MERRIMACK, N.H. – Newt Gingrich today declined to criticize Mitt Romney as others have for saying “I like being able to fire people," but pressed ahead with attacks on Romney’s leadership at investment firm Bain Capital and said he is more electable than Rick Santorum.
Outside a polling place for today’s New Hampshire primary, Gingrich said Romney’s comment was “taken out of context.”
Romney made the comment Monday morning when talking about wanting to have competition in the health insurance market and allow people to fire providers they do not like. Democrats and others have seized on the comment to argue Romney is heartless.
“I don’t think he likes to fire people,” Gingrich said. “It’s just consumer choice and the free market, and I think he just used bad language.”
Gingrich was hardly backing off his escalating attacks on the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Chatting with reporters on the campaign’s press bus, Gingrich said Bain Capital is fair game for dissection and criticism, and he intends to lead the charge.
“I do have some real questions if the investors took all the money, and the employees took all the losses,” Gingrich said.
The former U.S. House Speaker from Georgia did not call for additional government regulation in the area, only saying that it was a “judgment question” about Romney as he plays up his private sector experience at Bain as part of his resume.
The Romney campaign and many Republicans have pushed back against the Bain talk as an attack on the free market itself. Gingrich disputed that notion, saying failed investments are fine, but when the investor profits while the business goes bankrupt – as media reports found in some instances with Bain – criticism is warranted.
“You can’t blindly salute every possible behavior by every businessman in the country and say, gosh, if you’re critical of somebody you’re somehow anti-capitalist,” Gingrich said.
He also opened a new front of criticism against Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania who is competing with Gingrich for conservative anti-Romney votes. The two have saved their fire for Romney rather than each other thus far, but Gingrich said as the campaign moves to South Carolina he plans to make the case that he is more electable than his former congressional colleague.
Gingrich cited his work in helping coordinate Republican gains in Congress in 1980 and 1994.
“There’s a clear distinction with, say, Santorum," Gingrich said. "It is that I actually know how to build a nationwide campaign and he lost Pennsylvania by the largest margin of any senator in the history of the state” in 2006.
As he heads to campaign in Georgia neighbor South Carolina, Gingrich said it sets up as a fight between a “Georgia conservative and a Massachusetts moderate” – a twist on his “Reagan conservative” stump line.
“It’s very helpful,” Gingrich said when asked if being next door to Georgia matters. “We have a lot of folks who are going to be volunteering and working. My younger daughter went to Presbyterian [College] in South Carolina, and we have a lot of friends there.”
Gingrich’s wife, Callista, also made a rare appearance before the press, though she is a near-constant presence at her husband’s side on the campaign trail. She said she plans to do more speaking of her own: "I enjoy it very much and I anticipate doing more of it," she said.
Asked whether her mind wanders at all when hearing the same speech again and again from her husband, Callista quipped, “I hang on his every word.”
Newt Gingrich laughed and added, “Some of those speeches she thinks may be slightly longer than needed.”
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