CEDING TO political pressure, the Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has promised to post his income tax returns on the internet tomorrow.
“We made a mistake in holding off as long as we did,” Mr Romney told Fox News Sunday. “It was a distraction. We want to get back to the real issues of the campaign.”
Mr Romney’s poor handling of demands that he release tax records contributed to the thrashing he received in the Republican primary in South Carolina on Saturday.
The former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich won with 40.4 per cent of the vote, compared to 27.8 per cent for Mr Romney, 17 per cent for Rick Santorum and 13 per cent for Ron Paul.
Only a week ago, Mr Romney had a double-digit lead over Mr Gingrich in South Carolina. Mr Gingrich’s surprise victory has thrown the nomination wide open. The contest is now expected to last well into spring.
For the first time since the primary system started in 1980, three different candidates have won the first three elections: Mr Santorum, Iowa, Mr Romney, New Hampshire and Mr Gingrich, South Carolina.
“I’ve beaten Mitt Romney,” Mr Santorum told ABC yesterday. “Newt Gingrich has beaten Mitt Romney. The idea that conservatives have to coalesce in order to beat Mitt Romney, well, that’s just not true any more. Conservatives actually can have a choice.”
After making the rounds of the Sunday morning chat shows, the candidates moved on to Florida, a bigger and more complex state with high rates for television advertising. Mr Romney has already spent $4 million on broadcasts there, but Mr Gingrich is holding off for the time being. Mr Gingrich has hired José Mallea, who was campaign manager for the popular Cuban-American senator Marco Rubio.
Saturday’s primary finally resolved the question of who will be the “non-Mitt” candidate, which has dominated the Republican campaign for the past year.
The race is now between Mr Gingrich and Mr Romney, to the chagrin of the Republican party establishment, who prefer Mr Romney. “I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party over time,” Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey told NBC.
“The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination,” Mr Gingrich replied on the same network. “We’re going to make the establishment very uncomfortable. We are going to demand real change in Washington.”
In his victory speech, Mr Gingrich called Ronald Reagan “an actor who made movies with chimpanzees” but “turned out to be one of our greatest presidents and ended up with the disappearance of the Soviet empire”.
He evoked Reagan again yesterday. “I’m happy to be in the tradition of Ronald Reagan as the outsider who scares the Republican establishment,” he said.
Mr Gingrich and Mr Romney are now embroiled in tit-for-tat demands that the other produce documents regarding episodes in their past.
Mr Gingrich commended Mr Romney for promising to release tax records, but said “his staff cleaned his computers after he left his governorship, and we don’t know how he developed [the healthcare reform known as] Romneycare.”
Mr Romney has called on Mr Gingrich to release documents he submitted to a house ethics committee investigation in 1996 and the report he wrote for the state-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac, which paid Mr Gingrich up to $1.8 million.
Mr Gingrich questioned Mr Romney’s authenticity, saying, he was “bouncing around trying to find a message”.
In his concession speech on Saturday night, Mr Romney said the Republicans “cannot defeat the president with a candidate who has joined his [President Obama’s] assault on free enterprise”.
Mr Gingrich yesterday accused Mr Romney of “trying to cleverly hide behind an argument that no high school debater would ever let stand”. Questioning Mr Romney’s character and judgment “is not an attack on business”, he said.
Mr Gingrich also criticised ABC television for broadcasting an interview with his ex-wife.
“It was almost as though ABC was an arm of the Romney campaign, deliberately trying to set the stage and rig the game,” he said.