contest, no single candidate has been responsible for the criticism of Gingrich. And Romney, in particular, has been less willing to put his name to the attacks, leaving it to super PACs working on his behalf.
The involvement of such groups can be especially damaging for candidates like Gingrich who have not raised enough money to counter negative attacks with an advertising blitz of their own.
Nor does Gingrich have a well-financed super PAC working on his behalf.
"The problem is the super PACs come in and spend $1 million a week blasting a candidate," said Tim Albrecht, a senior aide to Republican governor Terry E Branstad of Iowa. "And Newt has not been able to put an apparatus like that together." – ( The New York Times)