
After his ill-prepared flop in Thursday night’s debate and his continuing slide in the polls leading up to Tuesday’s all-important Florida primary, Newt Gingrich has taken off his gentlemanly white gloves, put on a pair of steel-plated boxing mitts, and started smashing Mitt Romney with everything he’s got. His campaign’s latest ad, released yesterday, is nothing short of desperate. Here’s the opening salvo, which starts with a quote taken from a Mike Huckabee 2008 campaign ad; Huckabee has since rebuked the Gingrich campaign, saying use of the clip was “not authorized, approved, or known in advance by me.”
>[Huckabee:] “If a man’s dishonest to get a job, he’ll be dishonest on the job.” [Narrator:] What kind of man would mislead, distort, and deceive just to win an election? This man would: Mitt Romney.
Another anti-Romney ad called “Blood Money” was also released yesterday by the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future, and this one just takes the smear-covered cake. To a breathless violin soundtrack, this slickly produced video calls Romney every Republican epithet imaginable (“Obamacare inventor,” “serial flip-flopper, “questionable conservative”) before hammering home randomly inflammatory phrases from a recent Forbes article about Romney’s directorship of Damon Corp., a medical testing company then controlled by Bain Capital that defrauded Medicare of millions.
Related: The Coming Tsunami of Slime