Gingrich and Romney trade blows

Newt Gingrich cast Mitt Romney as the most anti-immigrant candidate of the four contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in a heated campaign debate in Hispanic-heavy Florida.

“That’s simply inexcusable” and “repulsive”, the former Massachusetts governor shot back, showing new-found emotion and aggression compared with his earlier debate performances.

“My father was born in Mexico. I’m not anti-immigrant.”

Mr Romney quickly added that Mr Gingrich’s campaign had stopped running a radio ad that made the “anti-immigrant charge” after Cuban-born Florida Senator Marco Rubio called on him to do so.

Mr Romney said to Mr Gingrich concerning the ad: “I think you should apologise for it.”

As for immigration policy, it was difficult to discern their differences. Both men said they want to clamp down in illegal immigration, create programs to make sure jobs go only to legal immigrants and deport some of the 11 million men and women in the United States unlawfully.

The exchange came in the last Republican debate before next Tuesday’s Florida primary, which was seen as a key chance for Mr Gingrich to win a big southern state and stagger the momentum of the better organised and funded Romney campaign.

Opinion polls indicate the race is close, with two other contenders, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Texas Representative Ron Paul, trailing far behind.

Mr Romney’s strong debate seemed likely to boost his fortunes, setting the stage for a long, gruelling battle for months between the two leading Republicans in more primary states in the run-up to the party’s nominating convention this summer.

A more aggressive and assured Mr Romney assailed his chief rival, ridiculing Mr Gingrich’s call to build costly infrastructure projects in key political primary states and to colonise the moon.

A career businessman and venture capitalist before he became a politician, Mr 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.”’

As charges flew back and forth, Mr Gingrich rebutted any suggestion that he could not rein in surging federal spending.

“You don’t just have to be cheap everywhere. You can actually have priorities to get things done,” Mr Gingrich declared, saying that as speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s he had helped balance the US budget while doubling spending on the National Institutes of health.

Mr 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.

That seemed unlikely, given the stakes in the primary now five days distant.

Moments earlier, Mr Romney and Mr Gingrich had exchanged jabs over investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two US mortgage giants that played a role in the national foreclosure crisis that has hit Florida particularly hard.

Mr Gingrich said Mr Romney was making money from investments in funds that were “foreclosing on Floridians”.

Mr Romney quickly noted that Mr Gingrich, too, was invested in mutual funds with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He then added that the former House speaker “was a spokesman” for the two.

That was a reference to a contract that one of Mr Gingrich’s businesses had for consulting services. The firm was paid 300,000 US dollars in 2006.

Mr Gingrich raised questions about Mr Romney’s wealth and his investments. “I don’t know of any American president who’s had a Swiss bank account,” Mr Gingrich said.

Mr Romney replied that his investments were in a blind trust over which he had no control.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” declared Mr Romney, who has estimated his wealth at as much as 250 million US dollars.