Newt Gingrich loves technology, but apparently it doesn’t always love him back enough on its own and sometimes needs encouragement.

Gingrich has already been caught vastly inflating his Twitter following with phony accounts, and now CNN now reports that the campaign’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has been aggressively making dozens of edits of Gingrich’s Wikipedia page. DeSantis has attempted to scrub or embellish embarrassing information about Gingrich’s marital troubles, House ethics investigation, and $500,000 Tiffany credit line:

Wikipedia records show DeSantis has made over 60 adjustments to entries in the online, publicly-edited encyclopedia to the biographical entry on Gingrich, the similar page on his wife, Callista, and a separate page on one of their books, Rediscovering Good in America. [...]

DeSantis’ edits, which began in October of 2008, included rewriting, removing, and editing lines, including several edits to references of Gingrich’s marriages, according to Wikipedia edit records, which are published and publicly viewable on the site.

While it’s common for campaigns to monitor and request edits to their candidates’ Wikipedia pages, what’s surprising is the degree to which DeSantis, a senior campaign official, has personally gone to great lengths to micromanage his boss’s entry.

During a town hall event in Reno, Nevada Wednesday afternoon, Newt Gingrich lashed out at Mitt Romney for suggesting that helping the poor is not a priority. Gingrich quoted Romney’s remarks from CNN and explained, “it gives you a perfect distinction of our two approaches”:

GINGRICH: I’m fed up with politicians in either party dividing Americans against each other…the Founding Fathers wrote that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, among with are life and the pursuit of happiness. The Founding Fathers meant all of us. Let me shock the Wall Street crowd. The Founding Fathers meant the 1 percent, who they called Americans. The Founding Fathers meant the very poor, who they called Americans. My goal is to find steps for every American to have a job, every American to work, every American to buy a house. I believe America was founded on a dream that we are in fact created equal and we have a chance to go out and have a chance to pursue happiness and that nobody of any background should be denied.

Watch it:

Other Republicans are nudging Romney to reconsider his comments. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) — who endorsed Romney in 2008 — advised the former Massachusetts governor to “backtrack” and reframe his argument. “He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.”

Still, despite all their new-found concern for the middle class and the poor, all three Republicans — Romney, Gingrich, and DeMint — support policies that would substantially undermine safety net programs and result in massive giveaways to upper-income earners and investors, while doing almost nothing for middle- and low-income Americans.

As ThinkProgress has been reporting, GOP contender Newt Gingrich has built up quite the record of making derogatory, racially-charged remarks on the campaign trail. He frequently derides President Obama as a “food stamp president,” and said he would go to the NAACP and tell African-Americans they should “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.” More than 40 Catholic leaders recently challenged Gingrich to “stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes” with his divisive rhetoric.

Last night, Gingrich’s most prominent surrogate, former Communications Director Rick Tyler, went on the offensive during an MSNBC interview with Rachel Maddow and the Rev. Al Sharpton when asked about his candidate’s racial rhetoric. He accused the anchors of “race-baiting,” and claimed Democrats are hurting African-Americans:

TYLER: It’s baloney. MSNBC ought to get off this race-baiting kick…The Republican Party was founded by Abraham Lincoln…this was started as a civil rights party. If you go back to the 1856 Democratic platform it’s a racist platform…The Democratic Party — you can ask Al Sharpton about that, I think he would agree that the Democrats have failed in the public schools with the African-Americans. They abort their babies. They’ve done nothing to lift them out of poverty.

Watch it:

Sharpton retorted that it was Gingrich who was making race an issue in the campaign by singling out minorities for excoriation in his speeches.

Tyler resigned over Gingrich’s infamous Greek cruise, but has reemerged as the head of his Sheldon Aldelson-funded SuperPAC, Winning Our Future.

Mitt Romney crushed Newt Gingrich last night in Florida, but Republicans overall may have been less enthusiastic about either candidate. Despite the tremendous amount of media attention the race has received and candidates calling it “the most important election of your lifetime,” turnout was was down in the Sunshine State — and significantly.

In 2008, 1.94 million people voted in Florida’s GOP primary. This year, turnout stood at a little more than 1.66 million voters. All this despite efforts by Republicans to register many more voters in 2010. 1.34 million turned out in the 2000 GOP presidential primary, the last contested one before 2008.

Many observers look at turnout in primaries as a gauge of voters’ enthusiasm for their candidates going forward into the general. The depressed turnout in Florida reflects numerous polls showing Republican voters to be dissatisfied with their current choices and wishing someone else would enter the race — almost 60 percent in a recent CBS poll — even though that’s almost impossible this late in the game. Exit polls in Florida showed 38 percent want “someone else [to] run for the nomination,” while just 51 percent of Romney supporters and just 31 percent of Gingrich supporters said they were “satisfied with the Republican candidates.”