BY Robert Behre
rbehre@postandcourier.com CHARLESTON, S.C. — The morning after his epic exchange over his marital past in a CNN-televised debate, former Speaker Newt Gingrich cancelled his scheduled 9 a.m. appearance at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference and didn’t talk to reporters at his next stop at MUSC’s Children’s Hospital.
Gingrich tore into CNN debate moderator John King Thursday night when King asked him about a new televised interview that Gingrich’s ex-wife Marianne Gingrich gave to ABC News. She said their divorce occurred after Gingrich asked her for an open marriage.
While the debate audience gave Gingrich a standing ovation after he called the question “despicable,” it remains to be seen how the debate’s defining moment will play out Saturday, when South Carolina Republicans go to the polls for the first-in-the-South presidential primary.
Former U.S. Rep. Bob Livingston, a Louisiana Republican who served with and currently supports Gingrich, announced that “a scheduling conflict” prevented Gingrich from addressing the conference, which cohosted Thursday’s debate.
Livingston called Gingrich “volatile,” but noted how Gingrich has done well, and further his campaigned, during its many televised debates. “Newt came firing back,” Livingston said of Gingrich’s performance Thursday in the North Charleston Coliseum. “He’s Rocky Balboa.”
While Livingston cited a scheduling conflict, the crowd awaiting him inside the TD Arena on Meeting Street was sparse and seemed to contain as many media members as Republican voters.
The media horde had grown to more than 50 by the time Gingrich, his wife Callista and S.C. Speaker of the House Bobby Harrell arrived at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Gingrich toured its pediatrict emergency room, pediatric cardiology intenstive care unit, a hemotology-oncology win and ended his tour in the Children’s Hospital atrium, where Callista Gingrich read her book, “Sweet Land of Liberty,” to about five children as a person in an elephant suit and dozens of camera-weilding reporters looked on.
Gingrich left MUSC without talking to reporters and ignored shouted questions like, “Are personal issues valid in this campaign?”
Gingrich is scheduled to return to Mount Pleasant this evening for a veterans’ town hall, which is set to start at 8 p.m. aboard the USS Yorktown.