Rick Santorum has ties to “Jews for Jesus” and Opus Dei. Mitt Romney is a member of a religion that a lot of southern evangelicals really don’t like. But Newt Gingrich, according to a radio interview today, doesn’t want to touch that. Instead, he’s more concerned about Barack Obama’s “Muslim friends,” and the “elite media” that’s keeping them consistently out of sight.
Speaking on the phone from Louisiana today, Gingrich was asked about the Washington Post’s two-page spread on Santorum’s connection to Opus Dei. He fired back:
>“Look, you have to understand that the elite media is in the tank for Obama … It is just astonishing to me how pro-Obama they are. Do you think you are going to see two pages on Obama’s Muslim friends? Or two pages on the degree to which Obama is consistently apologizing to Islam while attacking the Catholic church? Do you see anybody in the elite media prepared to say, gee, this is kind of odd?”
“Two pages?” President Obama must be a popular guy.
This type of criticism isn’t particularly new for Gingrich. Just this Wednesday, while holding a rally in Louisiana (where Santorum leads by double-digits), an audience member accused the president of being a Muslim. Newt Gingrich didn’t disabuse of him of the notion. He basically ignored the comment.
Saying that Obama likes Muslims more than Christians is becoming something of a theme for the former speaker, who told Greta Van Susteren this week, “he’s more sensitive to radical Islamists who are killing young Americans than he is to the Catholic Church, to Baptists, to fundamentalists.” In the same interview, he also claimed that — you guessed it — the mainstream media had blown the rally moment out of proportion. (In 2008, John McCain took the microphone from an old woman making a similar accusation, and corrected her; the comparison didn’t work in Newt’s favor.)
So, if we can expect anything from the last few weeks and months of the Gingrich campaign, it may be a combo of Obama/Muslim pirouettes, then subsequent salvos against the mainstream media for covering them. And of course, we all know that Newt’s great at those.
