Newt Gingrich told ABC News yesterday that he was close to airing an ad responding to attack ads that have been hammering him on his relationship with Freddie Mac. “We have a great story” Gingrich told Jonathan Karl about Freddie Mac, “and will probably run an ad by the time we get to New Hampshire or South Carolina.”
If you are a Gingrich supporter hoping Newt will finally respond to the Freddie Mac ads that have crippled his campaign, don’t get your hopes up. Gingrich told CNN a similar story last week. “[W]e may actually do an ad on this. I’ve been thinking about it for the last two days because this is clearly the one thing that is so direct and so immediate that it needs to be answered,” Gingrich told Shawna Shepard.
The Freddie Mac ads have been an “immediate threat” to Gingrich for over a month now. It simply does not take that long to cut a political ad. If Gingrich had a “great story” to tell about Freddie Mac we would have heard it by now.
ABC reports that Gingrich is selling a three-prong response on the Freddie issue: 1) most of the $1.8 million he took went to overhead at his company, not to him personally; 2) he opposed the 2008 bailout of Freddie Mac; and 3) he never lobbied for them on Capitol Hill.
All of these may be true, but they will not help Gingrich with conservatives concerned about his relationship with Freddie Mac. The bottom line is that Gingrich still will not repudiate the public-private partnership model that Freddie Mac, and companies like Solyndra, represent. Freddie Mac’s website quoted Gingrich saying in 2007: “I’m convinced that, if NASA were a GSE, we probably would be on Mars today. … While we need to improve the regulation of the GSEs, I would be very cautious about fundamentally changing their role or the model itself. [It] marries private enterprise to a public purpose.”
