Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is celebrating Valentine's Day with a new attack targeting rival Mitt Romney for supposedly getting love from the left.
Gingrich has rolled out the new offensive on a website called "Liberals Love Romney," which features a simple layout with cutouts of conservatives' most prominent liberal bugbears, from Saul Alsinsky to Al Gore. Each character includes a fabricated quote that underscores a story about Romney's persistent problems gaining the trust of conservatives.
The move comes amid a Gingrich campaign slide. As the former House speaker has stumbled, Rick Santorum has seen a rise to the top of the pack nationally, on the heels of a triple win last week, while Romney has taken key victories in a Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll and the Maine caucuses over the weekend.
Despite Romney's weekend triumphs, he is still struggling to shore up his conservative credentials, even after telling the CPAC crowd that he governed Massachusetts as a "severely conservative" governor. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced on Sunday that she was still "not convinced" about Romney's political ideology, and a poll released the next day showed that GOP voters still had the same concerns.