As Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney blast each other, they are still finding time to dismiss Obama as a failed president. The two are locked in a fierce contest for Florida, a swing state that holds its pivotal primary election on Tuesday.
Obama was in the second of a three-day, five-state tour in politically key states that he hopes will underline the policy messages of his State of the Union address to Congress on Tuesday. In Nevada, the president will announce the sale of oil and gas drilling leases for nearly 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico and promote the completion of a highway corridor for vehicles that run on liquefied natural gas. Both are a response to critics who say his policies have stifled domestic energy production.
Obama remains personally popular with Americans but is vulnerable in his bid for a second White House term because of voter dissatisfaction over his handling of the recovery from the recession that produced the steepest US economic decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployment stands at 8.5 percent, millions of Americans have lost their homes to mortgage foreclosures and economic growth is minimal.
Florida was particularly hard hit in the downturn, with unemployment of 9.9 percent. In the diverse state with large media markets, Romney and his allies have seized a staggering advantage in the television ad wars. They have reported spending $14 million combined on commercials — many critical of Gingrich. That’s at least seven times the investment made by Gingrich and an organization supporting him.
In remarks that aides said were a rebuttal to the State of the Union speech, Romney has said Obama “seemed so extraordinarily detached from reality, so detached from what’s going on in Florida,” where the mortgage foreclosure crisis has hit particularly hard.
Gingrich has been harsher, calling the president’s call for higher taxes on millionaires “a disaster of the first order.”
Under current law, investment income is taxed at 15 percent, a fact now well-known with the release of Romney’s income tax return this week. Wages, by contrast, are taxed at rates that can exceed 30 percent. Romney, the millionaire former head of a private equity firm, paid a lower tax rate than most American wage earners because his income comes mostly from investments.
Electability remains the top concern for Republican primary voters, according to polls taken in the primary and caucus states, so both Republicans were eager to paint a contrast with Obama.
Romney has long led in the Florida polls, but Gingrich’s upset victory last Saturday in the first-in-the-South primary in South Carolina revitalized his candidacy and raised questions about Romney’s staying power.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is also on the ballot, as is the libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul. But Santorum has been sinking in the polls as Gingrich rises, and Paul is bypassing a Florida campaign to concentrate on upcoming caucuses in other states. Both are not as well funded as Romney and Gingrich.
The candidates debate again Thursday in Jacksonville, Florida. If the separate appearances Wednesday by Romney and Gingrich on the Spanish-language television network Univision was a guide, this debate will be as feisty as the first.
Gingrich spoke acidly of Romney’s proposal for “self-deportation” as a way of having illegal immigrants leave the country without a massive roundup, calling it a fantasy.
But Gingrich ran into trouble over a radio ad his campaign was airing that called Romney “anti-immigrant.” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, who is neutral in the presidential race, criticized the commercial, and Romney said the term “anti-immigrant” was an epithet. Rubio is the son of Cuban immigrants.
In Florida, 13 percent of registered voters are Hispanic.
