ORLANDO — After keeping evangelical Puerto Ricans and
bored Tea Partiers waiting in a half-empty church sanctuary for
nearly an hour on Saturday, Newt Gingrich arrived at
the Centro de La Familia in Orlando and promised
to support Puerto Rico’s bid for statehood; agitate for a Cuban
spring; instruct Congress to repeal Sarbanes-Oxley, Obamacare, and
Dodd-Frank; and personally shake the hand of—and take a picture
with—every person in the room. 

Before Gingrich arrived at the center, Puerto Rican men in suits
roamed the sparsely populated sanctuary and women wearing their
Sunday Best gently fanned themselves with signs that read, “Don’t
believe the liberal media,” while Chris Tomlin
classics “Better Is One Day” and “We Cry Holy” trickled out of
the PA system. The crowd came alive as Don Carlos
Méndez, mayor of Aguadilla City, Puerto Rico, took the
stage to introduce Gingrich. 

“I
do believe that Newt Gingrich is going to be the next president of
the United States,” Mendez said, to wild applause. “And I do
believe that Callista, his wife, Callista Gingrich is going to be a
wonderful first lady. The best first lady ever!” 

Gingrich took the stage, shook Mendez’s hand, and introduced a
surprise endorsee, a “county commissioner” who wanted to “say a
word or two.” While Mendez’s endorsement brought the house
down, the second, supposedly more local one, resulted in a few lazy
claps: The commissioner was from Longwood, which is not only not a
part of Orlando, but not even in the same county. 

With endorsements out of the way, Gingrich got down to the
business of bashing rival Mitt Romney for being in Wall Street’s
pocket. “My competitor on Tuesday has money power,” he said.
“There’s no question on Tuesday he can raise more money from Wall
Street than I can. What I want to have is people power. I want to
ask each one of you to go out on Facebook, and Youtube, and
Twitter, and on email, even by telephone and talking to people face
to face—the old fashioned way,” Gingrich said, because “this is a
very important election.”  

Gingrich then dipped his toe into policy, saying that repealing
Dodd-Frank would “help housing get better literally overnight. It
wouldn’t get healthy, but it would get better.” The real
problem with Dodd-Frank, Gingrich said, is that people can’t get
housing loans. Perhaps if Floridians’ chief problem were not
repaying the loans they currently have, this proposal would have
gotten some more applause. As it was, Gingrich went from
Dodd-Frank, to Obamacare, to Sarbanes-Oxley without getting much
applause (and absolutely none for Sarbanes-Oxley). 

The former House speaker struck his first chord by promising to
support Puerto Rican statehood. “I want you to know that if the
people of Puerto Rico have a referendum, and they vote for
statehood, I will work with Congress to ensure that we work through
that. I think in every way we have an opportunity here—I’m not
urging people to vote one way or another, I think people in Puerto
Rico have to make their own mind up—I will work with the governor
and we will work with the Congress.”

Perhaps under the impression that all Spanish speakers care
about Cuba, Gingrich then promised to ignite a “Cuban spring.”

“I find it amazing that President Obama can look east thousands
of miles to Tunisia, Libya and Syria, but he can’t look south 90
miles,” Gingrich said (getting absolutely no applause from the
largely Puerto Rican audience). “And I just think we’ve been far
too slow and far too passive. You have my committment that we will
work very aggressively and very directly in helping the people of
Cuba, and also frankly in helping the people of Venezuela, where we
have an opponent in Huge Chavez, where we need to do something to
make sure he is not effective in undermining the United States.”
(This line got quite a bit of applause.)

Gingrich then laid out a case for not nominating a moderate,
saying the GOP nominated moderates in 1996 and 2008. “I think
frankly that Romneycare and Obamacare are so close together,”
Gingrich said, putting his left and right pointer fingers together,
“that you could never distinguish them in a debate.” 

“So I think we need somebody out here,” he said, spreading his
arms wide. From the crowd, a young Puerto Rican woman yelled,
“That’s you!”