Newt Gingrich: Mitt Romney surrogate still mad I wouldn’t back Bush tax-hike deal in 1990

(By Ed Morrissey, Hot Air) - One of the more curious strategies employed by the Mitt Romney campaign has been the deployment of former Governor John Sununu as a surrogate to attack Newt Gingrich for being insufficiently conservative. Sununu makes a good surrogate in general for Romney, especially in New Hampshire, but as Byron York has been reporting, Sununu is on very shaky ground attacking Gingrich on conservatism. As chief of staff to former President George H. W. Bush, Sununu engineered the tax-hike budget deal that violated Bush’s “read my lips” pledge, which caused a conservative revolt and ended up costing Bush the election.

Gingrich publicly opposed the deal, and now blames the disagreement for Sununu’s attack:

Gingrich recalled that he warned the Bush White House not to make the deal. “I kept telling them, this is a trap, you should not raise taxes,” Gingrich told me. “And they were clever.”

I said it seemed that Sununu is still mad at Gingrich. “Oh, I think he is,” Gingrich responded. “Because it all blew up. It turns out they shouldn’t have broken their word and raised taxes. I think if you’re the engineer of a policy that blows up, you have to blame somebody other than yourself.”

“I just think to pick a fight over tax increases and breaking your word and flip-flopping, and to have [Sununu] as a spokesman for that particular campaign is an unusual choice,” Gingrich said. “But it’s their choice.”