Now that Mitt Romney has won the New Hampshire primary, everyone and their mother are running political attack ads against him. At the front of the mudslinging pack is Newt Gingrich, who, between pledging to defend marriage against guys exactly like Newt Gingrich and serving as his own hype man, has found time to craft some pretty devastating anti-Romney ads.
One such ad set to run in South Carolina claims the former Massachusetts governor and current frontrunner is a pro abortion. Not just pro-choice, pro-everyone have abortions! The ad says that after Romney became pro-life, he kept governing as though he were pro choice. He expanded access to abortion pills! He filled the government with abortion advocates! He appointed judges and stuff who promised to force women to get pregnant on purpose and then have abortions just for fun and then everyone will get together and go to a gay bar to celebrate!
Except, as the Huffington Post's Laura Bassett points out, he actually didn't do that at all. She writes,
...after Romney dramatically changed his position on abortion in 2005, he did not "expand access to abortion pills." He vetoed a bill that would have expanded access to the morning-after pill by making it available without a prescription and requiring hospitals to offer it to rape victims.
If Mitt Romney actually did the things that Newt Gingrich said he did, he'd be a lot less shitty a candidate for women. But he didn't.
But Gingrich isn't only attacking Romney on the abortion front. One rich guy in Las Vegas is so opposed to the rich guy from Massachusetts garnering the Republican Presidential nomination that he poured $5 million of his own money into helping Gingrich produce a 28-minute documentary called "When Mitt Romney Came to Town." Spoiler alert: when Mitt Romney came to town, it was sort of like when Santa Claus came to town, except Romney fired everyone and rolled around in a pile of $100 bills laughing and laughing and laughing.
Although it's tempting to dismiss the Gingrich/Romney rivalry as "Rich White Dude in the 1% Problems," the accusation that Mitt Romney is a rich bastard beloved by other rich bastards isn't totally unfounded; of New Hampshirites who make more than $100,000 per year, Romney won 47% of the vote. As voters' income levels fell, so too did their support for Mittens.
In South Carolina, Romney may have difficulty convincing low-income voters that he's not a top hat-wearing abortion enthusiast like Gingrich says he is. Although, if Gingrich wants to be creative, he'd quickly commission a children's cartoon that depicts Mitt Romney as Scrooge McDuck, swimming around in his money bin situated high above the citizens of Duckberg while his sons Matt, Tagg, Josh, Ben, and Craig Huey, Dewy, and Louie around solving mysteries with their buddy Launchpad McQuack. Romneys! Woo-ooo.