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by Jen Green

Is it possible to win a presidential race by running only a positive campaign? The answer seems to be negative.

Forty-five percent of the political ads purchased in the last month in Iowa have been attack ads against Newt Gingrich. Both Ron Paul and Mitt Romney (or their surrogates) have spent millions of dollars targeting the former speaker of the house. Even Rick Perry has gone after him in his copious direct mailings. On Friday at a campaign stop in Des Moines hosted by cafemom.com, Gingrich acknowledged that it took a lot to withstand the attacks and that they had indeed hurt his standings in the polls. Admittedly, he wanted to remain positive in largely the same way that Reagan had run his campaigns.

On Sunday, he renewed his pledge to stay as positive as possible while campaigning in Iowa but to be “more aggressive” against Romney in New Hampshire. That didn’t keep him from saying what many have thought for the last four years, that “Romney would buy the election if he could.” Newt also gave us a bit of foreshadowing into the issues he’ll be engaging Romney on in New Hampshire by saying, “I think New Hampshire is the perfect state to have a debate over Romneycare and to have a debate about tax-paid abortions, which he signed, and to have a debate about putting Planned Parenthood on a government board, which he signed, and to have a debate about appointing liberal judges, which he did.”