Republican presidential candidate took aim at President Obama, denied ever doing any lobbying and called out House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in a wide-ranging interview with Larry Kudlow Tuesday.
The new front-runner, now leading Mitt Romney in a new nationwide Gallup poll, acted the part by largely ignoring his Republican opponents and going after President Obama.
In comparing himself with Obama, he said, “We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food stamp president in the American history in Barack Obama and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.”
The former House Speaker went on to say Obama represents a hard-left radicalism. He, on the other hand, wants big tax cuts and big cuts in the federal government.
Gingrich also reiterated his claim that he is not a lobbyist. While he’s been steadily rising in the polls, he’s also been under scrutiny for his consulting work with mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
“I do no lobbying; I’ve never done any lobbying. It’s written in our contracts that we do not do any lobbying of any kind. I offer strategic advice,” he said. “The advice I offered Freddie Mac was, in fact, aimed at how do you help people get into housing.”
He advocated breaking up Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae into four or five former units because he feels they are unmanageable at their current size.
Gingrich also responded to Nancy Pelosi’s recent comment that she would reveal information about the ethics investigation into Gingrich in the 1990s.
Pelosi told the website Talking Points Memo, “One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich. I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”
While Pelosi said she is referring to information that is in the public record, Gingrich warned that if she releases any non-public information, she’d be in violation of House rules. But either way, he said, it is a Christmas gift.
“The job of the Democrats was to get Newt Gingrich. They couldn’t beat any of our ideas so they decided to try to beat the messenger,” he said. “I think it actually will help people understand what happened in that period and how much of it was partisan.”
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