Free Republic

GILBERT, S.C. — Mitt Romney and a top surrogate called for Newt Gingrich, Romney's chief rival for the Republican presidential nomination, to release the House Ethics Committee report that led to a reprimand of Gingrich and a $300,000 fine. After Romney was pressed on his tax returns, Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) stepped in and interrupted Romney. "The people of South Carolina are not talking about tax returns. They're not. They're talking about jobs, spending and the economy," she said before taking a shot at Gingrich, who is neck and neck with Romney in recent polls of South Carolina. "In all...

Reporting from Florence, S.C.— Newt Gingrich on Tuesday questioned why Mitt Romney has not released his tax returns, arguing that if the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination has nothing to hide, he ought to make the documents public before South Carolina holds its first-in-the-South primary on Saturday. "Either there's nothing there, so why isn't he releasing them, or there's something there, so why is he hiding them?" Gingrich told reporters here after holding a town hall at an art gallery. "I believe we have the right to know. Therefore, he owes us the knowledge. If there's nothing there, why...

Sacred underwear, baptizing holocaust victims, gods of their own planets. When some of America’s most celebrated pundits and public intellectuals talk about Mormons, these are the images that are summoned. Ironically in this “Mormon Moment”—signaled by a hit Broadway musical, polygamous housewives on TLC, and of course two Mormon presidential candidates—Mormons, long considered quintessential “outsiders” to mainstream American culture, today find themselves at the center of the American zeitgeist. Yet it is the Mormons’ supposed theological weirdness that is the centripetal attraction. As Joanna Brooks has noted in these pages, the New York Times recently featured Harold Bloom’s musings on...

So the first third of the Republican presidential race is ending. The first third is the introduction: "This is who I am, this is what I want to do, this is why you want to choose me." The campaign is announced, organized, and goes forward in key early states. The second phase is the long slog through the primary states to the convention next August in Tampa, Fla. The third and final is the election proper, in the autumn of 2012. *** The first phase was clouded by an overlay of frustration and dissatisfaction: The best weren't in the game....

I noted the other day Romney’s emerging secrecy problem, including the refusal to release income tax returns even if he becomes the nominee.This is a break with standard practice for nominees, and creates a no win situation in which Romney makes his income and taxes a central general election issue or gives in and looks weak.  Or worse, we find out too late that there was a reason he resisted disclosure.In a preview of the general election, Occupy protesters have seized on the non-disclosure issue and Romney is digging in: Des Moines police today arrested a total of 10 protesters...

Romney Touts Himself As Successful Consensus Builder Philip Rucker December 23 When Mitt Romney was governor, he had a routine: Every Monday afternoon at 3, he would meet with the two Democrats who controlled the Massachusetts legislature. They rotated offices each week and, over cheese, juice and popcorn, the three negotiated the budget, taxes and health care. Sometimes they just chitchatted about movies, leaving Romney to wonder whether he had just wasted an hour. This was how Romney governed as a Republican here on Beacon Hill, where the legislature was 85 percent Democratic. He was practical, not ideological. He was...

Newt Gingrich intends to draw a contrast of his own with Mitt Romney when he buses through Iowa next week in the lead-up to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses – and he’s going right for Romney’s economic plan and experience. The Gingrich campaign has spent the past week on the defensive in the face of criticism from Romney himself that the former House speaker is unreliable, from the Romney campaign for not being staunchly conservative, and from a Romney-affiliated “Super PAC” with an onslaught of negative advertising. But after spending the week scolding the Romney camp for negativity in order...

Mitt Romney said he will not release his tax returns if he wins the Republican nomination for president, a rare move for a candidate. When asked if he would, Romney, in an unaired segment of an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, said that he doesn’t “intend to” release the returns. “I doubt it. I will provide all the financial info, which is an extraordinary pile of documents which show investments and so forth,” he said, according to video provided by NBC. When Todd pointed out that Romney had asked Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to release his returns during their 1994...

In an interview with the AP while campaigning in New Hampshire today, Mitt Romney said he would not meet Newt Gingrich in a one on one debate "out of respect" for the other candidates in the GOP race. What a copout. Were Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman being disrespectful to Romney when they agreed to one on one debates with Gingrich? When it comes to Newt, I guess Mitt is content to hide behind his surrogates and third party attack ads. And here I thought Mitt wanted to earn the nomination. Well, if Mitt wants to earn my...

Hohmann: Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace publicly called out Mitt Romney this morning for avoiding press scrutiny. At the end of a 26-minute interview with Texas Gov. Rick Perry in Austin, Wallace noted that he has now interviewed all the major candidates as part of his 2012 one-on-one series, except the frontrunner. ---- “He has not appeared on this program or any Sunday talk show since March of 2010,” Wallace said. “We invited Gov. Romney again this week, but his campaign says he’s still not ready to sit down for an interview.” Because of the influence Fox wields among...

TLC and why Palin will never be president -- part 2 Last week I wrote a piece pegged to tonight's TLC pairing of Kate Gosselin and Sarah Palin on Palin's "Alaska" reality TV series. The core of my commentary was that Palin will never be president because she has sold herself too cheap to low-rent reality-TV venues like TLC, and now she is being perceived as another one of the channel's freak moms like Kate Gosselin or the women on the series "I Didn't Know I was Pregant." As the title so coyly suggests, that shows features women who gave...