Gingrich responded heatedly. “You don’t just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done.’’ He said that as speaker of the House he had helped balance the budget while doubling spending on the National Institutes of Health.
The debate was the 19th since the race for the Republican nomination began last year, and the second in four days in the run-up to Tuesday’s Florida primary. Opinion polls make the race a close one — slight advantage Romney — with two other contenders, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Texas Rep. Ron Paul far behind.
Gingrich’s upset victory in the South Carolina primary last week upended the race for the nomination, and Romney in particular can ill-afford a defeat on Tuesday.
While the clashes between Gingrich and Romney dominated the debate, Santorum drew applause from the audience when he called on the two front-runners to stop attacking one another and “focus on the issues.’’
“Can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress … and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy?’’ he said in a tone of exasperation.
There were some moments of levity, including when Paul, 76, was asked whether he would be willing to release his medical records. He said he was, then challenged the other three men on the debate stage to a 25-mile bike race.
He got no takers.
In the days since Romney’s loss in South Carolina, he has tried to seize the initiative, playing the aggressor in the Tampa debate and assailing Gingrich in campaign speeches and a TV commercial.
An outside group formed to support Romney has spent more than his own campaign’s millions on ads, some of them designed to stop Gingrich’s campaign momentum before it is too late to deny him the nomination.
With polls suggesting his South Carolina surge is stalling, Gingrich unleashed a particularly strong attack earlier in the day, much as he lashed out in Iowa when he rose in the polls, only to be knocked back by an onslaught of ads he was unable to counter effectively.
