Former House
speaker Newt Gingrich said the White House's response to the Benghazi attack
will continue to hurt Barack Obama's reelection campaign.
Gingrich said on
ABC’s “This Week” that Obama canceling campaign trips as a potentially
devastating hurricane sets its sights on the northeast is proof that all of the
plethora of issues dominating the national discourse is hurting the incumbent
president.
“You have to
wonder, between Benghazi, the price of gasoline, and unemployment, just how much
burden the president is going to carry into this last week,” he said. “If you're
the incumbent, you never get a break, because they had four years to decide
they're for you, and they ain't doing it the last week.”
Gingrich said
Obama would “love” to have Romney’s jobs record from his time as governor after
four years of the worst unemployment numbers since the Great
Depression.
The price of
gas, Gingrich added, is $2 a gallon more than it was when Obama took office in
2008, and in the face of that increase, Obama pumped money into now-bankrupt
green energy companies instead of easing the fuel burden.
“It goes down
every fall when the summer travel goes in — it is still the most expensive for
this time of year in American history,” he said. “So you have a president who
badly invested your tax money to distort energy policies, while making you pay
$2 a gallon more. That's a pretty tough record to go into Ohio or Florida, or
anywhere, and say to folks, ‘Why don't you keep voting for $2 more on gasoline,
because you like Obama so much, you don't mind paying for
it?’”
Gingrich also
criticized the Obama administration for its confusing messages about the
Benghazi attack, and the possibility that Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
canceled a rescue effort at the consulate. Newsmax.com
The U.S.
ambassador to Libya and three American members of his staff were killed in an
attack on the U.S. Consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi on September 11.
MSNBC The Obama
administration has yet to fully and directly address many lingering questions
about the Benghazi attack, including who approved the security for the
ambassador at the Benghazi compound, what decisions were made about sending
military reinforcements during the attack, and what the White House knew before
publicly attributing the attacks to an anti-Islam film. Huffington
Post Earlier in the
week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told reporters that amid the assault he
and two top commanders agreed that there was too little information to risk
deploying additional troops into the frenzied scene. Huffington
Post "The basic
principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s
going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place,"
Panetta said. Huffington Post The ongoing
controversy over the administration’s explanation of the motive behind the
killing of four consulate staff has mushroomed into a potent election issue,
with both Republicans and Democrats accusing the other of playing partisan
politics. Politico
AGB/HJ
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