Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich trails badly in the polls and calls for him to drop out the race continue to mount, but he found a burst of energy Saturday afternoon addressing the hometown crowd at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference held at a Radisson Hotel near Harrisburg not far from where he was raised.
Gingrich latched on hard to his Pennsylvania ties and to the legacy he built during his nearly four tumultuous years as Speaker of the House.
“I am proud to be here. I am a conservative. I did have an Etch-a-Sketch, but I thought that they were children’s toys, not presidential campaign devices,” Gingrich told the audience, hitting at comments by an aide to Gov. Mitt Romney that he would reset and shake clean like an Etch-a-Sketch once he wins the nomination. “Great parties are not built on sand but on great ideas.”
The former Speaker also took a swipe at rival and earlier speaker former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum by contrasting the four consecutive balanced budgets he created with President Bill Clinton with the record of the Senator’s leadership team.
“When Sen. Santorum was in the leadership they added $1.5 trillion to the debt,” Gingrich added, suggesting that Santorum played a major role in costing the GOP control of Congress in 2006.
Gingrich continued familiar campaign themes such as his recent call to restore gasoline to $2.50 per gallon, noting that the Obama administration’s refusal to drill for oil has in his opinion contributed to the current high gas prices.
The president has mocked Gingrich’s suggestion by continuing his mantra that “you can’t drill your way to lower gas prices,” but the former Speaker noted that increases in natural gas drilling has brought down prices and it would therefore be reasonable to think that increased oil drilling will bring down prices.
“President Obama belongs to the Sierra Club Flat Earth Society,” Gingrich said. “We need an energy policy that makes us independent and that never again does an American president bow to a Saudi king.
“The idea of walking arm-in-arm with the Saudis is ridiculous,” Gingrich continued. “They support Wahhabism, which is the most extreme form of Islam; 9/11 was not an Afghan job, it was a Saudi job.”
Gingrich continued by slamming the Obama administration’s support for the Chevy Volt, which has only sold 11,000 models in the past two years despite subsidies to the tune of $250,000 per car.
“If you can afford to buy gasoline then you won’t need to buy a Volt,” Gingrich said. “The Volt is a tough sell because you can’t put a gun rack in a Volt. And if you could put a gun rack in a Volt, where would you put the deer?
“If we were to unlock federal lands and offshore areas to drilling, it would generate between $16 and $18 trillion in the next 20 years,” Gingrich continued. “If we could have some discipline we could be debt-free in a generation.”
Gingrich concluded by arguing that Barack Obama’s spending needs to be checked and that taxes do not need to be raised to match his spending levels.
