Gingrich’s rhetoric has long been polarizing, by design.

He called House Democrats “a leadership of thugs” in 1985 after they overturned a House election in Indiana that a Republican appeared to have won. Allies point to the event as a key turning point in Gingrich’s slow rise inside a party long in the minority.

A man who rose to power in part by exploiting the ethics problems of others, Gingrich was himself formally reprimanded by the House in 1997 and ordered to pay a $300,000 penalty, the first time in history a speaker was disciplined for ethical transgression.

As speaker, he was favored by Republican rank-and-file lawmakers for his ability to anticipate political trends and turn them to advantage.

Yet Gingrich’s less-inspired insights bordered on goofiness. He used his turn to speak at the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego to discuss … beach volleyball. “No bureaucrat would have invented it. And that’s what freedom is all about,” the then-House speaker said as an Olympic gold medalist stood nearby on stage.

Most memorably, perhaps, he pushed the Republican-controlled House to impeach President Bill Clinton over a dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky — at a time when Gingrich himself was conducting an extramarital affair with a congressional employee, later to become his third wife.

After four years as speaker, he was forced out by rank-and-file Republicans following the loss of seats in the 1998 midterm elections. He had survived a coup attempt more than a year earlier by members of his leadership team. “I am willing to lead, but I won’t allow cannibalism,” he said, echoing the very words used by one of his own political victims, former House Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat.

And yet, for all the tumult, divided government yielded highly consequential legislation in the four years Gingrich was speaker.

He and Clinton compromised on a far-reaching overhaul of the welfare system in the summer of 1996.

The president’s liberal allies were infuriated, but the deal helped Clinton with moderate voters while giving the Gingrich-led Republicans a significant accomplishment to show the voters in the fall campaign. The politics were brutal; reaching across the aisle to make a deal with Clinton meant throwing then-presidential candidate Dole overboard in hopes of saving the historic House majority for a second term.

With the president and the speaker back in office, negotiations on a balanced budget bore fruit in 1997, and the government ran surpluses for four years in a row beginning in 1998. It was, Gingrich noted repeatedly in his presidential campaign more than a decade later, the only time that’s happened in the entire lifetime of some White House contenders.

Over the course of a career, Gingrich, 68, went from rabble rouser to the pinnacle of establishment power and back again.

Rabble rousing was the way to power, he thought. It worked once, in Congress, but not the second time, in his bid for the White House.

He bid farewell to his supporters in a video posted on his campaign website on Tuesday. “Your help was vital,” he thanked them.

A formal announcement that he is suspending the campaign, coupled with an endorsement for Mitt Romney, is on the calendar for Wednesday.

By the time he decided to bow out, he had already weathered more crises than appeared survivable.

His entire senior staff quit en masse in the summer of 2011, saying he wouldn’t devote enough time to fundraising or campaigning in key early states. He promptly announced he would run a “substantive, solutions-oriented” race, as if he hadn’t supervised the hiring of numerous consultants in the preceding months.

When other challengers to Romney faded, Gingrich led the polls late last year before the Iowa caucuses, only to be knocked back by a strong barrage of attack ads financed by a super PAC aligned with Romney.

Somehow, he recovered once more, and won the South Carolina primary in January, before losing Florida and beginning a long, final fade.

It is not clear exactly how long Gingrich has wanted to be president.

He flirted with it in 1995, when he was speaker, and made a joint appearance in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire with Clinton to discuss campaign finance legislation.

Years earlier, shortly after taking office in the House in 1979, he said he didn’t intend to retire as the ranking member of the House Science and Technology Committee.

Gingrich had lost his first two races for the House, in 1974 and 1976, before his career-defining persistence paid off when a long-term Democratic incumbent retired in 1978, creating a vacancy.

A rare political species at the time, the Republican from Georgia quickly drew notice as a freshman lawmaker in 1979 when he pushed for the expulsion of then-Rep. Charles Diggs Jr. on ethics charges. Diggs, who had been indicted on charges that included taking kickbacks from congressional employees, was censured instead. He resigned his seat the following year.

In the next few years, in the early days of televised House sessions, Gingrich pioneered the practice of excoriating Democrats in speeches delivered at day’s end and aired nationally by C-SPAN. Viewers had no idea the speeches were made to an empty chamber until Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, a Democrat, ordered the cameras to pan the hall to show the rows of vacant seats.

Incensed at the criticism of Democrats, O’Neill said Gingrich had “challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

Under the rules of the House, O’Neill’s remarks crossed the line, and Republicans successfully demanded they be stricken from the record.

Inside the House, Gingrich and his allies created the Conservative Opportunity Society to help build a policy framework on key issues.

Outside Congress, he took over GOPAC in the mid-1980s and used it to build a farm team of future Republican political conservatives.

As speaker, Gingrich made sure the House voted in the first 100 days on each item in the Contract With America, the Republican campaign manifesto from the 1994 election. Never mind that one of the provisions called for limiting House members to six terms in office. By then, he was in his ninth.

His closest associates said he was often the smartest man in the room, and insisted on acting that way.

His ability to outmaneuver others and his understanding of technology were on brilliant display one night just before the Florida presidential primary.

Facing a crushing defeat, he strolled over to a group of reporters in the lobby of a Jacksonville hotel. With a conspiratorial smile, he said a poll coming out in the morning would show him trailing Romney by only 4 points, and having the momentum.

Was that on the record?

It was and, within minutes, virtually the entire press corps had been gulled by a fading candidate into tweeting that a poll of unproven existence showed him with a slim and shrinking deficit.

Gingrich lost Florida to Romney by 14 points, not 4, and his White House campaign entered a death spiral.

“After 43 primaries and caucuses, many long days and not a few long nights, I can say with confidence — and gratitude — that you have given me a great honor and solemn responsibility,” he said in excerpts of a speech to be delivered in New Hampshire.

Vowing to defeat President Barack Obama, he said that in the past three years, “we have seen hopes and dreams diminished by false promises and weak leadership. Everywhere I go, Americans are tired of being tired, and many of those who are fortunate enough to have a job are working harder for less.”

Opinion polls have long made the economy the top issue of the campaign, and Romney posed a series of rhetorical questions designed to lead voters to his side.

“Is it easier to make ends meet? Is it earlier to sell your home or buy a new one? Have you saved what you needed for retirement?” he said in the excerpts released by his campaign.

The speech was meant to cap the nominating campaign that still had some loose ends, including the pursuit of national convention delegates.

Romney is still more than 400 Republican National Convention delegates shy of a nominating majority, although he is far ahead of his most persistent rivals. There were 209 at stake in Tuesday’s primaries.

Romney began the day with 698 delegates of the 1,144 needed for the nomination, compared with 260 for Santorum, 137 for Newt Gingrich and 75 for Ron Paul.

Santorum suspended his campaign two weeks ago rather than risk losing a primary in his home state of Pennsylvania.

Gingrich, too, seemed to be heading toward the sidelines, but first he wanted to see the outcome of the primary in Delaware, where he has campaigned in recent days and has pocketed a few endorsements. Jackie Cushman Gingrich, his daughter, said the former House speaker intended to reassess his debt-strapped candidacy on Wednesday.

The nomination in hand, Romney has begun focusing more on Obama in recent days, campaigning in key battleground states, appointing an aide to oversee his search for a vice presidential running mate and accelerating his fundraising for the fall.

On Monday, he offered support for Obama’s call for legislation to prevent an increase in the interest rate on some student loans. In a second move toward the middle, he said his campaign was reviewing legislation to let young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. by their parents apply for non-immigrant visas.

Under a measure being drafted by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a potential ticket-mate for Romney, the immigrants affected by the legislation would be allowed to study or work in the United States but would not have a special path to citizenship.

At the same time, Romney is slowly accumulating the delegates to ratify his nomination at the party convention in Tampa, Fla., this summer.

He picked up 12 delegates at congressional district conventions over the weekend in Missouri, a state Santorum once planned to contest heavily in hopes of blocking Romney’s path to victory.

The gamesmanship underscored a central feature of the 2012 campaign, in which Romney hopes voters will turn Obama out of office because of high unemployment and other economic difficulties, while the president seeks credit for the recovery that has cut joblessness nationally as well as in Ohio and other states in the industrial Midwest.

The day’s events also reaffirmed Ohio’s central importance in the White House campaign. No Republican has ever been elected president without winning the state, and both candidates are expected to pour campaign resources in through Election Day.

Romney said little or nothing he hasn’t said before, reflecting his campaign’s view that the site was as important as his spoken message.

The continued idleness of the National Gypsum Co. facility “underscores the failure of the president’s policies to get this country working today,” the former Massachusetts governor said. He noted that Obama had campaigned in Ohio on Wednesday, and said, “if you want to know where his vision leads, open your eyes. Because we’ve been living it for the last four years.”

Romney said Obama would “like to be able to run on his words. But we have to make sure he cannot run away from his record.”

Romney’s campaign also took the unusual step of distributing excerpts of Obama’s speech at the site in 2008.

Obama’s appearance back then came in the midst of his struggle with Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary in Ohio. At the time, he was eager to make the case that she had been a supporter of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact generally opposed by blue-collar workers in the state.

“Now, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that we can’t stop globalization in its tracks and that some of these jobs aren’t coming back. But what I refuse to accept is that we have to stand idly by while workers watch their jobs get shipped overseas,” Obama said at the time, according to the excerpts distributed by Romney’s campaign.

“We need a president who’s working as hard for you as you’re working for your families. And that’s the kind of president I intend to be,” Obama said then.

His re-election campaign pushed back.

“The fact is that in Ohio, about one out of every eight jobs is related to the auto industry, and the auto industry would be in a terrible situation without President Obama,” said former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who is also co-chair of the president’s re-election campaign.

Romney opposed the auto bailout that Obama undertook in 2009. Now, with the industry turning out cars and profits, the president is expected to make his rival’s opposition to it a campaign issue throughout Michigan, Wisconsin and other states where it is an important part of the economy.

Strickland said Ohio ranks second behind Michigan in production of cars and trucks, but first in the manufacture of auto parts.

Except for the political symbols brought in for Romney’s speech — among them an American flag and a big sign that said “Obama Isn’t Working,” — the factory is a nearly empty, dusty shell of a plant where workers once turned out sheets of wall board used in housing construction.

A few stacks of wall board stood near what once was a loading dock and bore the manufacture date of: May 16, 2008.

Fewer than 100 jobs were lost at the time the factory closed.

Ohio’s unemployment stands at 7.6 percent, below the national average of 8.2 percent. It was higher, 9.1 percent and rising when Obama took office, reaching 10.6 percent in the fall of 2009 before it began receding.

“Even if you like Barack Obama, we can’t afford Barack Obama,” the former Massachusetts governor declared, an evident reference to the president’s ability to transcend at least some of the public’s dissatisfaction with the pace of the recovery. Romney quoted liberally — and mockingly — from Obama’s 2008 campaign pledges to repair the economy.

At the same time, Obama sketched his case for re-election in swing-state Ohio, where he met with unemployed workers who have enrolled in job training programs. Then he spoke at the Lorain County Community College.

“Right now, companies can’t find enough qualified workers for the jobs they need to fill” locally, he said. “So programs like this one are training hundreds of thousands of workers with the skills that companies are looking for. And it’s working.” By contrast, he said, between the years 2000 and 2008, Republican policies produced “the slowest job growth in half a century … and we’ve spent the last three and a half years cleaning up after that mess.”

Campaign symbolism counted for much on a day that seems destined to be replicated often in the six months until Election Day.

The Republican challenger delivered his scathing denunciation of the president’s policies with the Bank of America Stadium over his shoulder. Aides dubbed his remarks a pre-buttal to the president’s own, and early-arriving partisans heard a recorded medley of rock music that included “It’s Still the Same.”

Each man taunted the other at times.

“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Obama said in an evident reference to Romney, whose father was president of American Motors, an automaker.

Romney jabbed that unlike four years ago, when Obama walked through stage-set columns at his convention, things would be different this summer.

“You’re not going to see President Obama standing alongside Greek columns. He’s not going to want to remind anyone of Greece,” Romney said, “because he’s put us on a road to become more like Greece,” where crushing debt has led to an austerity plan and public protests.

It was only within the past two weeks that Romney shed his competition for the Republican presidential nomination, and he is still in the process of trying to unite his party after a three-month primary struggle in which he had trouble appealing to hardcore conservatives.

But already, elements of the fall campaign are falling into place.

Obama’s campaign was airing Spanish language radio ads in Orlando, Fla., Las Vegas and Denver — all in states that the president won four years ago and that figure to be fiercely contested in the fall.

From Ohio, Obama hopscotched to Michigan for two fundraisers, the first a reception at Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum, where Romney in 2007 launched his unsuccessful bid for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.

Speaking in a museum named for the founder of Ford Motor Co., Obama got some of his biggest cheers when he highlighted his administration’s efforts to rescue the American auto industry. Later, at a private dinner fundraiser in Bingham Farms, he said that the industry’s recovery didn’t just help Michigan, it “helped to give America a vision of what we could be.”

For his part, Romney arranged an appearance for Thursday at a factory in Lorain, Ohio, shadowing Obama’s Wednesday trip to the area. Obama toured the factory as part of his 2008 campaign — and it was closed later.

Polls consistently show the economy is the top issue for the nation’s voters, who will decide whether to accept Romney’s indictment or Obama’s reassurances. Given recent trends, each man has a case to make.

In Ohio, joblessness was 9.1 percent in February 2009, shortly after Obama took office. It stood at 7.6 last month.

In North Carolina, joblessness was 9.5 percent then, and stands at 9.9 now.

In Michigan, where Obama was appearing late Wednesday, it was 12.5 percent in 2009 and is 8.8 percent now.

In all three states, unemployment rose in the months immediately after Obama took office as the recession deepened and financial markets trembled.

“Right now we have two competing visions of our future. And the choice could not be clearer,” said Obama. He said he was sure Republicans were “patriots. I’m sure they’re sincere in — in terms of what they say. But their theory, I believe, is wrong.”

Without mentioning Romney by name, he said, “Instead of moderating their views even slightly, you now have Republicans in Washington, the ones running for president, proposing budgets that shower the wealthiest Americans with even more tax cuts, folks like me who don’t need them, weren’t looking for them.”

But Romney was relentless as he ripped into the president.

“Virtually nothing he has done has made it more likely for people to get jobs,” he said.

Reading from Obama’s campaign pledges from the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, he said the president has “failed by the measurements he set. You won’t hear that at this convention, but you’re going to hear it at ours.”

He added: “We’re a trusting people. We’re a hopeful people. But we are not dumb, and we are not going to fall for the same lines from the same person just because it’s a different place.”

___

Nancy Benac reported from Elyria, Ohio. Associated Press writer Stacy Anderson contributed from Washington.

“What exactly does President Obama intend to do differently once he is no longer accountable to the voters?” he asked.

Obama was overheard telling Medvedev several days ago that he will have more flexibility in negotiating an arms treaty once he is re-elected.

Speaking to newspaper publishers and editors, Romney also said he was not ready to declare a position on proposed legislation to protect confidential sources relied on by journalists.

“Do I see a role for confidential sources? Yes. Do I ever see a time when a confidential source would have to be revealed? Yeah, I can see that, too,” he said.

Romney spoke one day after Obama delivered a scathing indictment of Republican economic policies in a speech to the annual meeting of The Associated Press.

In reply, the Republican challenger said Obama “criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies — setting up straw men to distract from his record.”

Romney spoke to the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of News Editors on the morning after he swept to victory in three more primaries, in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

His wins widened his delegate lead, but rival Rick Santorum said he wasn’t bowing out. Instead, he urged voters in the next-up Pennsylvania primary to vote for “someone whose views are forged in steel, not on an Etch A Sketch.”

Romney didn’t mention Santorum on Tuesday night but sought to cast Obama as an “out of touch” liberal whose personal background is hostile to a free economy.

His remarks came just hours after Obama’s combative campaign speech in Washington, in which he attacked House Republicans’ budget plan as “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that “is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it.”

Obama called it “a prescription for decline.”

After his speech Wednesday, Romney planned to head to a campaign event in the Philadelphia suburbs. He was to campaign in the state Thursday as well.

Romney won at least 83 delegates in the three races Tuesday, with six yet to be allocated. That pushed his total to 655 of the 1,144 needed to clinch the nomination. Santorum has 278 delegates, Newt Gingrich 135 and Ron Paul 51.

For Romney, an end of the contested primary campaign could hardly come soon enough.

“I want to have our nominee start raising money, start organizing a national campaign and focus on President Obama and his agenda because this is time for us to start focusing on him rather than standing and focusing on one another in these primary contests,” he told radio host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “I think we’ve had, as of tonight, we will have had almost 35 or more state or territorial contests for the nomination. Maybe it’s time to get going.”

Obama has gained in the polls in recent months, particularly among women, as Republicans vie among themselves for support from a conservative party electorate. Santorum has devoted more time to social concerns — including birth control — than Romney, who has generally stayed focused on economic issues.

Surveys indicate Americans are growing more optimistic about the overall state of the economy. Unemployment has fallen in recent months, but it is still at a relatively high 8.3 percent of the work force.

Already, the early outlines of a general election ad war are visible. Obama’s re-election campaign is airing commercials in a half-dozen battleground states that accuse Romney of siding with Big Oil “for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables.”

The ads are a rapid response to $3 million in commercials aired by an outside group, American Energy Alliance, blaming the president for rising gasoline prices.

In his campaign for the Republican nomination, Romney has collected endorsements from former President George H.W. Bush; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a tea party favorite; and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, author of a conservative budget that Republicans pushed through the House last week.