PALATINE, Ill. – Hours after finishing a disappointing second place in both the Alabama and Mississippi primaries, Newt Gingrich marched his campaign onward, vowing he is “staying in the race.”

Campaigning in Illinois on Wednesday, Gingrich made little mention of the two contests he had hoped to win in the South. He instead focused his speeches on the big ideas that drive his campaign, explaining that many people just don’t understand what needs to be done to help change the country.

“The thing I find most disheartening about this campaign is the difficulty of talking about positive ideas on a large scale because the news media can’t cover it and candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it,” Gingrich told the five hundred plus person crowd at the Northwest Suburban Republican Lincoln Day Dinner. “The result is you can’t have a serious conversation. It doesn’t fit. It doesn’t count. It is as though it doesn’t occur.”

Gingrich, who brought up Alzheimer’s research for the first time in weeks, admitted he wants to be “the candidate of science and technology.”

“We are at the edge of such extraordinary opportunities and it is so hard to get this party to understand it,” said Gingrich, speaking in a more frustrated tone than usual. “Our political system is so methodically and deliberately stupid.”

The calls for Gingrich to exit the race have only increased in the 24 hours since Tuesday’s primaries that Rick Santorum won. But Gingrich says he will not bow out, arguing he is the only Republican who can take on Washington and all the problems that come along with it.

“We cannot be a normal party. If we run a normal campaign trying to govern within the framework of the current system we have no future because people would rather have Democrats do it, they at least enjoy it,” he said. “We are miserable at trying to govern in their system. We are in the business of changing Washington, not being accepted by it. It is a fundamentally different model. It is the base of what Reagan did.”