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MOUNT DORA, Fla. -- Newt Gingrich trained his full arsenal of weaponry on Mitt Romney at a rally here Thursday morning, charging that his opponent wouldn't stand up to President Obama in a general election and questioning his commitment to the GOP.

It was the harshest critique Gingrich has leveled to date and may be a reflection of his slackened showing in the polls. It also underscored Gingrich's strategy of capitalizing on the free media and momentum he tends to capture in debates; tonight CNN is hosting the final debate before Florida voters render their judgment on Tuesday, and the former House speaker's remarks seemed designed to tee up a confrontational line of inquiry from moderator Wolf Blitzer.

Rather than ease into his standard stump speech, Gingrich lit into Romney immediately.

“Let’s be very clear,” he said the moment he took the stage, and then launched into a tirade against the former Massachusetts governor. He ripped Romney for holding stock in government-sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as Goldman Sachs, all while running ads about Gingrich making money off of Freddie Mac for working as a consultant.

The Republican primary race has devolved into a background check on the two front-runners haggling for the nomination, with both campaigns dribbling out attacks, one by one, against the rival’s connections to lobbying operations and other enterprises.

“They’re counting on us being too stupid, or too timid,” Gingrich seethed, suggesting that the Republican establishment sides with Romney and is trying to prevent Gingrich from honestly detailing his opponent’s connections to K Street and financial firms that have benefited during these difficult times while citizens at the bottom of the financial totem pole have suffered.

Standing in front of a calm lake on a warm sunny morning before a crowd of roughly 1,000 older voters, he used the kind of language that tugs at the heartstrings of the Tea Party, and lambasted the power centers of the GOP.

“Remember, the Republican establishment is just as much an establishment as the Democrat establishment, and they are just as determined to stop us,” Gingrich said to sustained applause. “Make no bones about it. This is a campaign for the very nature of the Republican Party, and the very opportunity for a citizen conservatism to defeat the power of money, and it’s to prove that people matter more than Wall Street, and that people matter more than all the big companies that are giving to camps that are running the ads that are false.”

His remarks come on the heels of a CNN/Time/ORC International poll released Wednesday that shows Romney creeping back ahead of Gingrich among Florida Republican voters, 36 percent to 34 percent, and an Insider Advantage survey putting Romney ahead by eight points. Gingrich briefly led in the RCP average of the Florida Republican primary (Romney is back up, by 3.4 points) and seemed to have captured the momentum after winning in South Carolina convincingly on Saturday. But that victory prompted the Romney campaign to retool and reload its own ammunition to blast Gingrich, calling him an “influence peddler” for Freddie Mac. The attack had worked in Iowa, causing him to finish fourth there.

Gingrich acknowledged during his remarks that Romney’s attacks have taken a toll.

Referring to his Hawkeye State loss, he said, “What happened is we were drowned in a sea of mud in Iowa. Mud paid for with special interest money, mud paid for by lobbyists in Washington. And a candidate who was willing to say anything and do anything because he’s so desperate to be president, he doesn’t think the truth matters.”