Newt Mocks 'Desperate' Mitt

Newt Gingrich has moved to the mockery portion of the program.Campaigning outside an evangelical church in Tampa, he said Monday that Mitt Romney had moved from dishing out “pious baloney” to “desperate baloney”—enough, he said, to “open a delicatessen.”This is the sort of back-of-the-hand campaigning that comes easily to the former House speaker but is more labored for Romney. Of course, it’s easy to be loose when you’ve just won the South Carolina primary and one poll is showing you jumping into the lead here in Florida.Wearing a suit, white shirt and red tie despite the hot sun, Gingrich wasted little time unloading on his chief Republican rival, explaining to a crowd of under 200 that he’d heard Romney was saying “unkind things” about him. Mitt has taken to calling Gingrich a failed leader who was forced from power by his own GOP colleagues. “If you’ve been campaigning for six years and you begin to see it slip away, you get desperate. And when you get desperate, you’ll say anything.”Newt is so keen to identify himself with Ronald Reagan that he told the crowd he’d been practicing the line “there you go again” for Monday’s NBC debate.The rest of the talk featured Gingrich’s greatest hits—Obama as a Saul Alinsky radical, promising to repeal Obamacare, saying it’s similar to Romneycare—and a new line about how the president is “driving Canada into a partnership with China” by temporarily rejecting the Keystone pipeline from our neighbor to the north.A sign of the times: the loudspeaker played How You Like Me Now by a group called The Heavy.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

ADD THE DAILY BEAST ON GOOGLE

Howard Kurtz

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.