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Knives come out for Newt

WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich has already boldly declared he will be the Republican presidential nominee, and spent part of his day on Thursday brushing off an attack by those close to Mitt Romney, the suddenly flailing second-place candidate in a topsy turvy battle for the nomination.

WASHINGTON — Newt Gingrich has already boldly declared he will be the Republican presidential nominee, and spent part of his day on Thursday brushing off an attack by those close to Mitt Romney, the suddenly flailing second-place candidate in a topsy turvy battle for the nomination.

“The only opponent I have is Barack Obama,” Gingrich said in South Carolina when he was questioned about accusations by the Romney camp that he is too “irrational” and “unreliable” to be president.

Confidence is rarely in short supply for Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.

But as his soaring campaign stuns the U.S. political world, the knives are coming out — and not just from his fellow candidates, but from congressional Republicans and even a disgraced one-time D.C. lobbyist who disputes Gingrich’s insistence he’s never dirtied his hands in such a profession.

“I don’t want to say he’s lying, he may believe what he’s saying, but people have to understand that lobbying isn’t just going to meet with members,” Jack Abramoff, who spent three years in prison for fraud and corruption, told the congressional newspaper The Hill on Thursday.

Gingrich, 68, denies ever lobbying on behalf of mortgage and health-care companies that paid him millions of dollars in consulting fees. He says he was hired as a mere “historian” by despised mortgage giant Freddie Mac, for example.

“I just want to emphasize this: I did no lobbying, I did not reach out to Capitol Hill. I was not directly engaged in that way. I gave them advice on what they could do. But I’m not in the business of lobbying, period,” Gingrich said in November.

But Abramoff says Gingrich certainly profited from his work, and urged Capitol Hill to crack down on the common practice of lawmakers who leave politics to join lobbying firms with a well-placed jab at the candidate.

“Close the revolving door between public service and cashing in entirely ... not this ’I’m going to be a strategic adviser, or a history professor,’ or whatever the euphemism of the day is going to be,” Abramoff said.

Some of Gingrich’s former colleagues still serving in Congress, meantime, are warily eyeing his unexpected success on the campaign trail just four weeks before the crucial first Republican primary in Iowa.

Rep. Steve LaTourette of Ohio told The Associated Press he’s still suffering a “hangover” from Gingrich’s tumultuous years as speaker of the House, when “everything always seemed to be on fire.”

“I’d rather have steady,” he said.

Others have simply refused to talk about him, while Sen. John McCain damned him with faint praise, saying it would be “quite an achievement” if Gingrich were to win the nomination.

Two top Romney supporters — Missouri Sen. Jim Talent and former New Hampshire governor John Sununu — also held a conference call on Thursday to take aim at Gingrich.

“He is not a reliable and trustworthy conservative because he is not a reliable and trustworthy leader,” Talent said, predicting Obama would defeat the former speaker in a general election.

And yet a slate of new polls suggest Gingrich’s rise is real and that he could hold his own against Obama in a general election. And a CNN/Time survey shows him winning Iowa with 33 per cent of the vote, compared with 20 per cent for Romney and 17 per cent for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.

Key Obama strategist David Axelrod told the New York Times that the president’s re-election team now views Gingrich as a serious contender.

The timing of Gingrich’s ascent, in the aftermath of Herman Cain’s spectacular toppling from grace following the rise and fall of other candidates, couldn’t have been more fortuitous, said a longtime political observer.

“There’s no time for someone else to rise,” Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University in Washington, told a briefing at the Foreign Press Center.

“Gingrich is certainly capable, not just of shooting himself in the foot, but machine-gunning himself in the foot, with his loose talk and outsized ego. But the lovely thing for Gingrich is he doesn’t have that much time to fall. It takes a while after you’ve risen to fall, and Iowa’s less than four weeks away.”

Lichtman added that primary voters are so desperate for someone other than Romney that they are willing to overlook the thrice-married Gingrich’s scandalous personal history, and his ethics violations as speaker, to focus instead on the hard line he took against Democrats when Bill Clinton was president.

“Yes, he is an establishment Republican, but he was the conservative bomb-thrower back in the ’90s,” Lichtman recalled.

“He was willing to go after other Republicans, and he was the guy who said: ’We want to wage ideological warfare against the Democrats. We don’t want to compromise, we don’t want to work together; we want to obliterate them.”’

Gingrich, for his part, has been taking pains to meet with dubious Republicans to reassure them he’s a changed man. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who plotted his overthrow as speaker, said this week Gingrich is now a “different guy” than he was then.

In remarks to a business audience in South Carolina on Thursday, Gingrich even sounded a tone of uncharacteristic self-awareness.

“I am capable of saying things that are indefensible,” he said.