Facepalmetto State: We are all Gingrichians now (for the next week or so at least)
Did the earth move for you last night? To read the pundits this morning, when our bleary eyes crested the pillow we’d been biting through the dark hours before dawn, a new era greeted them, the like of which has never before been witnessed.
The base is revolting because they swept the GOP back into relevance in Washington just under two years ago and they have been thanked with contempt ever since.
(Asshole Assholeson)
The unstoppable force that is Newt Gingrich and the immovable object that is Mitt Romney are headed for a collision in Florida.
(Politico)
A more sober observer, the Atlantic’s Robert Wright, asks:
How did Newt do it? How did a candidate who seemed near death only a week ago rise up to win in South Carolina? He did it the way he always does it: By playing the hate card.
Wright foresaw this a couple of weeks ago:
What next for Newt Gingrich, now that his latest 15 minutes of fame has failed to last even 15 minutes? David Corn of Mother Jones has a theory: Gingrich is thinking about becoming “a suicide bomber.” Having accepted that he’ll never be president, Newt will stage a kamikaze mission against the man he holds responsible for this indignity: Mitt Romney.
Corn thinks the payback for all those Iowa attack ads—the ones paid for not by the Romney campaign but by rich people who happen to know Mitt—could come this weekend in two New Hampshire debates. Corn sees this prospect as a fitting culmination for Gingrich—“the peak of his three-decades long career as a Republican demolition man,” during which he tried to “institutionalize his hate politics.”
Google’s servers have been grinding away for various of the GOP field, but the current focus is telling, according to USA Today:
The Google search engine is reporting a major spike of interest in Newt Gingrich, with one specific focus.
His wives.
“At least three of the top four searches associated with Gingrich have to do with the candidate’s current and former wives,” Google reported.
Much of the activity was inspired by ex-wife Marianne Gingrich’s accusation that the former House speaker had sought an “open marriage.”
The top four search terms for Gingrich: Callista (his current wife), Marianne, Newt scandal, and Newt wives.
If they ever get to searching for Gingrich ethics, they may get more than they bargained for. And yup, Newt can pull the “How DESPICABLE to bring that up, it was 15 years ago,” but that just underlines how long ago he was in representative office, and the cloudy stank under which he left it.
Meanwhile, Mittbot 2.1 is rebooting, and will release his tax returns after Monday’s GOP debate:
Gov. Mitt Romney said Sunday he will release his tax returns on Tuesday as he tries to pivot from an issue that dragged him down in his South Carolina primary loss to Newt Gingrich.
Romney said he’ll post his 2010 tax return and 2011 estimate online Tuesday, after he was hammered by his rivals and gave awkward debate answers last week as he said he would release his tax returns in April.
...
“I think the speaker has some explaining to do sitting on the sofa with Nancy Pelosi and arguing for climate change regulation, calling the Ryan plan right-wing social engineering,” Romney said. “Look over his record and you’ll see he’s not as conservative, not as reliable a conservative leader, as people might have imagined.”
Tuesday looks like being a busy day for him, Maggie Haberman at Politico reports:
Via Jonathan Martin, Mitt Romney will give a speech in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday that is pegged to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address — but it’s also likely to take on Newt Gingrich.
This is a new, more aggressive and engaged phase of the Romney campaign, pivoting after a projected but surprisingly large loss in South Carolina.
Haberman quotes a Romney aide who claims this is all eleventy-dimensional chess with a dash of Berlin School pop psychology thrown in:
From the former speaker’s demonization of Romney’s business record, to his decision to indignantly deflect criticism from his ex-wife, the aide said Gingrich has ensured that he won’t win the Republican nomination.
“There’s always been a space for a candidate who kind of channeled anger in this,” he said. “It was Michele Bachmann, for a while it was Herman Cain. It’s just that Gingrich hasn’t grown.”
By taking on Gingrich, whose national favorability rating currently stands at just 27 percent, Romney will look “more sane” to the general electorate, the aide said.
“When we go up against Newt, it helps us in the general election,” he said. “It’s not an ideological thing as much as judgment — the total gestalt of it.”
Mind you, given Haberman’s later paragraph, I’m not sure how seriously to take her analyses:
Multiple sources inside and outside of Romneyland have suggested for weeks that Gingrich actually remains the candidate they had been most worried about posing a challenge in the long term, for the very reason that he has been hard to to get rid of. He also may hold much stronger appeal to Hispanic voters than Romney, who has tacked extremely hard-right on immigration.
In any case, expect to see more of this:
Mitt Romney called on Newt Gingrich to release all correspondence he’d had with mortgage giant Freddie Mac on Saturday morning, the day of South Carolina’s primary, while meeting with supporters at his Upstate South Carolina campaign headquarters.
“I’d like to see the report,” he told reporters. “I’d like to see what he actually told Freddie Mac. Don’t you think? This is a big issue. We’ve got a Washington insider talking about Freddie Mac. Let’s see what his report was to Freddie Mac, what he said to them, what advice he gave them.”
(The Hill)
On the day of the polls, Mitt had been rumored to be in line for a Bush endorsement, but Jeb didn’t get where he is today by backing losers:
Jeb Bush, the popular former Florida governor, said he will “stay neutral” in the Republican presidential primary while warning his party’s candidates to leave the “circular firing squad” of their primary debates behind and start appealing to a broader audience of voters.
(Bloomberg)
One figure who may stand to capitalize on this is highlighted by ex-Herman Cain humper R.S. McCain, with whom I’m in rare agreement, on his final point at least:
While nobody has appointed me the Omniscient Arbiter, authorized to write articles titled “What It Means,” I can summarize what one of Santorum’s supporters told me last night about what he expects: Newt and Mitt are going to attempt to destroy each other, and all the while Santorum will keep on campaigning, arguing that he is the “conviction conservative,” steadily accruing support from those conservatives who don’t like either Newt or Mitt.
The Santorum supporter who told me that is a fine young Christian man, and so I did not bluntly express to him what I see as the basic problem with the Gingrich campaign: Sooner or later, people will figure out that Newt is a selfish, arrogant asshole.
And people don’t like selfish, arrogant assholes.
Yeah, I’m no Omniscient Arbiter either, but in my experience they tend not to like shifty hypocritical demagogues with a checkered history too.
(Photo h/t The Astute Blogger)
Good luck in Florida, Newt!
More: Booman highlights bulk purchasing of brown corduroy trousers among the Republican establishment:
If you are looking for open signs of panic among the Republican Establishment, look no further than Jennifer Rubin, who last night penned an open letter to many of the foremost elected official in the party begging them to intervene to stop Gingrich.
Posted by YAFB on 01/22/12 at 12:58 PM • Permalink
Categories: Knee Slappers • Politics • Election '12 • Mittens • Bedwetters • Nutters • Teabaggery • Polisnark • Our Stupid Media • Skull Hampers •
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