Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is making another trip to Iowa to gauge his level of support for a potential presidential campaign, RealClearPolitics has learned.

Gingrich, who is sounding more and more like he is leaning toward a run for the White House, will meet with doctors and nurses as part of a tour of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in Iowa City on Saturday, Feb. 12.

Gingrich's latest trip to the nation's first voting state will be his ninth since the beginning of last year.

The former speaker does not have any public events scheduled for this weekend's trip, but his advocacy group, American Solutions, is organizing a meeting with approximately 25 small business owners and entrepreneurs who live in and around the university town.

Gingrich has presided over similar "listening sessions" in other cities as he has traveled the country over the past year to lay the preliminary groundwork for a national campaign.

On his previous Iowa trip late last month, Gingrich visited Des Moines and spoke at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. During that speech, Gingrich launched a critique of the Wall Street Journal editorial board's stance against the ethanol subsidies for which he has long advocated.

"Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it's working, and you wonder, 'What are their values?'" Gingrich said, according to the Journal.

Gingrich's comments promptly drew a rebuttal from the Journal, which accused him in an editorial of pandering to Iowa's voters and suggested that his "ethanol lobbying raises larger questions about his convictions and judgment."

As fallout from his battle with the influential editorial board began to grow in conservative media circles, Gingrich shot back in a letter to the editor of the Journal, taking umbrage with the newspaper's questioning of his motives. "My support of increased domestic energy production of all forms, including biofuels and domestic drilling, is born out of our urgent national security and economic needs," Gingrich wrote.

Before making his latest Iowa excursion, Gingirch is slated to speak on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. Gingrich's appearance at the annual conference will be sandwiched between speeches by two other potential presidential hopefuls: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

Gingrich will travel to New Hampshire next month for a lighthearted charity breakfast in Nashua, which has traditionally been well-attended by political activists in the nation's first primary state.

The former speaker has said that he is aiming to make a decision about whether to mount a presidential run by the end of this month.

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