How Newt Gingrich won over the tea party

"I think as tea partyers concentrate on that ... they'll say, `Wow, this really isn't the guy that would represent our views,' " Romney told reporters in Charleston, S.C., on Saturday. "I think the tea party is anxious to have people who are outside Washington coming in to change Washington, as opposed to people who stayed in Washington for 30 years."

Yet Gingrich's tea party strategy, at least for now, keeps paying off.

Without the financial resources or campaign structure to keep up with Romney, Gingrich has actively courted tea party adherents, much as Herman Cain did before he left the race amid accusations of infidelity. Gingrich was an early signer of the Contract From America, a tea party position statement patterned on Gingrich's own Contract With America. Gingrich also threw his support behind the 2009 tax day rallies, helping to give early legitimacy to the tea party movement.

He courted tea party organizations so aggressively in South Carolina that Bachmann cried foul, alleging that the Gingrich campaign was paying for support. There is no evidence of that occurring, and Gingrich's campaign has flatly denied it, as have tea party members in that state.

Gingrich's campaign has hired local tea party leaders in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

“Gingrich has been very clever in using the energy of the movement to propel his campaign in ways that Romney has just been tone deaf,” Michael Patrick Leahy, co-founder of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition recently told Owen Brennan, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.

Gingrich is no tea party shoo-in. He will have to prove that he's more committed to conservative principles than he's let on in the past. And that he's seasoned and disciplined enough to take on Obama.

“There's certainly positions he's taken that would find a lot of support in the tea party, but the problem for Gingrich is that he's taken a lot of positions over the years, some of them consistent with the philosophy of the tea party, but others that would not be,” says Professor Black, at Emory.

The straw poll win for Gingrich came with cautious approval from Jenny Beth Martin, a Tea Party Patriots coordinator. “An overwhelming number of activists from around the nation showed they are serious about electing a candidate who advances tea party principles,” she said. "Just as in 2010, candidates like Newt Gingrich will need to show they will be fiscally responsible and protect the Constitution in the White House."

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