Pat Dollard

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Agencie France Presse:

Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich barnstormed the key state of Iowa Tuesday, ripping his rivals’ attack ads and declaring himself the best candidate to beat President Barack Obama.

Scarcely two weeks before Iowans cast the first votes in the party’s nominating contest, Gingrich has been asking his supporters here to help him fight back as the barrage has battered his once-surging poll numbers.

“The next time you see one of the candidates who’s running the negative ads, ask them to take it off the air,” he implored some 200 people packed into the warehouse-like space of a clothing maker in Hiawatha, Iowa, on Monday.

Asked about a brutal campaign against him by the independent “Restore Our Future” group aligned with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Gingrich replied: “If you see Romney, ask him to take them off the air.”

At an earlier stop in Davenport, Gingrich bemoaned that other candidates for the Republican Party’s nomination were blasting “so much negative junk” to tear him down that they were “in effect doing Barack Obama’s work.”

The former House speaker recently clawed his way to frontrunner status on the strength of a series of well regarded debate performances, drawing sustained fire from the other candidates ahead of Iowa’s January 3 caucus.

But his support here has dropped by nearly half over two weeks, from 27 percent to 14 percent among likely caucus-goers, dropping him from first place to third behind second-place Romney and first-place Republican Representative Ron Paul, whose campaign has also been taking shots at the former speaker.

“Watch TV here for two days,” Gingrich told reporters in Davenport. “You get enough negative ads before you start answering them, your numbers go down for a while.”

And his national standing has ebbed as well, with a recent nationwide CNN survey of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents putting him in a dead heat with Romney, whom he led in a similar poll just weeks ago.

Looking to shore up his standing, Gingrich has set off on a campaign push in Iowa, with book signings or question-and-answer sessions at places like a private security firm, a small clothing company, a grocery store or coffee shop.

Despite his vows to run a positive campaign, Gingrich has been stepping up his attacks on his rivals and showing flashes of the volatile back-bench bomb-thrower he was when he first reached congress in 1979.

In Davenport, he took thinly veiled shots at Paul, who has denounced calls from Gingrich and others for military action against Iran and generally criticized what he describes as US overinvolvement overseas.

“I really stand apart from some of our candidates in believing that we need a strong defense, we need a very strong and, I think, thoroughly modernized intelligence community,” said Gingrich.

Asked about those comments, Gingrich denied he was talking about Paul, but coyly added: “If you want to draw that conclusion, I can’t stop you.”

And Gingrich also took aim at Romney, who ran for president in 2008 and has amassed a massive warchest as well as copious endorsements from established Republicans ahead of the November 2012 presidential and legislative elections.

“Some candidates have been running for five or six years, and have raised millions and millions of dollars. And they’re better organized than I am,” he said.

Gingrich allowed that he did not always stick by his pledge not to train his guns on fellow Republicans, saying: “Every once in a while, I slip when they get my goat and I can’t quite help myself.”

But he kept his heaviest fire for Democrat Obama, accusing him of embracing a “secular, European, bureaucratic socialist model” and charging “he doesn’t understand how to create jobs, he doesn’t understand national security and foreign policy.”