To capitalize on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s recent surge in national polls, the Newt 2012 campaign announced today in a fundraising email to supporters that Gingrich is “the most intelligent, most qualified” candidate in the race.
Gingrich’s campaign also offered the screen capture of a Drudge Report banner headline on Newt, and an admittedly “not scientific” Newsmax poll as evidence of Gingrich’s growing support.
“We’ve known all along that Speaker Gingrich is the most intelligent, best qualified candidate for President,” wrote Gingrich’s campaign manager, Michael Trull, “and more and more people are starting to agree.” The Newsmax poll, an online survey, showed Gingrich with 29 percent support, good for a 12-point lead over Herman Cain and former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass.
Public Policy Polling, a Democrat-leaning polling firm, also released a survey last week showing Gingrich in third place, ahead of the faltering former frontrunner Gov. Rick Perry, R-Texas.
Gingrich promised in an email yesterday that, as the Republican nominee, he would “challenge President Obama to a series of 3-hour Lincoln-Douglas style debates.” Gingrich also said that he would “hound Obama in a similar fashion that Lincoln had to hound Douglas to get him to debate.” The Republican hopeful even promised he would let Obama use one tool that his predecessor, Sen. Stephen Douglas. D-Ill., never had: “his teleprompter.” (Douglas’ Senate seat is actually held by Obama’s former colleague, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill.)
To help win the nomination, Gingrich’s campaign intends to release an ad featuring clips of Gingrich “owning the debates and proving that he is the only Republican candidate with both the intelligence and the record of accomplishments” to defeat President Obama, as Krull put it in today’s message.
