•  Campaign Videos (January 2012) « Newt 2012
  

[Crowd cheering and applauding] Gingrich: Thank you Chris.  I want to thank all of the Tea Parties who have made such a big difference and who have begun to change politics and government in America.  I think you represent citizens who are sick and tired of being told by Washington what to do and sick and tired of watching your country decay because the power structure in Washington doesn't want to make any changes.  They would rather manage the decay as long as they stay in charge, and we're here to tell them that their time is over and that the time has come for real change and real reform. [applause]

And let's be very clear.  Many of you probably noticed a number of attack ads and all sorts of junk, and that's what it is.  This is the desperate last stand of the old order throwing the kitchen sick hoping something sticks, because if only they can drown us in enough mud, raised with money from companies and people who foreclosed on Floridians.  Let's be really clear.  You're watching ads paid for with the money taken from the people of Florida by companies like Goldman Sachs, recycled back into ads to try to stop you from having a choice in this election.  That's what this is all about. [applause]

And the question you have to ask yourself is what level of gall does it take to think that we collectively are so stupid that somebody who owns lots of stock in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, somebody who owns lots of stock in a part of Goldman Sachs that was explicitly foreclosing on Floridians, somebody who's surrounded by lobbyists who made a living protecting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can then build his entire negative campaign in Florida around a series of ads that are just plain false, because they're counting on us being too stupid or too timid. 

And of course if I mention anything about them the entire establishment jumps up and says that's cheating.  How can you tell the truth, because don't you know that's politically incorrect?  Remember, the Republican establishment is just as much an establishment as the Democratic establishment and they are just as determined to stop us. [applause]

Make no bones about it, this is a campaign for the very nature of the Republican Party and the very opportunity for a citizen conservatism to defeat the power of money and to prove that people matter more than Wall Street and that people matter more than all of the big companies that are pouring the cash in to run the ads that are false. [applause]

I have been thinking about this for weeks.  Because when we ran a totally positive campaign, by the middle of December people had reacted and we were ahead by 12 points on Gallup.  And what happened was we were drowned in a sea of mud in Iowa, mud paid for with special interest money, mud paid for by lobbyists in Washington, and a candidate who was willing to say anything and do anything because he's so desperate to be president he doesn't think the truth matters.

Well I'm here as a citizen.  I frankly don't care what the Washington establishment thinks of me, because I intend to change them. [applause]

And it's true, we have to ultimately focus on beating Barack Obama, but we're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about. [applause]

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Notes: The video consists of clips from Gingrich's speech at the Lakeside Inn in Florida.  At this point the campaign had obviously become very negative.

Copyright © 2012 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.