ANNAPOLIS — Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has started charging supporters $50 for a photograph with him and said he is considering slashing his staffers’ salaries as he acknowledged Tuesday that his campaign funding is drying up.
“The money is very tight, obviously,” Gingrich said, responding to questions about his $50-a-pop price for photos with the candidate.
The former House speaker, who has won only two primaries — Georgia and South Carolina — said his campaign has enough money to survive until the Republican National Convention in August. “I have the money to keep going,” he said. “We’re working through what it’s going to take to get there. Clearly we’re going to have to go on a fairly tight budget to get from here to Tampa.”
Gingrich isn’t only losing fundraising dollars, but he’s also losing the media’s attention.
A handful of news organizations decided this week to pull their traveling reporters from covering the Gingrich campaign.
Gingrich said he doesn’t need a band of reporters following him around to make news.
“Everywhere I go we get a lot of coverage,” Gingrich said. He boasted that his campaign stop in Delaware on Monday evening attracted hundreds of voters.
“They announced on Friday afternoon I was going to be at a particular fire station [in Delaware],” Gingrich noted. “By Sunday morning they had given out all 400 seats and they spent all day Monday turning people down.”
