Romney accuses Gingrich of pandering to Florida’s Latino voters on immigration

MIAMI — Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney accused his chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich, of pandering to Florida’s Latino voters by mocking Romney’s stance on immigration in an appearance earlier Wednesday.

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney takes the stage at Univision's "Meet the Candidates" forum in Miami, Jan. 25, 2012. (Brian Snyder - Reuters)

Romney struck back at Gingrich on a day when both candidates spent much of the day in Miami, speaking at events designed to appeal to the state’s large Latino community.

Romney spoke at the same candidate forum sponsored by Univision television where Gingrich had earlier in the day accused Romney of living in a “fantasy land” for suggesting in a debate last week that illegal immigrants would “self deport” — voluntarily return to their home countries — if the United States made it difficult enough for them to get work in this country.

“Unfortunately for him, these are things he’s already spoken out about, and he’s spoken out about in favor,” Romney said, referring to an earlier comment from Gingrich’s spokesman that also suggested that immigrants might “self-deport.”

“Now, I recognized that that it’s very tempting to come into an audience like this and to pander to the audience and say what you hope people will want to hear,” Romney told Univision host Jorge Ramos. “But frankly, I think that’s unbecoming of a presidential candidate.”

On Wednesday, Romney’s campaign released a new Spanish language ad, in which he accused Gingrich of not being the Reagan conservative he claims. The ad criticizes Gingrich for a consulting contract with Freddie Mac and indicating he would not reverse an Obama policy allowing easier travel to Cuba for family members of Cubans.

“Reagan definitely would have never offended us, Hispanics, as Gingrich did by saying that Spanish is the language of the ghetto,” the ad concludes, referring to a 2007 remark by Gingrich for which he later apologized.

The back-and-forth was a demonstration of the importance of the growing Hispanic vote and particularly the Cuban-American community, traditionally a key Republican constituency in Florida.

Like Gingrich earlier in the day, Romney offered tough talk against Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro at a speech organized by the US-Cuba Democracy PAC.

“If I’m fortunate enough to become the next president of the United States, it is my expectation that Fidel Castro will finally be taken off this planet,” Romney said. “We have to be prepared. This is the time, in the next president’s first or second term, it is time for us to strike for freedom in Cuba, and I will do so as president.”

Romney also promised to create a new office to improve trade with Latin America, and at the Univision forum, joked with Ramos about his own roots.

“I don’t think people would think I was being honest with them if I said to them I was Mexican American,” Romney said in response to about whether he could claim the title because his American father was born in Mexico. “But I would appreciate it if you’d get that word out.”

But under tougher questioning from Jorge Ramos, Romney insisted that he is not “anti-immigrant” — as Gingrich has suggested — and nor does he have no compassion for those who come here illegally, particularly children who are brought to this country illegally by their parents.

He did not budge from his opposition, however, to allowing any illegal immigrants a new path to legal residency — as Gingrich supports for some longtime residents.

“You severely sanction employers who hire people who have not legal documentation and legal basis to be here. On that basis over time people will find it less attractive to be here, if they can’t find work here,” he said, explaining his position. “Some refer to that as self-deportation. and what it says is that I’m not in favor of going around the country, trying to round people up and put them in buses and take them across the border.”

He also did not back off his opposition to the Dream Act, which would allow some such children a path to citizenship through college.

“I’m not punishing her,” Romney said, when asked by Ramos why he would punish a 10-year-old girl from Peru who wants to go college and cannot afford it. “She can go to college. There’s no requirement that she goes to a college that provides an instate tuition break….There are many colleges in the United States and there are some that are relatively inexpensive. One can go to a college that’s not as expensive as others.

I’m not sure what the price is here in Miami-Dade, but my guess is it’s not terribly exorbitant.”

Those comments injected a touch of awkwardness into the exchange, as they came not long after Romney faced pointed questions from Ramos about his own personal wealth.

“How much money do you have?” Ramos asked him point blank.

“You tell me, and I’ll tell you,” Romney at first joked, before acknowledging that as a presidential candidate, he was required months ago to disclose information about his finances.

“I think the estimate in there is a pretty wide range, it’s been widely reported. My net worth is within that number,” Romney said.

When Ramos pressed him again, he acknowledged: “It’s between 150 and about 200 and some odd million dollars. I think that’s what the estimates are.”

While the figures have been widely reported — Romney reported in his August financial disclosure that his net worth is between $190 and $250 million — but it’s unusual to hear Romney himself peg his personal fortune. He went on to note that he didn’t inherit money from his parents but instead earned it through his own business success.

He also defended his tax rate — less than 15 percent — a low rate possible because most of his money in the last two years came through investments, which are taxed at a lower rate than wages.

“One of the reasons that we have a lower tax rate on capital gains, is that capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level, so as businesses earn profits, that’s being taxed at 35 percent,” he said, before pivoting to an explanation of his own tax plan, under which those who make less than $200,000 would pay no taxes on their own investments.

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Newt Gingrich defies conventional wisdom about women voters

Newt Gingrich is a ladies’ man.

That is, he kicked butt, to use rival Rick Santorum’s phrase, among women voters in South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary. That was one of the biggest surprises of the evening, because women voters were widely expected to turn away from Gingrich.

“Republican women don’t vote for cheaters, period,” one Republican strategist in Washington said in an interview a few days before the South Carolina primary. The strategist, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, echoed long-held conventional wisdom and years of electoral results showing that women, in particular, are less likely to vote for political candidates with a history of marital infidelity.

Gingrich has faced a gender gap for much of the election cycle, and he attracted significantly weaker support among women than men as recently as early last week in South Carolina. Most analysts attributed this to his tumultuous personal life, which includes three marriages and multiple extra-marital affairs, including one, during his second marriage and while he was House speaker, with the woman, Callista Bisek, who
Republican U.S. presidential candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich celebrates backstage with his wife. Callista, and his supporters after his speech at his South Carolina Primary election night rally in Columbia, S.C. (Eric Thayer - Reuters) became his third wife.

Voters were reminded of that personal history just a few days before the primary, when a sensational interview aired on ABC with Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, in which she accused Gingrich of asking her for an “open marriage” during the 1990s. The interview only heightened the expectation that Gingrich would not do well among women voters.

But something else entirely happened Saturday night in South Carolina: According to exit polls, Gingrich got nearly as much support from women as men. He won among married women, single women and evangelical women .He did beat other candidates by a somewhat larger margin among men, but he was tops among women as well, including 41 to 28 percent win over Romney among married women.

These results not only shed light on how Gingrich prevailed so widely in South Carolina; they also suggest that Gingrich may have dispensed with a topic long thought to be a huge weakness for him. That possibility may also force a rethinking by allies of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who have been attacking Gingrich on the issue of character for weeks.

Gingrich advisers interviewed Sunday said several factors likely played into Gingrich’s surge among women in South Carolina. First was the fact that Gingrich’s infidelity is old news for which Gingrich has repeatedly apologized. According to senior strategist Kevin Kellems, the very voters likely to hold infidelity against a candidate are the same voters more likely to consider forgiveness if they view the person as genuinely repentant.

“Everybody who’s watched us knows I am a 68-year-old grandfather,” Gingrich said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday. “ I have done things in my life that I regret, and I have had to go to God for forgiveness and reconciliation, but I have a great relationship with my wife, a great relationship with my children, a great relationship with my grandchildren, and at 68 I think I am the person best prepared to know how to get this country back on the right track.”

Lastly, Gingrich successfully changed the direction of the story by turning it into a referendum on the media, which he blamed for raising the topic of his marriages. He did so most notably in a feisty debate exchange Thursday in North Charleston, when Gingrich called CNN’s John King “despicable” for opening the debate with a question about Marianne Gingrich.

Republican women my colleague Melinda Henneberger interviewed in South Carolina on Friday morning were, she reported, even more supportive than men she interviewed of Gingrich’s handling of that debate question, saying it had only increased their admiration for him.

And Gingrich continued his attack on the media during his election-night speech in Columbia Saturday night and again Sunday on the national talk show circuit — a strong clue that he views it as a winning strategy and will keep talking about it in Florida in the coming days.

His team is also preparing — even looking forward to — the possibility that Romney’s allies will continue to hit him on character issues, a topic they believe will backfire.

U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, for instance, a Romney supporter from Utah, went directly after Gingrich over character and family values on Sunday. “If we put up anything less than a Boy Scout, we’re gonna be in trouble,” he said. “You can’t cede strong family values to the Democrats. That’s supposed to be one of our hallmarks.”

“I don’t believe that voters in Florida will find that media bias trumps serial philandering,” he added. “I think when the reality of that question settles in for conservatives, they’re not going to stand for somebody who’s had trouble in these areas. I really don’t. I think voters in a rational moment will see how devastating and stupid that would be to hand that card to Barack Obama.”

Gingrich’s team said they welcome such attacks because they aren’t working.

“You had a 28-point turnaround in South Carolina,” said Rick Tyler, a spokesman for a pro-Gingrich super PAC. “It was just one attack ad after the next on TV. In politics, there’s reality, and there’s perception, and they missed both.”

Amy Gardner is a national political reporter for The Washington Post covering the 2012 Republican presidential field. Follow her on Twitter at @AmyEGardner.

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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.

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GOP hopefuls rally S.C. voters a day before crucial primary

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GOP hopefuls rally S.C. voters a day before crucial primaryView Photo Gallery — ?A look at each Republican contender’s best leadership attribute.

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Philip Rucker, Dan Balz and William Branigin,

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Republican presidential contenders fanned out Friday across South Carolina on the last full day of campaigning before a primary that could solidify Mitt Romney’s front-runner status — or leave it up for grabs.

With polls showing former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) gaining ground on the former Massachusetts governor in the Palmetto State, the four remaining candidates in the race for the GOP presidential nomination sought to rally supporters at a series of whirlwind stops a day after clashing sharply in a debate here.

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Romney picked up the endorsement Friday of Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, who planned to join the candidate at a Charleston rally later in the day. Romney also planned campaign stops Friday in other parts of the state.

Gingrich scheduled half a dozen campaign appearances across South Carolina, notably in the Charleston area, while former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) and Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) were seeking to rally voters in the face of what polls showed to be an uphill battle for them in the state.

Republican politicians and their conservative allies, meanwhile, took aim at debate moderator John King of CNN for an opening question to Gingrich about his ex-wife’s public assertion that he had wanted an “open marriage” before their divorce in 2000. They charged that the question showed media bias against Gingrich and may have galvanized some last-minute support for him.

The latest polls out of South Carolina show Gingrich surging in advance of Saturday’s primary, with automated polls conducted Wednesday and Thursday putting him even with, or ahead of, Romney. One survey, an NBC News/Marist poll released Thursday, showed a sharp tightening of the race following a debate on Monday.

In Washington, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a leader of tea party conservatives, called the primary “clearly a two-man race” at this point between Romney and Gingrich. In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” he maintained his refusal to endorse any of the candidates, although he supported Romney in 2008.

Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) also declared that “it’s a two-person race” headed for a “photo-finish.” He said on morning news programs that he still has not decided which of the two to support in Saturday’s primary. “My decision will happen at the ballot box,” he said on CNN.

Friday’s barnstorming followed a series of fast-paced and unexpected events Thursday that shook the candidates and their campaigns, significantly changing the dynamic of presidential race ahead of a primary that many thought might settle the nomination.

It was a day of split-screen viewing and almost hourly recalibration. Iowa Republicans declared former senator Santorum the new winner of their Jan. 3 caucuses, erasing Romney’s eight-vote victory. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who had one of the largest donor networks of any candidate, quit the race and endorsed former Gingrich, who was gaining momentum but faced new challenges over his ex-wife’s accusations.

And the second candidate debate in four days, this time with just four contenders onstage and with more at stake than in any of the previous forums, featured sharp clashes over who has the temperament, character and know-how to lead the party into a general election.

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What do voters know about the GOP field? Very little.

???initialComments:true! pubdate:01/13/2012 14:04 EST! commentPeriod:14! commentEndDate:1/27/12 2:4 EST! currentDate:1/14/12 6:0 EST! allowComments:true! displayComments:true!Posted by Chris Cillizza at 02:04 PM ET, 01/13/2012

A new Pew Research Center poll suggests that most voters have little idea about even the most basic facts regarding the backgrounds of the men seeking the Republican presidential nomination this year.

Bored girl in classroom with stack of books (Jupiterimages - GETTY IMAGES/BRAND X) Pew asked registered voters four questions: 1) “Which candidate served as the speaker of the House” 2) “Mitt Romney was the governor of ___” 3) “After Iowa and New Hampshire, the next primary is in ____” 4) “Which GOP candidate opposes U.S. involvement in Afghanistan”

Pretty basic stuff right? Um, no.

Just 43 percent of all registered voters — these people are actually registered to vote — got at least three of those questions right. Forty eight percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters got three right — not surprising given that the questions were GOP-focused — while 41 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaning independents knew the answers to at least three questions.

The data for individual questions is no less revealing/depressing. Just 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters were aware that Romney had served as governor of Massachusetts. (Come on people!) Half of Republicans didn’t know that South Carolina is the next state to vote after Iowa and New Hampshire (Shedding a tear...); a bare majority (51 percent) knew that Texas Rep. Ron Paul was the candidate in the field who opposes U.S. involvement in Afghanistan (Slightly more understandable).

Young people — stunner! — were the least informed about the candidates. Just 40 percent of registered voters aged 18-29 knew that Newt Gingrich was the speaker of the House — and that was the best that age group did on any of the four questions! Only 32 percent knew Romney had served as governor of Massachusetts and less than one in four (24 percent) knew South Carolina was the next state to vote after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Sigh. (Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised given how Jay Leno has built an entire segment around how little the American public knows about, well, anything.)

What the Pew numbers should do is serve as a reminder for all political analysts and political junkies that not everyone — in fact, almost no one — is like us.

The average voter is a low-information decider, making his or her choices about candidates based on often times incomplete or just plain wrong facts.

The analysis of political races — from the presidential race on down — often assumes a level of involvement and information that the average voter simply lacks.

Humbling? Yes. Important to remember when talking about how voters think and who they will ultimately choose? Yes.

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