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When Rick Perry blew past Mitt Romney in a series of GOP presidential primary polls earlier this year, the Romney campaign sprung to action and issued a spate of attacks on the longtime Texas governor.

The same has not been true regarding Newt Gingrich. As the former House speaker has crept up in surveys of the Republican electorate nationally and in the early primary states, the Romney campaign turned up the heat on President Obama, doing so again on Monday.

With just five weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, Gingrich’s rise and Herman Cain’s demise figure to cause more turbulence in what has been a volatile race. But by hammering the president and his political apparatus again, Romney’s team tried to take the focus off the latest threat from a GOP rival.

Romney has directed most of his campaign efforts at winning the New Hampshire primary on Jan. 10, but the state’s only statewide newspaper, the Union Leader, endorsed Gingrich on Sunday instead. The publication took a sledgehammer to Romney four years ago, and he made a special effort this time around to court its publisher, Joe McQuaid -- but to no avail.

The Union Leader carries considerable influence with the Granite State’s Republican electorate, and McQuaid told RCP in August, “I think [our endorsement] gives a candidate a second look by the voters. And not only will we say we like the candidate, we’ll smack the others around.” That means that Gingrich is destined for continued favorable treatment from the paper’s editorial page, while Romney may not like what he’s in for over the next several weeks.

But rather than simply take that punch, the Romney campaign circulated 29 press releases on Monday, many of which promoted a dozen conference calls on which reporters could hear from high-profile swing-state legislators and other politicians who support the former Massachusetts governor. Not a single one of Romney’s releases mentioned Gingrich; all drilled down on Obama’s economic record while defending Romney’s.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was among the first surrogates to hold a conference call, and on it he pushed Romney’s economic record with talking points that have gotten lost amid Democratic Party attacks, including that under Romney’s leadership, Massachusetts ranked 47th in the nation for job creation. Pawlenty, who himself withdrew from the presidential race in August, said that Romney added jobs as a governor while Obama has lost them as president, and that unemployment went down during Romney’s tenure but up during Obama’s.

Romney’s communications director, Gail Gitcho, explained that because the Democratic National Committee had just targeted her candidate with another ad -- this one airing in some swing states -- the campaign isn’t going to let it go without a strong response. Hence, the conference calls with surrogates to drive coverage in those states. The exercise had the dual purpose of showing that Romney’s campaign may be the only one with an operation in place to flex such muscles on a few hours’ notice, creating the sense that Romney’s nomination is inevitable, and that he is the best-suited GOP candidate against a powerful incumbent.

On one of the calls, Gitcho was asked about the optics the calls created -- that Romney’s strategy seems focused on the general election at the expense of the primaries, specifically Iowa. “Our strategy is to win there,” Gitcho replied.

Of course, the candidate has spent little time in the Hawkeye State, which has become a free-for-all just several weeks ahead of the caucuses. Gingrich, Romney, Herman Cain and Texas Rep. Ron Paul are all polling about evenly in recent surveys.

But with allegations Monday from an Atlanta woman, Ginger White, that she carried on a 13-year affair with Cain, the onetime front-runner is likely to see more of a dip in Iowa, according to several Republican operatives there who have spoken to conservative activists in the state. And if that happens, Cain’s support could shift to another candidate and tilt the balance and outcome in the state.

And though Gingrich and Romney are both on the rise in Iowa, the race there is far from over. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a conservative Arizonan known for his hard-line stance on immigration, endorsed Rick Perry over the weekend and plans to hit the campaign trail with him this week. That endorsement might help Perry mitigate some of the damage he sustained for having earlier expressed a moderate position on illegal immigration.

Perry’s team also issued a direct-mailing in Iowa last week targeted at veterans, and sources say he will send another veterans-focused mailing a week from now to more than 100,000 Iowans who are hunters. The message of both is that Perry served in the military -- a distinction he can continue to use against Gingrich and Romney, who lack that experience.