MOUNT DORA, Florida -- After an appearance before several hundred Tea Party supporters at a lakeside resort, Newt Gingrich reacted to the latest wave of criticism directed at him from members of the Washington-based conservative establishment. Members of that establishment, he said, are "sitting around in a frenzy, having coffee, lunch, and cocktail hours talking about how do we stop Gingrich."
I asked Gingrich to react to a new column by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of The American Spectator in which Tyrrell called Gingrich "conservatism's Bill Clinton" and hinted that Gingrich might be the subject of new allegations of philandering. "His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces," Tyrrell wrote, "and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out."
"Tyrrell has to write whatever Tyrrell wants to write," Gingrich said. "I've been running a campaign that's based on very large ideas. For example, the speech yesterday on Latin America, the speech yesterday on what we ought to do in space."
"I get a pretty good reaction from the American people on these large ideas," Gingrich continued. "And then there is the Washington establishment, which is sitting around in a frenzy, having coffee, lunch, and cocktail hours talking about how do we stop Gingrich?"
In addition to Tyrrell's column, Gingrich has been the subject of new attacks in the last 24 hours from former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, from National Review, from former Reagan and Bush White House official Elliott Abrams, from commentator Ann Coulter, and other conservatives. The effect of the attacks has been intensified by the Drudge Report, which has highlighted a number of them. A number of those conservative voices, particularly National Review and Coulter, have criticized Gingrich for months now, but the new wave of attacks comes at a critical time, with Gingrich locked in a head-to-head battle with Mitt Romney in the critical Florida primary. The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Romney slightly ahead of Gingrich, 36.2 percent to 33.6 percent.
