HOOVER, Ala. – Newt Gingrich typically qualifies his insults on Republican presidential rival Rick Santorum: He’s a friend; they accomplished things together in Congress; he’s an honorable man.
But Gingrich has opened up new and more aggressive lines of attack against Santorum in the past week as he seeks to top his former colleague in Tuesday’s Mississippi and Alabama primaries.
“When we had a team he was a good part of that team,” Gingrich said Saturday night at a packed rally in Hoover, outside Birmingham. “And when I left [after the 1998 election] balanced budgets disappeared, the deficit started going up, spending started going up. … This is not the record that’s going to beat Barack Obama.”
Voters in both states will be able to size up the two men Monday, as they appear at a pair of forums – though they are not scheduled to debate directly.
Santorum and Gingrich will both appear at a Gulf Coast Energy Forum in Biloxi, Miss., Monday morning – an event in Gingrich’s wheelhouse as he has honed in on domestic oil drilling and gas prices as his primary pitch. Monday night they will attend a forum in Birmingham hosted by the Alabama Republican Party.
Gingrich has bet his campaign on a Deep South strategy after winning only South Carolina and his old home state of Georgia thus far. Santorum, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, is strongest in the Midwest but won the Tennessee primary last week as well. Most Gingrich supporters interviewed at events in Mississippi and Alabama named Santorum as their second choice, as the conservative alternative to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
Polls show Gingrich leading or close to it in both Mississippi and Alabama, the two states where he has set up shop since Super Tuesday and where his campaign and an allied Super PAC have bought advertising time. Santorum, meanwhile, added another impressive win Saturday in the Kansas caucuses, topping 50 percent of the vote. Gingrich, who scrapped plans to visit Kansas to focus on Alabama and Mississippi, finished third there.
Campaigning across Alabama on Saturday, Gingrich gave no mention to the voting in Kansas and talked up his Southern roots.
He donned a green Bassmasters shirt – a rare suitless moment – to welcome the endorsement of Bassmasters founder Ray Scott, one of the most famous fishermen in the country. Following an awkward moment when Romney said at a Mississippi rally that he’s learning to like grits, Gingrich now stresses his milled corn bona fides in each speech.
“I want you to know as a Georgian I understand grits,” Gingrich said in Hoover. “I even understand cheese grits. I even understand shrimp and grits. I think that gave you some sense of the degree to which Gov. Romney doesn’t fit being the Southern candidate in this race.”
The barbs at Romney – whom Gingrich months ago tagged as a “Massachusetts moderate” – are nothing new, but Santorum has taken a more prominent role in Gingrich’s speeches. He added two new twists Saturday in Hoover. Gingrich hit Santorum for voting for the Sarbanes-Oxley law, which requires more disclosure from publicly traded companies but has drawn criticism from the right as being overly burdensome.
Gingrich also attacked Santorum for voting to raise the federal borrowing limit during his time in the Senate. Often the subject of grandstanding, debt ceiling increases are common – and they happened four times in the four years when Gingrich was U.S. Speaker of the House, for a total of $1.05 trillion.
When asked if it was hypocritical to attack Santorum for raising the debt ceiling when the Gingrich-led Congress did it too, Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said the point was that Gingrich helped balance the budget, while when Santorum was in Senate leadership in the early 2000s the nation racked up huge deficits.
“Everything the tea party started out of was all the bad things this generation of Republicans started,” Hammond said.
The prime contrast that Gingrich draws between himself and Santorum comes down to 1994 vs. 2006. In the first year the Gingrich-led Republican wave took over Congress; in the second the Republicans were tossed out in huge numbers, including Santorum, who lost his seat by 18 percentage points.
“The leadership team that Rick was in suffered a disastrous loss in 2006, because the country didn't want bigger deficits, more earmarks, the Bridge to Nowhere, and those kinds of things,” Gingrich said on Fox News Sunday, referring to a controversial federally funded bridge project in Alaska.
“So, I think there's a principle difference. It's not just a label. What are you trying to accomplish, how do you think the system works, and are you in the business to change Washington decisively, or are you just in the business to be a part of the team?”
The Gingrich campaign is becoming more aggressive against Santorum in its Internet tools – hitting Santorum on the campaign Twitter feed and in a Web video featuring Santorum talking about how he got along with Democrats like then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The campaign also dispatched a group of Gingrich allies who served with Santorum or who knew him well on a “Santorum Truth Tour,” with four stops scheduled in Mississippi on Sunday.
Santorum, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, defended his record on spending.
“I never, ever voted for an increase in spending on any of those appropriation bills,” he said. “In fact, I was out on the floor castigating Republicans and Democrats who were voting for increase in spending. So I voted always to cut spending, repeatedly, consistently, throughout my 16 years.”
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