Gingrich, Santorum face off in Republican forum

Published 2:07 pm Sunday, August 10, 2014

The theater that bills itself as “The Showplace of the South” was host to a bit of political showmanship on Monday, just prior to the Republican presidential primary.

Before nearly 2,000 loud party faithful, plus a balcony stuffed with local and national news media, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum took part in a forum staged by the Alabama Republican Party.

Both candidates took swipes at both President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the current front runner in the campaign who opted not to attend. (Texas Rep. Ron Paul was also a no-show.)

Santorum eventually won the primary, edging out Gingrich and Romney. Paul was a distant fourth.

Gingrich, speaking largely off the cuff as is his custom, started off by making light of Romney’s perceived lack of knowledge of Southern culture. “This morning when I had grits, I thought it was a very normal thing to do,” said Gingrich, who grew up in Georgia.

He also took presidential press secretary Jay Carney to task over comments made Monday morning which criticized Gingrich (though not by name) and his promise to bring down the price of gasoline to $2.50 a gallon through increased oil production and building the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

Carney said that anyone who said that goal could be achieved “is lying,” to which Gingrich responded with a quote from a Wall Street Journal article about America’s oil reserves. “The idea of ‘peak energy’ is a stupid idea, it does not exist, and it is technologically incoherent. It’s been the basis of American energy policy for four years, and it is wrong,” Gingrich said.

Santorum focused his remarks more on Obama’s health-insurance initiative, including the administration’s new policy requiring birth control and contraceptives to be a part of employee health benefits, despite the objections of religious groups such as the Roman Catholic church on moral grounds.

“If you don’t like it, even if the benefits are against are against your religious convictions, too bad — you will do what you are told with this new ‘right’ that you have,” Santorum said. “The problem is, government is not the source of rights in this country.”

Those comments elicited cheering from the crowd, which was about evenly split between Santorum and Gingrich supporters.