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Annapolis, Maryland (CNN) – On Tuesday, Newt Gingrich reiterated a date when he might potentially drop out of the presidential race. But the candidate’s stance came with one major condition.

Romney has to clinch.

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“Gov. Romney is the frontrunner but is a long way from a majority,” the Republican presidential candidate said during a news conference at Maryland’s capitol building in Annapolis. “If [Romney] does get, by the time Utah votes on the 26th of June, if he gets a majority, obviously I will support him and will be delighted to do anything I can to help defeat Barack Obama.”

But in his next breath, Gingrich reiterated what he’s long said: he’s in for the long haul, should Romney fall short of the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination by the Utah primary – the last contest of this cycle.

“If however we get to June 26 and Gov. Romney does not have a majority, I think you’ll then have one of the most interesting, open conventions in American history,” Gingrich said.

“It’ll be a 60-day dialogue on television, radio the internet all the way up to Tampa. And the question will be asked: who can best beat Barack Obama? And at that point I think most Republicans agree that I would probably do a better job debating Obama than any other candidate. And I think it becomes a very viable, very lively campaign.”

The former House speaker’s words echoed comments he made just one day earlier in an interview on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

“Everyone seems to agree that getting to the magic 1,144 for you right now before the convention isn’t possible, do you agree with that?” anchor Wolf Blitzer asked the candidate.

After acknowledging Romney’s front-runner status, Gingrich added: “He’s the weakest front runner in modern times. If he can get to 1,144, he’s the nominee. But if he can’t get to 1,144, on 26th of June, it will be a wide open primary at that point if Romney can’t clinch it.”

Gingrich badly trails Romney in two areas that matter in the march to the nomination: delegates and cash.

By CNN’s estimates, Gingrich holds 136 delegates to 569 for the former Massachusetts governor. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has 262 delegates.

In terms of cash, Romney raised million in February, according to financial disclosure forms, versus Gingrich, who raised .6 million last month. And while Romney’s campaign reported no outstanding debt, Gingrich’s campaign held the largest debt for any GOP presidential effort, owing a total .5 million.

On Tuesday, Gingrich acknowledged his campaign is cash strapped. For example, the campaign has started charging supporters to take a picture with Gingrich.

“The money is very tight, obviously. That’s why we’re trying to raise more money,” the candidate said.

A reporter asked: does he have the money to keep going?

“Yes. I have the money to keep going,” Gingrich responded.

“Clearly we’re going to have to go on a fairly tight budget to get from here to Tampa. But I think we can do it. And I think we will do it. And it’s going to take a lot of work on our part. But we have a lot of supporters who want us to do that.”

– CNN’s Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

Also see:

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Tom Mulcair, the new leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, is yet more vivid proof that we are living in post-partisan times in Canada.  

As you can't help but notice, we now have a former Quebec Liberal heading up the federal New Democrats, and a former NDP premier heading up the federal Liberals. The Conservative party is trying already to present Mulcair as an opportunist, because he shopped around a bit before landing in the NDP. 

But let's not forget: the Prime Minister is a man who started his life as a Toronto Liberal, then became  a progressive conservative, then a founding member of the Reform Party, then leader of the Canadian Alliance, then leader of the modern Conservative party. And as some suggest — most recently in  a powerful reproach by columnist Andrew Coyne — it's not clear that Harper is all that conservative these days either. 

Shopping around for a political party is what politicians seem to do these days — not to mention the voters. It's what makes the Canadian political landscape "volatile," as the analysts like to say. In some pockets of Toronto, I'm reliably told, there are people who have voted in the past 18 months for  Rob Ford, Jack Layton and Dalton McGuinty — and probably see no contradiction between those choices. Voters just aren't all that into political parties these days: witness the fact that the main opposition party in a country of 34 million or so people could only roust 60,000 hardy souls to choose a new leader. 

It's just speculation, but I think the blurry partisan lines explain a lot about the nasty tone of politics in Canada these days. 

* First, when ideological/policy differences get fuzzy, the personal differences get sharper. It's easier to attack your opponent's personality than his/her complex, ever-evolving views. 

* Second, because the public doesn't seem to be all that ideological, you can't capture their attention with appeals on that front. Far better to present your rival as a cartoon character: a bully/dictator/weakling/whatever. 

* Third, because there are so few people actually involved in politics, the parties themselves become small tribes, filled with people who harbour memories and grudges of battles past. That's part of the back story, it seems to me, behind those odd new attack ads against Bob Rae, highlighting his record of 17 years ago in Ontario. Not only are the Conservatives still ticked about those years, they're trying to remind Liberals that he used to be their enemy and remind New Democrats that he turned his back on them. 

I suspect that Conservatives are going to try the same thing with Mulcair for a while, playing up his record as a former Quebec Liberal — which is led by a former leader of the old Progressive Conservative party in Canada, let's remember. Wait: Conservatives and Liberals, cats and dogs, living together? It's also happening in British Columbia right now as well, where B.C. Liberal leader Christy Clark is (somewhat infamously)  amassing former Harper advisers on her team. 

It all means we shouldn't take it all that seriously when politicians try to present their partisan divides as sharp ones. They're all shopping around, just like we are.

The real and polarizing divisions in Canada are regional, linguistic and, most worryingly of late, income-based. It would be good to hear the politicians talking about bridging those differences.  

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(CNN) – In a message to his followers Saturday, Matt Romney posted a photo of his father, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, at the movies with his wife and grandkids.

Matt Romney later said the group went to see “The Hunger Games.”

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(CNN) – Rick Santorum holds a substantial lead over the other Republican presidential candidates in Louisiana ahead of the state’s Saturday primary, according to a new survey.

The American Research Group poll showed the former Pennsylvania senator received 43% support among likely Republican voters, ahead of rival Mitt Romney’s 27%, Newt Gingrich’s 20% and Ron Paul’s 6%.

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Santorum led among self identified supporters of the tea party and those who do not back the grassroots movement. He also received the top spot among men with 42% to Romney’s 24%, Gingrich’s 21% and Paul’s 9%. Among women he received 44% support, followed by Romney’s 30%, Gingrich’s 19% and Paul’s 3%.

Friday’s results mirror other polling taken in the Pelican State that shows Santorum’s message resonating in the state, in which 20 delegates are at stake.

ARG surveyed 600 likely Republican primary voters between March 20 and March 22 with a sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points.

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 Watergate is getting tossed around a lot in the swirling controversy over robocalls in the last election. It may be fun to find the similarities — tapes! dirty tricks! — but the differences are far more interesting. 

First of all, as one of the actual Watergate operatives points out in a story today, the level of dirty tricks being alleged here are on a totally different scale. In effect, this is worse. On CBC Radio's The Current this morning, former chief electoral officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley also makes the point that the magnitude of the charges here goes far beyond run-of-the-mill pranks and dirty tricks between political rivals. 

** Update ** As I was writing this, the Commissioner of Elections Canada sent out a press release notifying us that:  "More than 31,000 contacts have been iniitated with Elections Canada by Canadians. (And) Elections Canada is reviewing these…" 

Second, Watergate was broken with the help of anonymous sources. It's been interesting to see the absence of them in this story. Oh, Conservatives are talking off the record (and by the way, the serious ones are very concerned, not huffing and puffing about conspiracies and victimhood) but  no one is  feeding any details to the media, as far as I can tell. Frankly, I think that may change when the people behind the fraud calls — and we should stress, no one knows for sure whether they're actual Conservatives — really do realize they could be facing jail time. My instincts tell me that whoever is behind this thought it was a fun prank, on the same all-in-good-fun spirit as defacing lawn signs, disrupting rallies or calling people outrageous names to get a rise out of them. 

Third, the Watergate scandal took place in the 1970s, when tape recorders were still new to journalists and politicians. (Fun, I'm-old fact — when I started in political journalism in the late 1980s, the use of tape recorders was frowned upon, believing it made us lazy note-takers, and if we wanted them, we had to pay for them ourselves.) 

It's actually the technology, unheard-of in the 1970s,  that makes this whole robo-call controversy possible. Just have a look at this search warrant to see the technical complexity of this investigation.  

Moreover, the reporting of this tale is heavily reliant on tools of the Internet and social media, which means it's unfolding in real time.

 This has made some Conservatives quite annoyed/vexed — what kind of reporting relies on Twitter tips and Internet registries of suspicious calls?  My answer is that this is just old-fashioned reporting — tips are kind of important to journalists — conducted in the open.  Twitter has turned journalism into kind of an ant farm, where you can sit and stare for hours through the glass, watching reporters do their jobs (complete with all the smart remarks and irreverent jokes made during the sitting-around-waiting-and-watching bit that consumes a lot of our days.) 

The Watergate reporters built their stories away from the glare of the public. They took tips, pursued them, proved them, and then published. Right now, in the robocalls controversy, you're simply seeing that process in the open. Transparency!  One of the Conservative talking points in the last few days, for instance, is that all we have here are allegations, no evidence. Actually we have bits and pieces of both. I asked some lawyers on Twitter this morning about the distinction between allegations and evidence. Here's my favourite answer (sent in by a fellow I've known since he was legal counsel to my student newspaper at Western and the student council there.)  

 @Tony5083: Allegations are bald assertions: "The light was red." Evidence goes to proof of an assertion: "I saw a red light."

 

So these recordings that are now turning up? Or the Internet registries? Are they allegations? Or evidence? I lean toward the latter, actually. They're evidence being accumulated to back up the allegations. 

At any rate, I'd venture to say that what we're seeing here isn't Watergate, but Canada's first digital political scandal, made possible — and reported — through technology that wasn't available to Nixon or Woodward and Bernstein. It would actually be fun to imagine how Watergate would have happened with these tools. First, I guess, Nixon wouldn't have needed a physical break-in; all he'd have to have is a good computer hacker, or a Pierre Poutine with a cellphone. 

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Washington (CNN) – Mitt Romney headed to the nation’s capital Thursday to raise money for his front-running Republican presidential campaign, buoyed by recent primary wins and a key endorsement but also facing fallout from a top adviser’s gaffe.

A Wednesday comment on CNN by Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s senior campaign adviser, provided top rivals Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich with new ammunition to attack the former Massachusetts governor over shifting stances on issues such as health care and abortion during his career.

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