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If we elect newt, we might be able to live on the moon
, bet games on the moon, hell yeh
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. An aggressive Mitt Romney repeatedly challenged Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich in a fast-paced campaign debate Thursday night, ridiculing the former House speaker's call to build costly projects in key primary states and to colonize the moon.
Romney vehemently denied Gingrich's own accusation that he anti-immigrant more so than any other candidate. And, as charges flew back and forth, Gingrich rebutted any suggestion that he couldn't rein in surging federal spending.
"You don't just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done," Gingrich declared, saying that as speaker of the House he had helped balance the budget while doubling spending on the National Institutes of health.
The debate was the second in four days in the run-up to next Tuesday's Florida primary. Opinion polls make the race a close one slight advantage Romney with two other contenders, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Texas Rep. Ron Paul far behind.
Gingrich's upset victory in the South Carolina primary last week upended the race for the nomination to oppose Democratic President Barack Obama in the fall, and Romney in particular can ill-afford a defeat on Tuesday.
While the clashes between Gingrich and Romney dominated the debate, Santorum drew applause from the audience when he called on the two front-runners to stop attacking one another and "focus on the issues."
"Can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress ... and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy?" he said in a tone of exasperation.
There were some moments of levity, including when Paul, 76, was asked whether he would be willing to release his medical records. He said he was, then challenged the other three men on the debate stage to a 25-mile bike race.
He got no takers.
The first clash occurred moments after the debate opened, when Gingrich responded to a question by saying Romney was the most anti-immigrant of all four contenders on stage. "That's simply inexcusable," the former Massachusetts governor responded.
"Mr. Speaker, I'm not anti-immigrant, my father was born in Mexico," Romney declared. "I'm not anti-immigrant."
At the same time, Romney noted that Gingrich's campaign had been pressured to stop running a radio ad that called Romney anti-immigrant after Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called on Gingrich to do so.
He called on Gingrich to apologize for the commercial, but got no commitment.
About an hour later, Romney pounced when the topic turned to Gingrich's proposal for an permanent American colony on the moon an issue of particular interest to engineers and others who live on Florida's famed Space Coast.
A career businessman before he became a politician, Romney said: "If I had a business executive come to me and say I want to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I'd say, `You're fired.'"
The audience erupted in cheers, but Romney wasn't finished.
He said the former speaker had called for construction of a new Interstate highway in South Carolina, a new VA hospital in northern New Hampshire and widening the port of Jacksonville to accommodate the larger ships that will soon be able to transit the Panama Canal.
"This idea of going state to state and promising people what they want to hear, promising hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that's what got us into trouble in the first place," Romney said.
Gingrich responded that part of campaigning is becoming familiar with local issues, adding, "The port of Jacksonville is going to have to be expanded. I think that's an important thing for a president to know." He went on to refer to completion of an Everglades project that he did not describe, then noted he had worked to expand NIH while he was speaker.
Below, HuffPost's live blog coverage of the debate.
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Crowd That Cheered Mitt Wasn't Stacked, Florida GOP Says
It was hard not to notice that the debate audience in Jacksonville, Fla., on Thursday night enthusiastically cheered Mitt Romney's performance. That was a big change from the two debates last week in South Carolina, where Newt Gingrich got raucous applause from massive debate crowds in Myrtle Beach and Charleston.
After the debate ended, Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, wrote on Twitter: "Hidden story of this debate: Why was audience more pro-Mitt & less pro-Newt than others? JAX was pro-Mitt '08, but must be more to it."
HuffPost asked the Florida Republican Party's spokesman, Brian Hughes, how the tickets to the debate were allocated.
Hughes said the state party was responsible for 900 of the 1,200 tickets, and said he "bristled" at any suggestion the audience was stacked in anyone's favor.
"The vast majority of [the tickets] went to rank and file. We did a very thorough job of getting them to the rank and file, vetting them to make sure they went to registered Republicans, and then making sure they went out to people that were not knowingly affiliated" with any of the candidates, Hughes said.
"We worked very hard to ensure that the room was rank-and-file folks who represent the electorate that these guys are trying to speak to," Hughes said.
-- Jon Ward
Palestinian-American Republican Calls Out Candidates
"As a Palestinian-American Republican, I can tell you that such people do exist," a member of the audience told the GOP candidates at Thursday's debate, referring to Newt Gingrich's comments in December that the Palestinians are an "invented people."
But if the man asking the question hoped his presence would goad the candidates into moderating their pro-Israel positions, he was surely disappointed.
"The reason there's not peace between the Palestinians and Israel" is that the Palestinian leaderships in the West Bank and Gaza "have the intent to eliminate Israel," Mitt Romney said.
Romney further rehashed his view that Obama "threw Israel under the bus" by calling for a two-state solution that would be based on Israel's borders before the 1967 War, which resulted in Israel's annexing all of Jerusalem and occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The 1967 borders have long been the basis for the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Gingrich explained his earlier comments by saying that the Palestinian people was "technically an invention of the 1970s," which he claimed supplanted a general Arab identification that had been prevalent in the region.
In recent weeks, Gingrich-supporting super PACs have received $10 million from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife. Adelson is known for his hard-right views on Israel and strong support for Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Both Romney and Gingrich criticized President Obama for appeasing Israel's foes and not sufficiently supporting the Jewish state.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Obama said, "Our ironclad commitment and I mean ironclad to Israels security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history."
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