KUDLOW: At least on the language and your approach on that. Let me ask you something else. This is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. On the top of the Drudge page you've got all these attacks on you coming from conservatives. All right? Let me read the toughest one, let you respond. My friend Elliot Abrams, who worked in the Reagan State Department and the National Security Council, he says that you really weren't close to Ronald Reagan, that, in fact, you were attacking and criticizing Reagan during the middle '80s and he used a quote from a speech you made I think on the floor of the House, "Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet Empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing and, without a dramatic change in strategy, is going to continue to fail." Do you want to respond to that?
Rep. GINGRICH: Sure.
KUDLOW: You are arguing in the campaign that you were a Reagan follower and a Reagan intimate. Elliot Abrams and others are saying it's not true.
Rep. GINGRICH: Well, you'll notice an orchestrated Romney supporter attack once again painting a falsehood. Tony Dolan, speech writer for eight years, will tell you I worked very closely with him. Bud McFarlane, National Security adviser for five years, will tell you I worked very closely with him. Michael Reagan has endorsed me. In 1995, Nancy Reagan said, `The torch of conservatism has been passed from Ronnie to Newt.' That was at the Goldwater Institute in 1995. All of a sudden you have a handful of Romney supporters creating a totally fictitious version of the 1980s for one purpose, to try to prop up Romney. Now, let me--let's make a point here. Romney in the 1980s was an independent. Romney in 1992 gives money to Democratic candidates for Congress, votes in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. Romney in 1994 runs for the Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy and says, `I was never for the Reagan and Bush policies. I am an independent. I would not want to bring them back.' This is the campaign. He was the anti--Romney's the anti-Reagan Republican. This is the campaign trying to somehow smear me and distort my entire history. And you know personally, Larry, because you and I were engaged in it that we worked on supply-side economics before Reagan adopted it. We worked to pass it in '81 with Reagan. And to come back in and have the anti-Reagan, which is what Romney is, decide that he's going to somehow disrupt my historic record I think is typical of the dishonesty of the Romney campaign.
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