Gingrich attemps spin-control

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Gingrich attemps spin-control

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Newt Gingrich backpadels his recent comparisons to billingual education as "Ghetto"... 

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Yahoo AP:  

WASHINGTON - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is mulling a
presidential bid, said his "word choice was poor" when he equated
bilingual education with "the language of living in a ghetto."

In
a video statement read in Spanish, subtitled in English and posted on
YouTube Wednesday, the Georgia Republican said he was not attacking the
Spanish language.

"I made some comments that I recognize caused a bad feeling within
the Latino community. My word choice was poor but my point was simply
this: In the United States it is important to speak the English
language well in order to advance and have success," he said.

Advocating intensive English-language education "is an expression of
support for Latinos, not an attack on their language," Gingrich said.
"I have never believed that Spanish is a language of people of low
incomes, nor a language without beauty."

Gingrich made the original comments Saturday in a speech to the
National Federation of Republican Women. "The American people believe
English should be the official language of the government. ... We
should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people
learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of
prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto," Gingrich told the
women's group.

The comments sparked a backlash within the Latino community, but the
YouTube statement was a "step in the right direction," said Peter
Zamora, the regional counsel for the Los Angeles-based Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The video shows Gingrich is "trying to remedy the negative effects
of the fallout from his statement, which really generated a lot of
negative impressions, especially in the Latino community," Zamora said.
"It's a definite shift from this weekend."