The guy who didn't effectively promise him a cabinet position:
Former U.N Ambassador John Bolton is set to endorse Mitt Romney and will join his top team of foreign-policy advisers, according to people close to the campaign. The move is a blow to Newt Gingrich, who is close to Mr. Bolton and said recently that he would nominate the former ambassador as his secretary of state were he to become president. The Bolton endorsement will help buttress Mr. Romney’s image as the more hawkish of the GOP candidates. The irascible Mr. Bolton had contemplated his own White House bid for much of last year before ruling out a run in the late summer.
Bolton, who had flirted with a presidential run of his own, will explain his decision to Greta Van Susteren on her Fox program this evening. In other endorsement news, the Wall Street Journal reports that a group of influential South Carolina conservatives with ties to Sen. Jim DeMint are also preparing to throw their support behind the former Massachusetts governor. DeMint has predicted that Romney will win his home state.
UPDATE (Thursday) - Video added:
It sounds like foreign policy worldview and general election viability factored heavily into the former UN ambassador's decision. Bolton said he thought "very hard" about the "extraordinarily important" question of whom to back, and ultimately landed on Romney. The GOP frontrunner's campaign is trumpeting the endorsement this morning, and is circulating this story about Jim DeMint defending their man against Republican attacks:
Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, is being attacked by a Newt Gingrich television ad ripping him for his past support of abortion. Gingrich, the former House speaker, also is criticizing Romney's leadership of venture capital firm Bain Capital for what he said was a history of taking over companies, extracting cash and leaving behind unemployed workers. DeMint countered Wednesday, telling conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that the only way to win the abortion battle is to convince people who support the right to abortion to become opponents and that "this idea of condemning people who have changed their minds is not a good idea for any of us."
Texas Gov. Rick Perry also tried to claw his way back into prominence by repeatedly hammering Romney's firm for "vulture" capitalism in which South Carolina workers lost jobs while Bain was profiting. Asked about Perry's line, DeMint told Ingraham, "I don't like that at all because I was in business a long time as a consultant to a lot of businesses. Everyone knows that over half of new businesses fail and that's part of the process of failing and getting up and succeeding. And I really think that to have a few Republicans in this race beginning to talk about how bad it is to fire people, certainly we don't like that, but it really gives the Democrats a lot of fodder." He added, "We need to understand the principles of our party."
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani asks Newt Gingrich, "what the hell are you doing?"
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who recently called Mitt Romney “a man without a core,” defended the GOP front-runner’s record as an executive at Bain Capital, calling the attacks against him “ignorant" and dumb. “I’m shocked at what they’re doing,” Giuliani said of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry Thursday on "Fox and Friends." “It’s ignorant and dumb. It’s building something we should be fighting in America, ignorance of the economic system, playing on the dumbest, most ridiculous ideas about how you grow jobs.” Giuliani also said the attacks were “unfair and bad for the Republican Party.”
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