Past opponents change tune on Romney

May 28, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTOn

The awkwardness of presidential politics was on full display Sunday morning as three former rivals of Mitt Romney were questioned about their past criticisms of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Sen. John McCain and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich each took to the Sunday talk shows and backed away from past critiques of Romney’s background.

Giuliani dismissed his criticisms as having “a certain amount of personal ego,” McCain defended free enterprise, which “can be cruel,” and Gingrich said Romney had done what he needed to do to explain his business background to voters.

Gingrich had led the attacks on Romney’s past, making his experience as chief executive of Bain Capital a key issue in the early primary states.

“The Bain model was to go in at a very low price, borrow an immense amount of money, pay Bain a great deal of money and leave,” Gingrich said earlier this year.

“Sure, I went straight at him on the Bain issue,” Gingrich said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Reminded that he had at one point in the primary campaign demanded that Romney convene a press conference where he “explains what happened to the companies that went bankrupt and why did Bain make so much money out of companies that were going bankrupt,” Gingrich said Sunday: “I think he did that.”

And McCain, asked on “Fox News Sunday” to respond to a 2008 statement in which he said Romney “managed companies, and he bought and he sold, and sometimes people lost their jobs,” also defended Romney’s business background.

“This is a free enterprise system,” McCain said Sunday. “Yes, the free enterprise system can be cruel. The problem with this administration is that small businesses have been the ones to suffer the most.”