Newt Gingrich to quit race, endorse Romney

No surprise here...

Newt Gingrich is expected to suspend his presidential campaign within the next week and endorse former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a spokesman said..

Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said that Romney called the former House speaker this morning to say he would welcome his endorsement, should Gingrich choose to end his campaign.

The two campaigns are “working out the details” of the endorsement, Hammond said.

“Over the next few days we're going to look realistically at where we're at,” Gingrich said in a speech in Concord Tuesday night. He said he would assess the race “as somebody who's a unifier and somebody who's realistic.”

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Gingirch hints that the end may be near

WILMINGTON, Del. -- The future of Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign seems to hinge on the Delaware primary early next week.

"Tuesday is a big day," a source close to the Gingrich campaign told NBC News. "Newt is just waiting to see what happens on Tuesday."
Up until now, Gingrich has promised to take his campaign all the way to the Republican convention in Tampa at the end of the summer, although the odds are not in his favor.

The former House speaker has been spending the majority of his time the past three weeks in the First State. Gingrich has made at least 12 campaign stops in Delaware thus far while the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, has held just one event there.

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Newt Gingrich sharply scales back campaign

Newt Gingrich, who once led the Republican presidential field only to see his standing diminished after a string of losses, will reduce his campaign schedule and lay off a third of his staff in a strategy shift that underscores his fading chances of claiming the party’s nomination.

The former House speaker has already replaced his top aide, Michael Krull, with Vince Haley, who had been deputy campaign manager and a policy adviser. Gingrich, who had pinned his hopes on a strong showing in the South but won only his home state of Georgia and neighboring South Carolina, will continue to visit primary states but will begin a post-primary strategy that zeroes in on the Republican National Convention, his aides said.

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Alabama and Mississippi may be last good chance to stop Romney

For Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, the Deep South primaries in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday will be a race for conservative primacy in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination. Unless one of them decisively puts the other away, however, Mitt Romney could be the big winner no matter where he finishes.

While Romney, the establishment front-runner, is counting on a growing sense of inevitability that he will be the nominee, Alabama and Mississippi are two of the last, best chances for Santorum and Gingrich to make their case against each other.

In temperament and tone, Ging­rich has an easier sell in the South: He can “talk Southern” in a way that Santorum can’t. But his personal baggage — a history of marital infidelity and two failed marriages — could be a significant stumbling block among the conservative, family-values voters who make up a large part of the two states’ electorates.

This is particularly true when that record is held up against Santorum’s personal story as a devoted husband and father of seven.

Gingrich has tried to cast Santorum as a bit player in the 1990s Republican revolution that Gingrich led, and in a region where unions are deeply unpopular, the Gingrich campaign has tried to cast Santorum as a pawn of big labor.

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GOP Establisment Rallies Against Gingrich

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The revenge of the Republican establishment is a sight to behold. From one corner to another, those who have tangled with Newt Gingrich, who feel aggrieved toward Newt Gingrich or who fear Newt Gingrich have amassed to stop him. They know how much harder it will be to do so if the former House speaker wins Florida on Tuesday.

The quintessential example of establishment angst came Thursday from Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Hours before Thursday’s GOP debate, he released a letter — circulated by Mitt Romney’s campaign — attacking Gingrich and pleading with Republican voters not to make him the party’s nominee. There is much rich history behind that letter.

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I have no dog in this fight. Both Romney and Gingrich are just slightly different examples of the Republican Party's own version of right wing statism. That said I find the battle enormously amusing. The establishment people are right of course. Gingrich can not win in the general election. His supporters are the same people who nominated Christine O'Donnell in Delaware back in 2010 throwing away a Senate seat that was a lock. They are violating the late Bill Buckley's very astute rule of politics... "You don't nominate the most conservative candidate. You nominate the most conservative candidate who can win."

Poll: Gingrich gains in GOP field but trails Obama badly

Newt Gingrich leads Mitt Romney among Republicans, but he is the weakest of the Republican candidates tested against President Obama, according to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday evening.

Gingrich leads Romney 37 percent to 28 percent nationally among registered Republicans likely to vote in the primaries; Rick Santorum is in third with 18 percent, and Ron Paul is fourth with 12 percent.

Gingrich has built its advantage by consolidating the heart and soul of the Republican Party: very conservative voters, the South and the Tea Party.

Though Gingrich is the preferred candidate of GOP primary voters, he performs the worst of all Republican candidates tested against Obama, including Santorum.

"Gingrich is Goldwater," said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff. "In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla."

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Romney campaign worries as polls show Gingrich pulling ahead in Florida and nationally

Multiple sources are reporting that the Romney camp is getting very nervous.  The most recent polls show Gingrich leading nationally by 4+ pts and by almost 8 pts in Florida.  Andrea Mitchell at NBC reported that there has been talk among GOP big shots of trying to "reinvent the smoke filled room" and presumably draft an acceptable moderate Republican if Romney loses in Florida.  There is real fear of what will happen if Gingrich is the nominee.  He has staked out positions so far to the social/neo-con right that the only way he could win the general election is if the vote is limited to members of Free Republic.

Gingrich makes play for gold vote

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Newt Gingrich has moved to capture some Republican voters who lean toward Ron Paul and other Republicans who were Jack Kemp followers by naming two gold bugs to the Gingrich future team of advisers.

The former House speaker says he intends to appoint investment banker Lewis E. Lehrman, famous in the Reagan era for his red suspenders and gold-standard advocacy, and Jim Grant, editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, as President Gingrich’s Gold Commission - if and when of course Mr. Gingrich wins both the Republican nomination and the general election in November.

Mr. Paul, a Texas congressman with a conservative libertarian world view, earlier had promised to appoint Mr. Grant as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

“It is a smart move to pitch both the Paul enthusiasts who may not think Paul has a chance and the Kempians,” conservative fundraiser Richard Norman told The Washington Times.

“Kemp and Paul are about as far apart as you can get but the one thing that unites them is a return to the gold standard.”

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That's nice.  But what Newt is selling I'm not buying.  Gingrich is a quasi fascist imperialist whose idea about respect for the rule of law is jailing judges he doesn't agree with.  Moving on.

Ron Paul has my vote, even if I have to write it in.

Gingrich Stuns Romney in South Carolina

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) won a stunning come-from-behind victory in the South Carolina presidential primary on Saturday, using hard-edged debate performances to vault over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

Polls closed at 7 p.m., and Gingrich was leading Romney in the earliest official returns. Exit polls made it clear that he would go on to defeat Romney — a win that will profoundly re-shape a nominating contest that, a week ago, seemed to be almost over.

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GOP In Upheaval: Perry quits - endorses Gingrich, Santorum won in Iowa, Gingrich's ex-wife makes salacious accusations

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Republican presidential contest took a series of unexpected twists Thursday as Texas Gov. Rick Perry quit the race and endorsed Newt Gingrich, while officials in Iowa declared that former senator Rick Santorum had in fact won more votes than front-runner Mitt Romney in the caucuses there two weeks earlier.

The developments struck a blow to Romney, who just days ago appeared poised to lock up the Republican nomination by the end of the month. But on the morning of a potentially decisive debate in Charleston, the race was suddenly in flux. Gingrich seemed to be enjoying a sudden burst of momentum — drawing huge crowds, getting new endorsements and ticking upward in multiple polls — while Santorum laid claim to the Iowa caucuses as a victory.

But Gingrich faced his own setback Thursday after his former wife, Marianne, gave an interview to The Washington Post describing her husband’s infidelity. He is also expected to release his tax returns later Thursday, a move designed to pressure Romney to release his own, which Romney has said he will not do until April.

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See more on Santorum's Iowa win here.  Read the story on Gingrich's ex-wife here (caution: salacious details).

Gingrich hints at support for gold standard

The boss, who’s something of a gold standard enthusiast, is excited: Newt Gingrich called this morning for a Gold Commission, like the one Ronald Reagan set up in 1981, to consider how to get back to hard money (and perhaps to gold). Here’s video of Gingrich speaking in Columbia, S.C., at a foreign policy forum sponsored by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. (The text is below.)

“We need to get our house in order. And we need to vaccinate ourselves against foreign contagion. The correct answer to the Euro is not to spend more American money propping up the Germans who prop up Southern Europe. The correct answer is to figure how we seal our banks off; how we make sure we protect ourselves and then say to the Europeans: you have a problem and you need to solve it.

“Part of our approach ought to be to reestablish something Ronald Reagan did in 1981 and that is to have a Commission on Gold to look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.

“We need to repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. We need to say to the Federal Reserve: your only job is to maintain the stability of the dollar because we want a dollar to be worth thirty years from now what it is worth now because that optimizes saving and investment because people know what they are going to back.

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