Mitt Romney cries poor — falsely says Gingrich outspent him

[highplainsdem]

From the SF Chronicle's Politics blog:

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/01/31/mitt-romney-cries-poor-falsely-says-gingrich-outspent-him/

All the polls are predicting a BIG Mitt Romney win Tuesday in Florida, which isn’t surprising since Mitt outspent Newt Gingrich roughly 5:1 in the Sunshine State. Or $15.3 mill to $3.4 mill in combined Super PAC plus campaign spending.

-snip-

Earlier in the day, Mitt said he didn’t “buy” the Florida vote. Mitt said he had to respond to Newt after getting his tail kicked in South Carolina.

“You know in South Carolina we were vastly outspent with negative ads attacking me and we stood back and spoke about President Obama and suffered the consequence of that and also some good debates by Speaker Gingrich,” Romney said Tuesday in Tampa.

Perhaps that’s the reality on Planet Mitt. But on this planet, the reality was that Romney and his super PAC supporters bought $4.6 million of TV air time before S.C. primary on Jan. 21. Newt and his peeps: $2.2 million.

-snip-

[gratuitous]

1. I'm not trying to defend Mitt, but . . .

His words are "we were vastly outspent," not that it was Gingrich alone who vastly outspent the Romney campaign. He might have been referring to spending by all the other candidates, not just Gingrich.* Considering, though, how much money Romney has at his disposal, getting outspent anywhere is a solely a matter of a decision on allocation of resources. Romney's campaign may have decided that spending in South Carolina wasn't worth the bang for his bucks (Excluding, of course, the SuperPAC expenditures which are in no way ever ever coordinated with a particular campaign, and yes, I do believe in the Easter Bunny, why do you ask?), and he'd hold onto his money to be more profitably spent in Florida.

*Of course, Romney might have still outspent all the other candidates combined, and his whole whiny schtick is just so much hoohah.