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Friday, February 17, 2012

Voters say they opted for Gingrich’s ‘guts’

Many voters said they liked the scrap in the former House speaker’s personality — his willingness to seek confrontations with his GOP rivals and the news media. That, they said, was what the GOP would need in the race against President Obama this fall.

“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” said Harold Wade, 85, leaving a polling place in this picturesque seaside suburb outside Charleston. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.”

And Gingrich, he said, was the only one mean enough.

“What we need is someone who’s got some brains,” Wade said, explaining his vote for the former speaker. “And we need someone with some guts.”

Surveys of voters at South Carolina polling places showed the roots of Gingrich’s resurgence. About two-thirds of voters said recent debates — in which Gingrich stood out, partly by blasting debate moderators for their questions — were the most important thing in their voting decision, or one of several important factors.

Equally important may have been what Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, didn’t do this week. Weeks ago, back in Iowa, Romney’s campaign and supporters had crushed a Gingrich surge with ads that cast the former speaker as an unreliable conservative.

This time around, Romney’s supporters were slower to react. His campaign highlighted Gingrich’s 1997 reprimand for violating House ethics rules, and it rolled out legislators who said Gingrich had supported “earmarks” and pork-barrel spending.

But they may have waited too long.

Early last week, before those debates, polls showed Romney with about a 10-point lead in South Carolina. It seemed that this primary would be the beginning of a Romney cakewalk, and the beginning of Gingrich’s end.

Way back then, both Edmund Hardy and George McCutchen had sent in absentee ballots for Romney. On Saturday, they were still happy with that choice.

“I like Newt, and I would love to see him in a Cabinet position” said Hardy, 72. “He’s a bright guy.” But he thought the former speaker carried too much political baggage to win.

McCutchen, 67, said that one of the main reasons he voted for Romney was that he wanted to “speed this process up and have it come to a conclusion.”

“I hate what’s going on,” Hardy said. Both were still dressed in camouflage from a morning of duck hunting, digging into plates of pork at a barbecue restaurant called Sweatman’s in Holly Hills, S.C.

“The way they are beating each other up,” said McCutchen, “it opens wounds and unearths where the vulnerabilities are.”

Gingrich had done a good deal of that beating-up. He criticized Romney for not releasing his tax returns, arguing that “if there’s anything in there that is going to help us lose the election, we should know it before the nomination.”

And, for many in South Carolina, here was a signal of something important. Gingrich looked a man who was tough enough to win.

“We want someone who could beat Obama, and I think that’s Newt. He can handle him. Looking at Newt in the debates, he can handle anybody,” said Debbie Peterson of Piedmont. “I have a little bit of a problem with the divorces, but I need somebody to beat Obama. I like Romney, he is decent and moral, but I just don’t see him beating Obama.

“So it’s got to be Newt,” she said.

In Sullivan’s Island, E.P. Chiola had been for a third candidate — former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.). But then he thought about the battle ahead.

And he, too, turned to Gingrich.

“The more I thought about it, the more I decided I’m looking for a good fight,” Chiola said.

Romney, by contrast, spent the week fumbling to answer questions about his wealth and his tax returns. Some voters paid no mind to Romney’s troubles: Michael and Elizabeth Ricciardone of Mount Pleasant, S.C., said they still liked Romney’s business know-how and his steady character. They both voted for Romney on Saturday.

“It’s okay to be successful in this country. Redistribution of wealth is not in my vocabulary,” he said.

But others felt turned off.

“He’s too slick for me. Too polished,” said Jim Near, 56, a real estate agent and meteorologist from Mount Pleasant. “We all pay taxes. There should be no issue there. His responses were no good.”

He decided that Gingrich wouldn’t work, either: he had too much political baggage and that Santorum lacked the support to take the nomination. So, if Near couldn’t pick a candidate who would win, he would pick at least pick one he thought was leveling with him.

“Ron Paul seems the most honest. He’s not trying to portray himself as anything other than who he is,” Near said.

Staff writers Karen Tumulty, Philip Rucker, Nia-Malika Henderson and Jason Horowitz, all in South Carolina, contributed to this report.

View the original article here

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Newt Gingrich’s lambasting of John King follows a popular line among Republicans

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Newt Gingrich’s lambasting of John King follows a popular line among Republicans

View Photo Gallery — ?The CNN correspondent hosts his own political program and has moderated numerous debates.

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Paul Farhi,

Did John King blow it?

The CNN host stepped on a land mine named Newt Gingrich when he opened Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate by asking him about his second ex-wife’s allegation that he suggested she accept his affair as part of their marriage.

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Gingrich’s now-famous response practically blew back King’s hair. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office,” he said to thunderous applause during the forum in Charleston, S.C. “And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.”

To even more enthusiastic applause, the former House speaker added, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

Gingrich’s shoot-the-messenger answer may be one of the most memorable moments of the campaign and a potential boost for his candidacy against front-runner Mitt Romney.

Question is: Did King — an experienced and able journalist — do Gingrich a favor by starting the debate with such an indelicately posed question on such a delicate issue? And was he prepared with a follow up once Gingrich got rolling?

In the face of Gingrich’s initial blast, King could only offer that the allegations about Gingrich “did not come from our network.” (The Washington Post and ABC News were the initial sources of the report.) That allowed Gingrich to up the ante and scold King further: ”Don’t try to blame somebody else.”

In post-debate comments, King seemed to have few regrets. “I understood that if I asked the question, he was not going to be happy with it, and he was going to turn on me. Knew that coming in,” he said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper immediately afterward. (King was unavailable for an interview Friday.) “This is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It was my judgment, my decision and mine alone. If we’re going to deal with it, let’s deal with it upfront, let’s not try to sneak it into the middle of the debate somewhere.”

King didn’t back down Friday night in a segment of “John King, USA,” the daily CNN show he began hosting in 2009, a dozen years after arriving at the network and quickly rising to senior White House correspondent.

“I was doing my job as I see it, and [Gingrich] was doing his,” said King, 48. “I take no offense in him turning on me.” He also ran a series of clips of Gingrich attacking the media, adding, “Let’s not ignore the obvious and time-tested calculation in the Speaker’s response.”

But maybe it wasn’t that simple. Some observers found flaws in King’s approach.

“Gingrich was clearly waiting for the question, clearly was prepared to pounce,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a communications professor and media historian at American University. “King seemed taken off guard. He looked a little sickened. And he did himself no favors by lamely pointing out that it wasn’t CNN but another network that dug out the Gingrich-infidelity story. That allowed Gingrich to pounce again.”

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