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Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during a campaign stop on Friday, Feb. 17, 2012 in Peachtree City, Ga. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speaks during a campaign stop on Friday, Feb. 17, 2012 in Peachtree City, Ga. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
PEACHTREE CITY, Ga. (AP) ? Newt Gingrich slammed his Republican rivals Friday for refusing to appear in a nationally televised debate from his home state of Georgia, a state the former House speaker has made central to his strategy of getting his struggling presidential bid back on track.
Gingrich made his remarks at a rally in the congressional district he represented for 20 years, speaking to a few hundred supporters. He planned several campaign stops across Georgia on Saturday with Herman Cain, a fellow Georgian and former contender for the GOP nomination who has since endorsed Gingrich.
CNN was forced to cancel the debate, scheduled to take place in Atlanta on March 1, after Mitt Romney declined to participate. Rick Santorum quickly followed suit.
The cancellation was a blow to Gingrich, who is banking on a strong showing on Super Tuesday, March 6, in Georgia, Ohio and eight other states holding contests that day.
“The average Georgian is going to say, the average Ohioan is going to say, ‘Let me get this straight. They won’t come here to debate but they want my vote?’” Gingrich said, adding, “Anybody who’s afraid of debating Newt Gingrich isn’t going to be in very good shape to debate Barack Obama.”
Gingrich, whose sole win came in South Carolina’s primary Jan. 21, conceded winning Georgia was “crucial” to sustaining his presidential bid. His candidacy has struggled since Romney soundly beat him in Florida Jan. 31 and Santorum won contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri on Feb. 7.
Gingrich also criticized ads run by a super PAC supporting Romney’s candidacy.
The ads by Restore Our Future, which is run by former Romney advisers, have been harshly critical of Gingrich and the millions the group spent on the ads contributed to his defeat in Florida and Iowa. Restore Our Future is currently running ads in Michigan and Arizona, which hold primaries Feb. 28, as well as several Super Tuesday states.
“You can’t hide behind millions of dollars in negative ads and think you’re going to win the presidency,” Gingrich said. “I think there is a declining impact of totally false ads, and I think you’re going to see as Romney applies the same technique at Santorum, a general revulsion against this kind of purely negative campaigning.”
Gingrich’s campaign website posted a letter Friday from attorney Patrick Milsaps to Georgia television stations warning of potential liability if they aired Restore Our Future ads claiming Gingrich had favored legislation endorsing China’s one-child policy. The group has run ads in several states suggesting Gingrich partnered with Democrat Nancy Pelosi to support legislation favoring such a policy, which has been discredited by several independent political fact checking organizations.
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Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bfouhy
Associated Press
Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-02-17-Gingrich/id-84835305c4364275a5b721bc6d2b5bab
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Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, greets supporters at a campaign rally in Coral Springs, Fla. Sunday, Jan. 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Steve Mitchell)
Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, greets supporters at a campaign rally in Coral Springs, Fla. Sunday, Jan. 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Steve Mitchell)
Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, right, is joined by wife Ann, following his speech during the South Carolina Primary night rally Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
Republican presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is greeted by supporters after Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington Sunday, Jan. 22, 2012. ( AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
TAMPA, Fla. (AP) ? Now it’s Florida’s turn.
And Republican presidential rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have just 10 days to navigate a state unlike any they’ve competed in so far. Florida is six times larger than New Hampshire, has almost five times more Hispanics than Iowa, and, with numerous media markets, is much more expensive for candidates than South Carolina. That’s where Gingrich trounced Romney on Saturday night, suddenly scrambling the GOP presidential race ahead of Florida’s Jan. 31 primary.
“It’s been fascinating spectator sport so far,” Beth Schiller, 48, said inside Buddy Brew Coffee shop the next morning. “But it’s coming here now. They’re all coming.”
Indeed, the remaining candidates in a shrunken field ? Romney, Gingrich, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Texas Rep. Ron Paul ? planned to be in the state Monday for the first of two presidential debates this week.
All eyes were certain to be on what’s essentially a two-man race.
After a crushing South Carolina defeat, Romney no longer faces the prospect of wrapping up the nomination quickly and now is forced to regroup. He has spent months planning for the Florida campaign, essentially building a firewall in the state. He has the largest organization of any candidate. And he and his allies combined have had the TV airwaves all to themselves for weeks, already spending roughly $6 million combined. The former Massachusetts governor’s areas of strength in the diverse state may be with the transplanted Northeasterners and snowbirds along the Gold Coast.
But now there are doubts about whether he can knit together the broad cross-section of Republican voters he’d need to win in this state, much less the nomination.
“I’m looking forward to a long campaign,” Romney said on “Fox News Sunday,” an acknowledgment that he wouldn’t sew up the nomination with a Florida victory as aides once had hoped.
Gingrich, for his part, will work to keep his momentum going despite continued division among tea party and religious activists who, to a certain degree, continue to divide their support between him and Santorum. The state’s conservative panhandle may be fertile ground for the former Georgia lawmaker who talks of his Southern roots often. His team also is working hard to court evangelicals, who vote in droves in the state’s GOP primaries and who tend to look skeptically on Romney.
He dramatically trails Romney in fundraising and organization in the state, underscored by his launching of an online “money bomb” Saturday night to try to raise $1 million to help fund his efforts in Florida.
“My job in Florida is to convince people that I am the one candidate who can clearly defeat Obama in a series of debates and the one candidate who has big enough solutions that they would really get America back on track,” Gingrich told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
His South Carolina victory is certain to change the dynamics in a state where Romney has led in polls for weeks.
“People want to get behind a winner,” said Tom Gaitens, co-founder of the Tampa Tea Party and state director for the conservative organization FreedomWorks. “People will be drawn to Newt like a magnet.”
Florida’s size and diversity creates challenges for all the candidates. And the issues may be far different than those in the previous states.
There are 10 distinct media markets in Florida, which helps explain the tremendous cost of running a statewide campaign here.
And the voters are anything but homogenous.
Northern Florida along the panhandle is as close to the South as the state offers. It’s the least populated and considered the most culturally conservative. Southeastern Florida, including the Miami area, is traditionally not as conservative as the rest of the state, offering a large Latino population and many Northeastern transplants and Jewish voters. The bulk of the state’s Republicans, including a significant collection of evangelicals, live along central Florida’s Interstate 4 corridor, including Tampa and Orlando.
Exit polling from the 2008 GOP primary shows that approximately 39 percent of voters identified themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. That’s a significant voting bloc Gingrich has been targeting. He won evangelicals soundly in South Carolina, where they constituted roughly 65 percent of the electorate.
Hispanics are also key.
Romney is already on television running an advertisement in Spanish. Gingrich plans to do the same. The Gingrich team is based in the Miami area, the epicenter of the state’s considerable Cuban population. Cubans make up roughly a third of the state’s Hispanic population and figure to play prominently.
Romney’s team is based in Tampa, and it has spent weeks working to woo the 200,000 people who already have cast ballots through absentee and early voting.
Like everywhere else, the economy is certain to dominate the race in Florida. The unemployment rate here is 10 percent, much higher than the national 8.5 percent jobless figure. And more than 2 percent of all Florida housing units were involved in foreclosure last year, according to the RealtyTrac foreclosure listing service. Florida also is third in the number of homes with “upside down” mortgages, at 44 percent of all mortgaged properties, according to the CoreLogic real estate data firm.
But other topics also will dominate.
Florida is a retirement mecca, so expect discussion about Social Security. It’s also home to a number of environmentalists working to protect the coastline and fight drilling, so those topics are all but certain to be touched on. And with a heavy influx of Hispanics, immigration is certain to be raised.
Associated Press
Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-01-22-GOP%20Campaign-Florida’s%20Turn/id-d50956d6d09e4f479637d05692211fda
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WASHNGTON ? Mitt Romney chugged ahead Thursday as the conservative-fueled drive to deny him the Republican presidential nomination reached a difficult new phase: Once-surging rivals Rick Perry and Herman Cain scrambled to control serious damage, while an old face sought new ways to exploit their problems.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich could emerge as the newest hope for conservative activists who doubt Romney’s commitment to their priorities. But Gingrich trails Romney and others in organizing in key states such as Iowa. And he will have to prove that his long and sometimes troubled political history can withstand closer scrutiny.
Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Perry rearranged his schedule Thursday to try to mitigate a disastrous debate moment, in which he could not remember the third federal agency he has vowed to abolish. Perry canceled a Tennessee fundraiser to appear on several TV networks and the David Letterman show, pledging to stay in the race.
He repeatedly said he “stepped in it” at the Wednesday night debate but declared in an interview, “This ain’t a day for quitting nothing.”
For Cain, the former pizza company executive, it was day 11 of trying to get beyond sexual harassment accusations leveled against him by four women, two of whom received cash settlements from a trade association Cain once headed.
Facing voters for the first time since the allegations emerged, Cain met with tea party groups in Michigan, hoping the friendly settings would preserve the lofty perch he enjoyed in GOP polls two weeks ago.
“How you beat Obama? Beat him with a Cain!” he told one supporter at a crowded diner in Ypsilanti. The crowd cheered.
He is airing his first TV ad in Iowa, and he has hired a new lawyer who is warning women they will be scrutinized for any charges made against the candidate.
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, filmed a TV ad in Iowa on Thursday and blasted President Barack Obama’s Iran policy in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. His supporters quietly reveled in the good fortune of Perry’s and Cain’s woes.
With the Iowa caucus set for Jan. 3, and the New Hampshire primary a week after that, Romney is looking strong, but he’s hardly home free. Many conservatives still resent his past support of legalized abortion and gay rights, and his requirement that all Massachusetts residents obtain health insurance.
But they have failed to coalesce around a single alternative. Rep. Michele Bachmann briefly topped the polls, followed by Perry and then Cain. It’s unclear whether Cain can hold his position.
Some Iowa Republicans hope former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who emphasizes social conservative issues such as abortion and gay rights, can make a move. He has visited all 99 Iowa counties and aired radio commercials.
Other party insiders feel the person best poised to rise is Gingrich, the fiery Georgian who led the GOP’s 1994 takeover of the House (after 40 years in the minority). He eventually lost his leadership post and left the House after clashing with President Bill Clinton over taxes and an unpopular government showdown.
Gingrich is adding staff in key states, opening new offices this week and raising more money than he has in months.
With Romney widely seen as the front-runner in New Hampshire, a rival must do well in Iowa to surpass him. Gingrich is popular with many Iowa Republicans, and he drew good reviews for his speech at a large dinner in Des Moines last week.
But he has little structure in place for the organizationally intensive caucuses, which require people to show up for gatherings on a mid-winter night. Gingrich has not done much of the retail-level campaigning seen by past successful caucus candidates. His schedule in the next 10 days shows him visiting the state to promote a movie he produced with his wife and participate in a multi-candidate event aimed at social conservative activists
Gingrich has had no paid staff in Iowa since a mass exodus of his campaign team in June. He plans to name a staff and open campaign headquarters in Iowa soon,
“What I’m seeing now is a real surge of energy” for Gingrich, said supporter Linda Upmeyer, Iowa’s House majority leader. “The bright, shiny things have come and gone, and now people are focusing on a decision.”
A key question is whether Romney will see Cain’s and Perry’s problems as a chance to make a big push in Iowa. A win there would make him the prohibitive favorite. But to fare poorly after raising expectations would echo his disappointing Iowa performance four years ago.
Romney has made only four public visits to Iowa this year. But a small core of advisers and staff keeps in close touch with key elements of the Iowa network he assembled in 2007.
Romney has phoned activists and held multiple question-and-answer conference calls that included thousands of potential voters. He has been the most consistent poll leader in Iowa without pulling away. The Des Moines Register’s late-October survey showed Romney with 22 percent, narrowly trailing Cain.
Romney has a healthy contingent of precinct-level caucus leaders, an edge over many of his rivals. He has sponsored phone calls criticizing Perry’s position on immigration.
However, Romney has avoided multi-candidate forums in Iowa. He is not expected to participate in an event sponsored by a social conservative group in Des Moines on Nov. 19, or the evening fundraiser for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad the same evening. Several other candidates are expected at both events.
Bachmann had a bumpy day Thursday. About 30 Occupy Wall Street protesters loudly interrupted her foreign policy speech in Mount Pleasant, S.C., saying she was dividing the nation. Bachmann left the stage but returned and finished her speech after the protesters departed.
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Associated Press writers Kasie Hunt in Michigan, Shannon McCaffrey in Atlanta, Bruce Smith in South Carolina and Phil Elliott and Steve Peoples in Washington contributed to this report. Beaumont reported from Iowa.
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/politics/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111110/ap_on_el_ge/us_campaign_rdp
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