Romney, Gingrich focus on Obama
CHARLESTON, S.C. – With dueling appearances on Sunday news shows, Republican rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich sought to rebut attacks on their private-sector experience but refrained from criticizing each other, instead focusing on their plans to unravel President Barack Obama’s policies if elected to the White House.
Though Gingrich still leads Romney in many national polls, the former Massachusetts governor has gained significant new support in two early voting states. He landed the endorsement of the influential Des Moines Register on Saturday, a day after winning the backing of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, and former Republican nominee Bob Dole endorsed him Sunday in an open letter to Iowans.
In Sunday’s appearance, Romney avoided the attacks on Gingrich that he unleashed last week, instead skewering Obama’s leadership style.
“His great failing is that he does not understand how this economy works,” Romney said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I do know how this economy works and my policies are designed to get people what they desperately want.”
Repeatedly stating that he was in the race to help middle-class Americans, Romney said he was prepared for Obama to use his work at Bain Capital to paint him as a “fat cat.”
“Of course he will, in part because he’s been the great divider,” he told host Chris Wallace. “This is a president who goes after anybody who is successful, and by the way, he’s pretty successful too.”
Romney has come under fire for his work at Bain, a private equity firm that acquired more than 100 companies during his 15 years at the helm, sometimes slashing thousands of jobs and driving companies deep into debt as it sought to make profits for investors.
On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Gingrich expressed some regret for his campaign’s handling of his own private-sector controversy: the disclosure that his firm was paid $1.6 million for advising Freddie Mac, the quasi-governmental mortgage giant many Republicans blame for triggering the housing collapse.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page chided the former House speaker for his “lack of candor” about his work for Freddie Mac.
Gingrich told host Bob Schieffer “that we earned that editorial” by failing to give a full accounting of his work for Freddie Mac “from day one.”
Romney criticized the president’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq by the end of this year.
Romney would not say whether, in hindsight, he would have made the same decision as President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Gingrich, by contrast, noted that he had said as early as 2003 that the U.S. “had gone off a cliff” by engaging in Iraq.
“I think we are going to find to our great sadness that we’ve lost several thousand young Americans and had many thousand more wounded undertaking a project that we couldn’t do,” Gingrich said Sunday.