Newt Gingrich cries when asked about his mom
- By
- Brian Montopoli
- Topics
- Campaign 2012
UPDATED 2:45 p.m. ET
DES
MOINES -- Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich broke down in
tears when asked about his mother at a campaign stop at a coffee shop
here Friday.
Asked by pollster and Republican consultant
Frank Luntz talk about a "special moment" he remembers about his late
mother, Gingrich first responded, "first of all, you're going to get me
all teary-eyed - Callista will tell you, I get teary-eyed every time we
send Christmas cards."
He then started crying, prompting
many in the audience - made up mostly of mothers - to say, "awww."
Luntz is known for asking questions to get answers based on emotion,
telling PBS' Frontline in 2003 that 80 percent of life is emotion to intellect's 20 percent.
"But,
uh -- excuse me - my mother sang in the choir," he said, speaking over a
crying baby in the audience. "And loved singing in the choir. And I
don't know if I should admit this, but when I was very young, she made
me sing in the choir."
He went on to discuss how his
mother, Kathleen Gingrich, is someone who he remembers "loving life" and
"having a sense of joy in her friends." He then talked about how she
lived in a long-term care facility toward the end of her life, which led
him to emphasize brain science and other issues in his public life.
As
he talked about what he called "the real problems of real people in my
family," he began crying again. Gingrich's comments prompted
enthusiastic applause from the audience. Later, one of his daughters
brought him a tissue to wipe his eyes.
Gingrich went on to discuss how his mother spent "27 years as
an army wife" as part of a culture that valued patriotism and duty. He
said that if his mother were here today he would tell her he would "do
everything I can as a candidate to be worthy of ourselves."
Newt Gingrich wipes away a tear while speaking
about his deceased mother during a question and answer forum put
together by Moms Matter 2012 at Java Joe's, a coffee shop, on December
30, 2011 in Des Moines, Iowa.
(Credit:
Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)
Before she died, the Daily Beast
reported last week,
Kathleen Gingrich discussed how she "almost didn't survive" her
difficult years raising Newt and Gingrich's violent stepfather, saying
she "had manic-depressive illness."
Gingrich's
remarks came at the end of an hour long question and answer session with
about 150 Iowa mothers at Java Joe's coffeeshop in Des Moines. It was
his second stop of the day on his campaign tour around Iowa ahead of the
January 3 caucuses.
Earlier in the question and answer session
with Iowa mothers, Gingrich was asked to convince the audience that his
claimed personality change after two divorces and a history of
infidelity reflect a "fundamental change of the heart and not just
political talk."
The remarkable thing about 
