Newt Gingrich addresses campaign cutbacks, will stay in the race

Reporting from Washington — 

Though he has announced his full-time campaign staff will be cut by a third, that his campaign schedule will be scaled back and his campaign manager has been replaced, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich remains adamant that he will stay in the race.

“[Mitt] Romney has to earn this. It’s not going to be given to him,” Gingrich said in an interview with Washington’s WTOP-FM Wednesday morning, soon after his campaign’s announcement of the cutbacks.

Putting his campaign in a sports context throughout the interview and evoking the St. Louis Cardinals’ underdog sprint to a World Series win last year, Gingrich continually stressed that he wouldn’t drop his candidacy despite its current struggles.

“None of you guys would call a football team or a basketball team and say, ‘Why don’t you drop out?’ You’d say, ‘There’s a season. Let’s play the season,’” he said.

But a recent CNN poll indicated that 60% of GOP voters want Team Gingrich to hang up their jerseys and go home.

Though Gingrich’s campaign has twice risen from the grave during the primaries, reaching its peak with a dominant win in South Carolina, since then the former House speaker has only won his home state of Georgia. His campaign’s February finances also revealed more debt, $1.55 million, than cash, $1.54 million.

Since the South Carolina win, Gingrich has gone from first in national polls to last place in the recent Illinois primary, falling far behind Romney’s current rival, Rick Santorum.

“Why do you guys try to reduce leading America to the smallest and pettiest and most personal questions? It’s about representing a set of ideas and a set of values that are really important,” Gingrich said after asked whether a personal disdain for Romney, the race’s front-runner, is a cause of the campaign’s continuation.

At a campaign stop in Wisconsin, the next battleground for the presidential hopefuls, Santorum weighed in on Gingrich’s announcements.

“One of the things I was told very early on in presidential politics is that you run for president as long as the money hangs on,” Santorum said of Gingrich’s financial woes on Tuesday. “Obviously, financially, it’s tough. I can certainly understand that.”

“I think it is time for all the Republican candidates to coalesce behind me,” Santorum said after asked directly whether Gingrich should drop out.

As for its next steps, Gingrich’s campaign will shift its priorities from a traditional strategy to one focused primarily on lower costs, with a larger emphasis on social media and video promotion. In the long term, Gingrich’s great hope is that by the time the GOP convention begins in August in Tampa, Fla., Romney will be without the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination. If that happens, Gingrich’s bet is that he can pull off that underdog victory he seems so confident of achieving.

morgan.little@latimes.com

Original source: Newt Gingrich addresses campaign cutbacks, will stay in the race