Politico has a story about Newt agreeing not to go after Romney any more about Bain, and Newt was just on Hannity’s radio show on the issue. (I’ll post the audio if I can get it.)
Newt said there are three or four instances where the record is really bad and Romney needs to defend it. Newt said the challenge is not to the model but how Romney acted in specific instances, and how odd it is that Romney runs on his business record but doesn’t want to discuss the record.
Newt made the point that it is impossible to discuss the issue without being accused of class warfare by people trying to protect Romney, but the issue will come up if Romney is the nominee without knowing how much it would hurt Romney.
Newt did not back away from the issue, but said he is moving on.
You know my position. Newt is making a purely political decision to move on. Once he lost Rush and Hannity on the issue — wrongly I believe — it no longer was politically tenable.
So we will go through the primary process and possibly nominate someone with a potentially devastating electability problem. The electablility problem will not go away, we just will not find out how bad it is until September and October 2012.
So add Bain to the list of things we cannot discuss, for fear of being labeled anti-capitalist. Along with Jeremiah Wright, for fear of being called racist.
(added) Here’t the Hannity audio:
Update: Politico’s story was headlined “Newt Gingrich on Bain attacks against Mitt Romney: I crossed the line.” The Gingrich campaign denies that Newt ever uttered those words, and denies the thrust of the Politico article. The campaign statement is consistent with Newt’s Hannity interview. Newt is not pushing Bain as an investment model problem, but a problem of specific instances of problematic behavior by Romney. The Hannity interview makes pretty clear that it’s not going to be the focus of attacking Romney, at least not from the Newt campaign.
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