MILLSBORO, Del. -- Newt Gingrich doesn’t talk about being president anymore.
He remains, technically, a candidate for the office, traveling the country with a scaled-back coterie of aides and Secret Service agents. But instead of making White House plans, the former U.S. House speaker from Georgia talks of crafting a conservative Republican Party platform at the August GOP convention in Tampa.
The platform, in Gingrich’s mind, helps pull presumptive nominee Mitt Romney to the right and helps define a better contrast against President Barack Obama in the fall. Gingrich plans to unveil a list of platform planks -- mostly mirroring his own campaign themes such as domestic energy production -- next week and spend his time on the campaign trail advocating for them.
“With your help we can force Romney to choose between being ‘severely conservative,’ as he put it, and being an Etch-a-Sketch,” Gingrich said, referencing a recent comment by a Romney adviser comparing the general election to a toy that can be shaken up to erase a drawing.
"And I think it's really, really important that we have a platform that is an intelligent 21st century conservative platform and is unambiguously committed to conservative principles. And with your help, Callista [Gingrich's wife] and I will fight all the way to Tampa to make that happen."
It’s a long way from earlier speeches in which Gingrich described a slew of actions he would take in his first hours in the White House, but he still intends to remain a candidate for president going into the convention.
When asked directly by a reporter in Millsboro whether this means Romney is the certain nominee, Gingrich replied: “No. I'm saying part of the debate for the next two months ought to be is he prepared to say up front he wants a conservative platform or are his consultants going to convince him to say, ‘Oh no, no, no, don't be for anything.’ ”
Gingrich has long said he will not back out of the race and endorse Romney until the former Massachusetts governor clinches the required 1,144 convention delegates for the nomination. As long as former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania stays in the race, that day probably will not arrive until late June at the earliest, given the nature of Republicans’ proportional delegate allocation. Romney has an all but insurmountable lead at this point, but Santorum and Gingrich have said they want to provoke a nomination fight on the floor if Romney cannot win on the first ballot.
That talk from Gingrich has waned in recent days as he has become an increasingly irrelevant figure to the race. His only two victories have come in Georgia and South Carolina, and he has not even gotten the minimum vote share to earn proportional delegates -- usually 20 percent -- since the March 13 contests in Alabama and Mississippi. On Tuesday, Gingrich finished behind U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas in Wisconsin and the District of Columbia and narrowly beat Paul in Maryland.
As a result, Gingrich is struggling to raise money and has cut back on staff and travel, and Fox News and CNN recently stopped covering all his events.
Matt Towery, who runs the InsiderAdvantage Georgia polling firm and is a former Gingrich aide, said he worries Gingrich is losing his clout by staying in the race and compared him to Paul, who similarly is continuing for reasons other than winning the nomination.
“The one thing I don’t want to see for Newt Gingrich is for him to lose the clout that he has, which I think is considerable, and lose it and see it diminished with these continued 10 percent, 9 percent, whatever results,” Towery said.
Gingrich continues to talk about picking up delegates in places such as Delaware, where he is spending considerable time ahead of the state’s April 24 primary. He hopes to find support in the conservative rural areas, and he drew crowds of 150 and 300 in the small towns of Magnolia and Millsboro on Thursday. He also continues to court unpledged delegates, whose votes are not tied to state primary outcomes.
According to an Associated Press tally, Romney leads with 655 delegates, followed by Santorum with 278, Gingrich with 135 and Paul with 51.
“The reason to stay in the race as a candidate would be to use your delegates as leverage,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. “But you need to have a bloc of delegates to use as leverage for that to be a credible path.”
Leading Republicans are increasingly calling for an end to the primary season. Romney himself is mostly ignoring his GOP rivals and focusing his campaign on Obama: Their fiery dueling speeches on consecutive days to the Associated Press newspaper editors’ convention in Washington this week were widely viewed as the start of the general election campaign.
Not for Gingrich. In Millsboro on Thursday he mentioned, as he often does, the drawn-out 2008 primary battle between Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton that ended up helping Democrats that fall. He continues to needle Romney for his ties to Wall Street and policy flip-flops.
But instead of talking about beating Romney, Gingrich talks about holding him to conservative principles. This allows Gingrich to spin his continued presence in the race as a positive for the party -- pushing important ideas rather than trashing the all-but-certain nominee. In speeches Thursday he discussed a few of his planks:
- Increase domestic exploration of oil offshore and on federal land, with royalties used to help pay down the national debt.
- Commit to return specific federal powers to the states.
- Manage the federal bureaucracy like a business.
- Increase brain science research through a public-private partnership at the National Institutes of Health, a new addition to Gingrich's speeches that he called the "most controversial" part of his platform.
Ayres was skeptical of the notion that the platform will matter.
“The platform in some ways is the written statement of where a party stands," he said, "but most people are going to determine where a party stands based on what the presidential nominee says.”
Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond acknowledged that the platform means little to the general public, but he said it is a way to inspire hard-core conservative activists who remain skeptical of Romney.
“If we want a way for them to be engaged in the process," Hammond said, "start a fight for the platform.”
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