Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning. 
 
 Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter. 
 
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 reset VandeHei on anti-Newt attacks Gingrich fires back in Florida 
 
 If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud. 
 
 It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late. This is just a sampling of what’s hitting Newt: 
 
 • The overnight Drudge Report banner: “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan.” The headline linked to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies. 
 
 • Drudge also linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.” 
 
 Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past. 
 
 • Bob Dole issued a scathing statement Thursday that the Romney campaign provided to the National Review in which he said “it is now time” to rally to stop Gingrich, blamed the former Speaker for losing House Republican seats in 1996, and warned that it could happen again, at all levels of government. 
 
 “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late,” Dole said. “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.” 
 
 Dole added, “In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year.” 
 
 • Conservatives are circulating a piece written by the editors of the National Review: “The Hour of Newt.” The editors, who have been extremely critical of Gingrich for weeks, waved conservatives off the Gingrich bandwagon. “Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.” 
 
 • Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist writing on her self-titled website, warns: “Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!” She, too, gets Drudge promotion, with a column punctuated with this punch: “Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.” 
 
 • Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: “He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.” ||||| The “right-wing social engineering” comment 
 
 Attacking Gingrich for his since-retracted “Meet the Press” statement belittling Paul Ryan’s budget proposal has become de rigueur among his fellow Republican presidential candidates. 
 
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 Romney’s campaign this week rolled out two surrogate phone calls lashing Gingrich for the anti-Ryan apostasy as evidence the former House speaker cannot be trusted to carry the Republican banner. 
 
 “Gov. Romney is much more disciplined in his approach and much more thoughtful about what he says and how he says them,” Iowa state Rep. Renee Schulte said in a Romney campaign press call Friday. 
 
 The opportunity to nail Gingrich Saturday for his social engineering remark is almost too tempting to pass up. His five rivals would benefit from tethering themselves to a rising star in the party like Ryan, reinforce their fiscal conservative credentials and all without much downside risk. 
 
 Freddie Mac 
 
 The information about Gingrich’s work for Freddie Mac that’s already in the public record makes this is a target-rich environment. 
 
 Gingrich insists he never lobbied for the mortgage giant. He and his companies earned millions working, he says, as a highly paid adviser offering historical advice. 
 
 Whatever role he played, Gingrich has considerable exposure. And his opponents have considerable motive to attack him. 
 
 Romney, without being specific, has repeatedly charged that Gingrich has spent his entire life working in Washington — so a Freddie Mac hit on Gingrich would be a two-fer. 
 
 Bachmann also has railed against “crony capitalism” in previous debates. 
 
 Perry bemoans the clubby insider nature of Washington, threatening to “blow up” the influence industry in which Gingrich enriched himself. 
 
 What better way to highlight those criticisms than to attach them to the front-runner through the Freddie Mac connection? 
 
 Immigration 
 
 The issue of illegal immigration was the root of Romney’s first attack on Perry, and the Texas governor’s inability to ably respond played a significant role in his demise. 
 
 Gingrich is certain to avoid the performance errors that doomed the Texas governor, but his position that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country legally without a path to citizenship is anathema to immigration hard-liners like Bachmann and Santorum, and Romney is practiced in leveraging the issue to his advantage. 
 
 The trick will be for candidates to draw blood from Gingrich without appearing, to use Perry’s loaded term, heartless. At the foreign policy debate Nov. 22, Gingrich deftly batted away charges that his plan amounts to amnesty, without significant pushback. 
 
 Recent Iowa polls show that, while likely caucus-goers don’t necessarily agree with Gingrich’s more moderate immigration position, the issue is far less important than the economy on their list of concerns. ||||| ROCK HILL, S.C. — Clear signs Mitt Romney is again worried about Newt Gingrich: He released two new negative web videos, unleashed attacking surrogates and even went after the former House speaker himself. 
 
 And that was all before lunch on Wednesday. 
 
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 Romney hasn’t engaged directly since December, when he scrambled to stop Gingrich’s sudden surge to the top of the polls. But Romney’s campaign feels Gingrich’s new momentum — and isn’t concerned about a credible challenge from Rick Santorum — and they’re eager to cut him off now so he doesn’t remain a problem past Saturday’s primary. Romney’s hoping a win then will eliminate Gingrich as a contender and help him wrap up the nomination early. 
 
 Romney led the charge himself, even saying Gingrich’s name aloud from the stage, which he rarely does. 
 
 After a digression about how he expects Barack Obama to campaign against his record running Bain Capital, Romney brought the argument to Gingrich. 
 
 “Some Republicans have jumped on that bandwagon. Recognize, its not the way to build a strong economy to tear down fellow Americans or to attack capitalism,” Romney said. “My goodness, I listened to Speaker Gingrich the other night talking about the enterprises that I’m associated with, I’m proud of the fact that I’ve worked in the private sector, that I’ve achieved success, that we were able to build jobs in America and I’m going to keep using that experience to make sure that we build jobs for the entire country.” 
 
 Romney’s comments followed a day of emails fired off by his campaign attacking Gingrich’s positions of free enterprise and a morning event where he attacked Gingrich unprompted and at length in front of a crowd of about 300 people under a warm sun at Wofford College in Spartanburg. 
 
 “I was disappointed over the last couple of weeks to see one of my opponents attacking free enterprise, just like the president was,” Romney said. “That’s not the role of the Republican Party, that makes us sad.” 
 
 Then he twisted the knife, comparing Gingrich with one of the right’s favorite boogeymen. 
 
 “You know, the speaker just the other day at the debate was talking about how he created millions of jobs when he was working with the Reagan administration. Well, he’d been in Congress two years when Ronald Reagan came to office,” Romney said. “That would be like saying 435 congressmen were all responsible for those jobs. Government doesn’t create jobs. It’s the private sector that creates jobs. Congressmen taking responsibility or taking credit for helping create jobs is like Al Gore taking credit for the Internet.” 
 
 Acknowledging the rave reviews Gingrich garnered for his debate performance Monday night, a Romney campaign source told POLITICO on Wednesday that the attacks on Gingrich are coming because he is “the one left who can go the longest.” 
 
 “South Carolina is like Iowa — an opportunity that we never thought we would get,” the source said. “If you dust Newt up there so that Santorum stays alive, Newt gets no traction heading into Florida, where he has no structure, and then into a month, February, where there is no obvious good state. Points fell off Newt fast when voters were reminded of his entirety, not just his facility as a debate presence.” 
 
 The source said the Romney campaign’s goal in South Carolina remains the 34 percent John McCain won here in 2008, which the campaign estimates will be enough to win, so long as conservatives don’t consolidate around either Gingrich or Santorum. And the campaign is not worried about Santorum. 
 
 The source said Romney’s internal polling for South Carolina shows the former Massachusetts governor in the “low 30s,” with other candidates in the low 20s or high teens. That tracks with a CNN/Time/ORC poll released Wednesday afternoon had Romney at 33 percent and Gingrich at 23 percent — though most of the polling done over the days preceding Monday’s debate. ||||| Joe Skipper/Reuters 
 
 Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked. 
 
 Of course most political reporters don’t want Gingrich in the White House. But they’ve had every incentive to keep him in the headlines and overrate his odds of defeating Mitt Romney for the nomination. 
 
 Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention. But chatter is all it will be. For Gingrich and his media enablers alike, the dream died in Florida – and here are four reasons why. 
 
 If Gingrich can’t compete in Florida, he can’t compete nationally. 
 
 To date, all of the Republican primary contests have been held in smallish states with distinctive demographic profiles. This made it possible to play up the significance of Gingrich’s convincing South Carolina victory, while downplaying Romney’s New Hampshire win as an independent-abetted, only-in-New-England fluke. 
 
 But Florida’s primary was closed to independents, Florida’s electorate was as conservative and Tea Party-friendly (though not as evangelical-heavy) as South Carolina’s and Florida’s large senior population once looked like it would give Gingrich an edge. If the former speaker couldn’t even come close to beating Romney in such relatively favorable terrain, it’s hard to see how he can hope to compete with him anywhere outside the Deep South. 
 
 The anti-Romney vote isn’t as big as Gingrich likes to think it is. 
 
 As the Florida polls turned against them, Gingrich’s campaign began hinting that Rick Santorum should drop out of the race and give Gingrich a clear shot at consolidating conservatives against Romney. If Santorum weren’t in the race, one of Gingrich’s campaign chairmen in Florida told CNN on Monday, “we would clearly be beating Romney right now.” 
 
 But as it turned out, Romney received as many votes as his two nearest rivals combined. And more importantly, pre-primary polls showed that without Santorum in the race, Romney would still have led Gingrich by a wide margin – as much as 16 points, according to an NBC/Marist poll. The fact that a majority of Republicans still have reservations about Romney, in other words, doesn’t mean that a majority would ever vote for Gingrich. 
 
 Romney’s down-and-dirty Florida campaign eased right-wing doubts about his toughness. 
 
 Romney hammered Gingrich in the debates, and then carpet-bombed him with negative advertisements. 68 percent of the ads that ran in Florida were negative spots attacking Gingrich, and Romney’s only positive ad was a Spanish-language spot that aired 15 times in total. While this gloves-off approach may have tarnished Romney’s image with swing voters, it helped reassure the many conservatives who were attracted to Gingrich because they want a no-holds-barred fighter for the fall campaign. 
 
 As John Podhoretz wrote on Monday in the New York Post, Florida was a test of Romney’s mettle: “The clean-cut Boy Scout Ken-doll candidate from Massachusetts needed to show his fellow Republicans that he could be mean, tough and merciless on the attack — that he could take it to his rival and best him.” Consider that mission accomplished. 
 
 Gingrich’s lackluster debate performances permanently undercut the strongest rationale for his candidacy. 
 
 In truth, the idea that the former speaker’s skills as a debater would give him a significant general-election edge over President Obama was never particularly plausible. Still, many Republican primary voters seemed to be believe it: The promise of a Lincoln-Douglas-style showdown with the president has been one of Gingrich’s more effective rhetorical flourishes, and his showstopping performances in South Carolina were crucial to his upset victory. 
 
 But it’s hard to see how Gingrich’s Master Debater reputation recovers from his poor showings in the debates in Florida. Even if he stays in the race long enough to get another crack at Romney, voters will always remember that he can be bested – that if you prick him, he might just bleed. Once lost, an aura of invincibility is an awfully hard thing to regain. 
 
 Without his debating magic, Gingrich doesn’t have any cards left to play. He won Herman Cain’s endorsement in Florida, but it didn’t help his cause. Sarah Palin had his back, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sheldon Adelson funded his ads, but Romney still massively outspent him. Santorum could have dropped out, and Gingrich still would have lost by double-digits. 
 
 There’s nobody waiting in the wings to help him, no endorsement or donation that can change the fundamentals of the race. If he keeps going now – and there’s every reason to think he will – he’ll be pinning his hopes on a deus ex machina. Every realistic path leads only to defeat. ||||| The conventional wisdom is set: Newt Gingrich's overwhelming victory in South Carolina sets the stage for an extended primary in which he represents the conservative base and Mitt Romney represents the more electable choice of the Republican establishment. But there's a key flaw in this narrative. Gingrich, the supposedly conservative choice, isn't reliably conservative and the supposedly electable candidate is looking less and less electable. 
 
 Romney, throughout the Republican race, was an incredibly vulnerable front-runner, given that he ran and governed as a moderate/liberal in Massachusetts and signed the health care law that was the model for the rightly-despised Obamacare. But his great organization, fundraising abilities and business background in an election about the economy were supposed to make him electable. Yet over the past few weeks, he's been unable to effectively respond to Gingrich's attacks on his career at private equity firm Bain Capital and to calls for him to release his tax returns. His favorability ratings have already been suffering, and today he got absolutely slaughtered in a state in which the establishment front-runner typically beats off insurgents and effectively locks down the nomination. 
 
 Given conservatives' deep reservations about Romney, there's always been an opening for a conservative alternative to him. And in theory, an extended primary between Romney and a consistent conservative outsider that elites dismiss as unelectable could be satisfying and healthy. The problem is that Gingrich, boosted by two debate performances in which he lashed out at moderators, was able to claim that mantle. And no more bizarre definition of "anti-establishment conservative" ever existed. Gingrich has been in Washington since Jimmy Carter was president. He lives in a ritzy suburb of DC. After being ousted from his role as Speaker of the House by his own party, he's profited by taking money from large corporations such as drug companies and Freddie Mac to push for polices that expand government, including (at the time) the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society in the form of the Medicare prescription drug plan. He recorded a global warming ad with then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In 2008, he endorsed an federal mandate to force individuals to purchase health insurance. And in one of the early tests of the Tea Party in 2009, he sided with the establishment candidate Dede Scozzafava over the conservative. Oh, and Gingrich also happens to be widely unpopular. 
 
 Over the next few weeks, or months, Gingrich will argue that Romney isn't conservative and isn't as electable as the establishment will have you believe, while Romney will argue that Gingrich isn't electable and isn't as conservative as he'd have you believe. And they'll both be right. 
 
 Rick Santorum, the newly-minted Iowa victor will try to find a seam between the two of them by arguing that he is the choice for consistent conservatism. But he'll run into problems making that argument. 
 
 Of course, President Obama is looming in the background in all of this. If he wins, he won't repeal Obamacare or sign real entitlement reform to rein in our debt. He'll raise taxes, expand regulations on businesses, appoint a new wave of liberal judges to the bench and union-friendly appointees to key posts. 
 
 One of the miracles of America's founding was that so many great men emerged at once and complemented each other with unique skills. But now, in a time of great crisis, we're stuck with painfully bad choices. ||||| Newt Gingrich: Mitt Romney Conservative Enough for GOP Nomination 
 
 Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo Newt Gingrich (above) said he would support Mitt Romney if the former Massachusetts governor won the GOP nomination but gave no indication he was leaving the race. 
 
 Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) said today that GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney is “conservative enough” to be the party’s nominee. 
 
 Gingrich, whose own campaign for president is faltering, instead shifted blame for Romney’s perceived lack of conservative chops to the former Massachusetts governor’s staff. 
 
 “[He’s] conservative enough [and] I suspect he will accept a solid, conservative platform, but he does have consultants who are of the Etch a Sketch tradition,” Gingrich said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to comments made last month by Romney senior political adviser Eric Fehrnstrom. 
 
 Fehrnstrom, appearing on national television, was trying to emphasize how priorities shift when a primary race is “reset” for the general election, but he drew flak because of Romney’s own personal shifts on several key issues from his time as governor to now. 
 
 As for Gingrich, who has been an especially tough critic of Romney throughout the campaign, he said he is committed to defeating President Barack Obama and is ready to support Romney if he has enough delegates. 
 
 “If Mitt Romney ends up as the Republican nominee, I will work as hard for him as I would for myself,” Gingrich said, adding that he’s already spoken with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus about how he can help the party win in November once it has chosen the nominee. 
 
 But the former Speaker also gave no indication he’s ready to leave the race. 
 
 When pressed about his financial woes — his latest filing revealed he has as much campaign debt as he does cash on hand — Gingrich said “it’s hard” and noted he has dipped into personal funds “a little bit, but not dramatically.” 
 
 In an interview published today with the Washington Post, Gingrich said nothing could make him get out of the race at this point. 
 
 “The only way I’ll be the nominee is if Romney makes a major mistake and ends up with a number of his delegates saying they just can’t do that,” Gingrich told the Washington Post. “On the other hand, that has happened in American history, and as a historian, I’m probably the calmest person about not getting out [of the presidential race] of anyone you know.” 
 
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 Texas Rep. and GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul released a harsh attack ad Wednesday evening against Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and a fellow GOP candidate. 
 
 The ad, available to journalists through a “private” YouTube link, hit Gingrich for numerous allegedly contradictory statements about individual health care mandates, his involvement with Fannie and Freddie Mac, and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan. 
 
 The Web ad uses quotes from media outlets and commentators including ABC News, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, Fox Business Network’s Gerri Willis and conservative radio talked Rush Limbaugh — and numerous statements from Gingrich himself. 
 
 The Paul campaign says it is working to prove that Gingrich is not a consistent conservative. 
 
 “Our campaign is making a bold move to debunk the myth that the Newt we are seeing on the 2012 campaign trail is the conservative he has been touted to be all along,” said Paul national campaign chairman Jesse Benton. 
 
 “This step we are taking is necessary, as voters are seeking authenticity among conservatives who are able to show a decades-long career of consistently walking the walk of Constitutional principles, limited government, and promoting sound money and economic policy,” Benton continued. “Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential candidate with that record.” 
 
 The Gingrich campaign defended Newt’s conservative record, but refrained from mentioning Paul — instead taking a shot at GOP candidate Mitt Romney. 
 
 “No candidate in the race has achieved more conservative reform of government or spent more time and energy championing the cause of the conservative movement than Newt Gingrich, which is why voters across the country are choosing Newt over Mitt Romney,” Gingrich campaign spokesman R.C. Hammond said when asked for comment. 
 
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– The conservative media have apparently figured out that Newt Gingrich could actually win the Republican nomination, and they are responding with a breathtaking collective attack on the candidate. Politico rounds up the highlights, noting that "this is just a sampling of what's hitting Newt." In the National Review, Elliott Abrams writes that Gingrich often undermined Ronald Reagan, in what Politico calls "a devastating takedown." In another recent National Review piece being circulated by conservatives, the editors ramp up their opposition to Gingrich and urge conservatives not to support him. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of the American Spectator compares Gingrich to Bill Clinton, calling them both "1960s generation narcissists" and noting that, for "girl hopping" Gingrich, "there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out." On her website, Ann Coulter minces no words: "Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!" Her column blasts Gingrich's "hotheaded arrogance." The Drudge Report linked to the Abrams piece with a banner reading, "Insider: Gingrich Repeatedly Insulted Reagan." The site, which has been viewed as pro-Romney in the past, also linked prominently to Tyrrell and Coulter. Tom DeLay told KTRH, "He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. … When he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined." A top figure in the conservative media tells Politico that Republican leaders and media are beginning to realize, "It could happen, and it would be a disaster. All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker—there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen." Politico notes that dozens of GOP lawmakers, governors, and other VIPs have said the same, privately, in recent weeks. Click for more on why tonight's debate is crucial for Gingrich.