Republican White House hopefuls assailed each other Wednesday ahead of this state's key nominating primary, with frontrunner Mitt Romney pounding his chief conservative threat, Newt Gingrich. At a campaign rally here, Romney mocked Gingrich's claims to have helped create jobs during his time in Congress, saying "government doesn't create jobs, it's the private sector that creates jobs."
"Congressmen taking responsibility, or taking credit, for creating jobs is like Al Gore taking credit for the Internet," he jibed, echoing a popular - and mostly erroneous - conservative attack on the Democratic former vice president.
It refers to a March 1999 interview in which Gore, praised by Internet pioneers for early legislation that helped build the World Wide Web, said that as a US senator he "took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim roundly mocked on the right as saying he "invented" it.
Romney's campaign unleashed a blistering barrage at the former House speaker, branding him a dangerously erratic leader whose nomination would pave the way for President Barack Obama to win a new term come November 6. Former senator Jim Talent, who served under speaker Gingrich in the 1990s, accused him of saying "outrageous and destructive" things that forced others to "clean up after him" and helped Democrat Bill Clinton to reelection in 1996.
Former representative Susan Molinari, speaking with Talent on a conference call arranged by the Romney campaign, said Gingrich practiced "leadership by chaos" and warned he would "help elect another Democrat president." Romney's campaign echoed those themes in a new Internet advertisement and website, both named "Unreliable Leader," that strongly suggested it saw the more conservative former lawmaker as a rising threat ahead of Saturday's primary. Asked Wednesday about the attacks, Gingrich reportedly said "that's just stupid."
Gingrich trailed the former Massachusetts governor and multi-millionaire venture capitalist - who won the only two previous nominating contests, in Iowa and New Hampshire - by double-digits in South Carolina. But Gingrich has worked to position himself as the strongest conservative challenger to Romney, who faces stubborn doubts about his conservative credentials and has yet to rally a majority of Republicans behind him.
An independent group allied with Gingrich released its own Internet ad, showing computer-animated Obama annihilating his Romney counterpart in a debate by detailing some of his position changes on issues dear to conservatives. "I agreed with Governor Romney on many things, but this presidential candidate Romney? I don't even know the guy," the mock Obama says. "Then again, he doesn't seem to know himself."
At a campaign event Tuesday, Gingrich himself pressed Christian conservative former senator Rick Santorum - running third in South Carolina - and Texas Governor Rick Perry to drop their campaigns and throw their lot with him. Neither candidate appeared poised to heed the call, but time was fast running out for Romney's rivals to deny him the nomination. But Romney took fire Tuesday for admitting he pays just 15 percent of his income in taxes and playing down his $375,000 earnings from nine speeches given between February 2010 and February 2011 as "not very much" money.
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