Gingrich’s charges will be amplified in South Carolina, the next primary state, with a 30-minute, independently produced television advertisement bought by a political action committee run by his former aides called “Winning Our Future” and funded by supporters, according to Rick Tyler, an adviser to the PAC and onetime Gingrich campaign spokesman. The trailer for the ad posted on a website calls Romney a “corporate raider” and says he’s akin to others on Wall Street motivated primarily by greed.
The Gingrich attack, echoed during the weekend by other Republican candidates, marks the first time the field of a half- dozen contenders has taken aim at him on this issue. Romney, who also sought the nomination in 2008, won the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses by eight votes and is favored to win in New Hampshire.
Firing People
Romney, speaking to business leaders in Nashua, New Hampshire, this morning, extolled the virtues of the free market, in a comment likely to be seized upon by his opponents.
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” he said, speaking about the need to change the delivery of health care in the U.S. “If someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”
Gingrich is seeking to stop Romney’s momentum before the primaries in South Carolina on Jan. 21 and Florida on Jan. 31. Enhancing the Gingrich-aligned PAC’s ability to run the ad is a $5 million donation to Winning Our Future from Sheldon Adelson, a longtime supporter of the former speaker. That contribution was confirmed yesterday, on condition of anonymity, by a person close to Adelson, chairman of Las Vegas Sands Corp.
Tyler said no date has been scheduled for when the attack ad will run in South Carolina.
‘Corporate Mugger’
“Mitt Romney is not a capitalist,” Tyler said of the former private-equity executive and onetime Massachusetts governor. “He is a predatory corporate mugger. If you ever wonder why so many manufacturing jobs are overseas, you need to look no further than Mitt Romney. He can claim thousands of jobs created, only those jobs were created in Mexico and Southeast Asia.”
Adelson was the biggest donor to Gingrich’s former political committee, American Solutions for Winning the Future, contributing $7 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group. He already gave the maximum $2,500 to Gingrich’s presidential campaign.
Loading...
Comments