Gingrich defends decision to stay in Republican race despite various woes

WASHINGTON – Newt Gingrich’s White House aspirations have been on life support for weeks, but the struggling Republican haughtily defended his decision to remain in his party’s presidential race on Wednesday despite dismal primary results, a serious debt problem and a dramatic cut in staff.

The former speaker of the House of Representatives expressed dismay about suggestions that he should drop out of the race to enable Mitt Romney to seal the nomination well before the party convention in August.

“For some reason everybody in this establishment is chanting that (Rick) Santorum and I should quit,” he said in a radio interview in the U.S. capital, although Santorum has not, in fact, been facing the same barrage of calls to drop out that Gingrich has.

“Well, you know, Romney has to earn this. It’s not going to be given to him and we have every right to run. I have 176,000 folks who go on to Newt.org and donated, and I think that’s a very important factor. So I owe the folks who have been supporting me.”

He added no one would expect a losing sports team to stop playing mid-season.

“I find it fascinating – none of you guys would call a football team or basketball team and say: ‘Gee, why don’t you drop out?’ You say: ‘OK, there’s a season, let’s play the season out, let’s see what happens.'”

Gingrich’s stand comes after a series of devastating defeats in the race. Despite serving the state of Georgia for two decades as congressman, that was one of only two states he’s been able to win. South Carolina was another.

Meantime Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, handily won the southern states of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana. Gingrich barely finished second, only narrowly squeaking past Romney, in two of those contests.

A new CNN/ORC poll shows him running dead last nationally, behind even libertarian Ron Paul, with 60 per cent of Republicans saying he should exit the race. He’s got only five per cent of support among Wisconsin voters, who cast ballots in their state primary next week.

The last handful of reporters embedded with Gingrich’s campaign left his bus this week. And he’s more than US$1.5 million in debt, so broke that he’s recently taken to charging supporters $50 to be photographed with him.

“The money is very tight, obviously,” Gingrich said while campaigning in Maryland on Tuesday. “That’s why we’re trying to raise more money.”

Later Tuesday, news emerged that Gingrich – a distant third behind Romney and Santorum in terms of delegates – was laying off a significant portion of his campaign staff, drastically reducing the number of campaign events and replacing his campaign manager.

He described those moves as a “big-choice convention” strategy that will allow him to spend the next few months personally calling up delegates and urging them to back him so that he can seize the day in the event of a brokered convention in Tampa in August.

Such a scenario occurs when a front-runner is unable to get the 1,144 delegates needed to lock up the nomination by the convention. That isn’t considered a likely turn of events in 2012.

“We’re staying in, that’s exactly why we’re downsizing,” Gingrich said Wednesday. “We’re doing the appropriate things to be able to campaign.”

It’s yet another example of Gingrich’s historic difficulty in admitting defeat, some pundits have suggested.

“Gingrich sees himself as figure of historical significance, and that was certainly true early in the 1990s,” said Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak.

“But this time around, he still believes he is the strongest nominee and he’d be a transformational president. And it’s hard for him to give up that dream. But this race is over for him unless the chaos theory prevails and Tampa turns into a circus, and I do think there’s a slim chance of that happening.”

Gingrich, the man who said in a Republican debate that the best word to describe him was “cheerful,” has startled some on both the right and left in recent days with his indignant reactions to current events.

He railed against a recent Robert De Niro joke at a fundraiser for U.S. President Barack Obama – “Do you really think our country is ready for a white first lady?” the actor quipped – dubbing it inexcusable and calling upon the president to make amends for it.

Ann Romney, meantime, said she thought the joke was funny, and even conservative mouthpiece Ann Coulter ridiculed Gingrich for his outrage.

Last week, Gingrich called Obama’s remarks about the Trayvon Martin case “disgraceful.” The president weighed gingerly into the controversy surrounding the slaying of the unarmed black teen, noting that if he had a son, he’d look like Martin.

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly told Gingrich this week his reaction was “overly harsh.”

Gingrich was cranky again on Wednesday when asked if he was refusing to drop out of the race because of personal animosity towards Romney.

It wasn’t an unfair question – after the Iowa caucuses, Gingrich all but declared war on his rival when the former speaker’s support in the state withered in the face of a crush of negative advertising from the Romney campaign.

“No, it has nothing to do with that. Why do you guys try to reduce leading America to the smallest and pettiest and most personal questions?” he said. “It’s about representing a set of ideas and a set of values that are really important.”