Gingrich was the third of the GOP presidential candidates to speak today to the packed house at CPAC, an annual conference that attracts grassroots activists and conservative leaders from across the country to a Washington hotel.
Gingrich has only won South Carolina in the nominating contest, and is pinning his continued hopes on a strong result in Ohio and the South on March 6, Super Tuesday.
Gingrich did not deliver any attacks today on his most frequent Republican target, Mitt Romney. But he delivered a speech that contrasted remarkably with Romney’s earlier in the day. Where the former Massachusetts governor presented a safer, conventional speech in the mold of a State of the Union address, Gingrich, punctuating each bullet point with red-meat rhetoric, described how he would overthrow the Washington status quo.
He reserved the bulk of his ire for President Obama. He said he would repeal Obama’s healthcare plan, repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulatory overhaul, and eliminate all White House “czars’’ who are tasked with a variety of government responsibilities.
He accused Obama and his administration of lying about foreign policy, of seeking to wage war on organized religion and the Catholic church, and of starving the US economy of the domestic petroleum production it craves. He promised to repudiate “at least 40 percent of his government on the opening day’’ of a Gingrich administration.
The pledge drew chants of “Newt, Newt, Newt.’’
The fourth remaining candidate in the GOP nominating race, Texas Representative Ron Paul, is skipping this year’s CPAC convention because of unspecified travel constraints, according to his campaign. That adds some suspense to the convention’s closing straw poll tomorrow. The libertarian congressman has won the CPAC straw poll for the last two years. In the three years before that, the winner was Mitt Romney.
