EXCLUSIVE – PAUL VIDEO BLISTERS GINGRICH FOR “SELLING ACCESS”: Ron Paul continues to intensify his attack on Newt Gingrich, releasing another two-minute web video this morning that seeks to define the former House Speaker as a corrupt Washington insider who got rich by “selling access.” The fast-paced video, which will be pushed hard on conservative web sites this week, includes a clip of Gingrich calling himself “an insider” and another in which he mind-bogglingly brags about getting paid $60,000-a-speech. The video comes on the heels of the Paul campaign’s decision to expand the buy size for their first, 60-second Gingrich takedown in Iowa and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney's campaign just launched unreliableleader.com to highlight Newt's breaks with conservative orthodoxy: http://unreliableleader.com/. Watch the Paul video: http://bit.ly/tcKufR.
Hohmann continues [emphasis added]:
USA TODAY - "GINGRICH SLAMMED '96 RIVAL ON CHILD LABOR": "Before Newt Gingrich questioned the validity of child labor laws, he used them to attack an opponent," Jackie Kucinich writes in what is likely a rival campaign's quick-hit oppo dump. "...in a 1996 ad titled 'Cookie,' Gingrich slammed his then-congressional opponent, Michael Coles, former CEO of Great American Cookie Co., as an 'unscrupulous businessman' partly because of a 1993 violation of child labor laws and accused him of using children 'for hazardous labor,' according to a transcript of the ad in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution." http://usat.ly/vD4N3f
Team Romney is also going after Gingrich's desciption of Palestinians as an "invented" people. Scott Conroy writes at RealClearPolitics:
In addressing Gingrich’s comments, Romney said that while he agreed with most of what his opponent had said, he took issue with Gingrich’s eagerness to throw “incendiary words into a place which is a boiling pot.”
In language that seemed to imply Gingrich is a loose cannon, Romney added, “I will exercise sobriety, care, stability and make sure that in a setting like this, anything I say that can affect a place with rockets going in, with people dying, I don't do anything that would harm that process.”
In the spin room following the debate, Team Romney turned up the heat with some of the most eviscerating language that a campaign aide has leveled against a GOP foe in the primary fight thus far.
Romney spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom called Gingrich’s remarks “tremendously destructive to a negotiated settlement” in the Middle East and said that he was “astounded that Newt Gingrich stood by his incendiary comments.”
“You heard Mitt Romney say, ‘I’m not a bomb-thrower.’ Newt Gingrich clearly is,” Fehrnstrom added. “He comes across as the Foghorn Leghorn of politics -- very loud, very brash, and very sure of himself, even when he’s wrong.”
