Newt Gingrich said last month that he would repudiate any ads by independent Super PACs that he felt were out of bounds. On Friday, his campaign said he was honoring that pledge by calling on a pro-Newt Super PAC, Winning Our Future, to take down ads attacking Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital years.
“This week, fact check organizations like The Washington Post and Politifact have ranked advertisements produced by Super-PACs supporting Governor Romney and myself as containing enormous inaccuracies,” Gingrich said in an e-mailed statement to reporters. “I am calling for the Winning Our Future Super-PAC supporting me to either edit its ‘King of Bain’ advertisement and movie to remove its inaccuracies, or to pull it off the air and off the internet entirely.”
The ads, which are backed by a $5 million donation from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, are running in South Carolina and highlight layoffs at companies that Bain bought out. But fact checkers have noted that a number of its case studies took place while Romney was not at the company, or were deliberately misleading about the impact of Bain’s management.
But Gingrich’s call for the ad to make sure it sticks to the facts is not without its edge. He goes on to demand Romney — whose independent Super PACs devastated Gingrich with negative ads in Iowa — follow his lead and repudiate “inaccuracie” from his own supporters.
“I am once again calling on Governor Romney to issue a similar call for the Super-PAC supporting him to edit or remove its ads which have been shown to contain gross inaccuracies, something the Governor has thus far refused to do,” Gingrich said
Benjy Sarlin
Benjy Sarlin is a reporter for Talking Points Memo and co-writes the campaign blog, TPM2012. He previously reported for The Daily Beast/Newsweek as their Washington Correspondent and covered local politics for the New York Sun.
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