Newt Gingrich campaign fights for its life

Gingrich campaign fights for its life
By: Alexander Burns
May 18, 2011 04:26 AM EDT

Even his supporters predicted Newt Gingrich’s mouth might knock him out of the presidential race.

But no one thought it would happen before his first real campaign trip to Iowa.

Now, Gingrich is urgently struggling to convince the political class that his 2012 hopes aren’t dead, amid an unending barrage of Republican attacks over his comments on the House GOP’s proposed Medicare overhaul.

Gingrich finally seemed to realize the seriousness of his political plight Tuesday, when he held three conference calls, made a personal apology to House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and admitted in a Fox News appearance: “I made a mistake.”

“The fact is that I have supported what Ryan’s trying to do on the budget,” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren. “The budget vote is one that I am happy to say I would have voted for.”

It’s not clear whether that course correction has come too late. Before Gingrich’s evening mea culpa, there were growing signs that his gaffe – undermining his own party by calling Ryan’s much-touted Medicare plan too “radical” to become law on NBC’s “Meet the Press” – had already dealt him a near-fatal blow.

For two days, his team seemed flat-footed in response to a spiraling political crisis. The chorus of voices criticizing the former House speaker has only grown louder, drawing in Republicans as prominent as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.

“Many have said now he’s finished,” Cantor said in a radio interview, stopping short of endorsing that analysis but calling Gingrich’s comments “a tremendous misspeak.”

Perhaps most tellingly, not a single prominent Republican has rallied to Gingrich’s defense – a testament to the regard in which Gingrich is held by much of the Beltway GOP establishment.

For a host of party leaders, Gingrich seems to have proven with astonishing speed that he deserves his reputation as an undisciplined, self-destructive, shoot-from-the-lip politician. His flair for provocative rhetoric, combined with his desire to make loftier political points, might make him too combustible for the presidential campaign trail.

“The problem for Newt is, this is exactly what everybody who has ever worked for or around him said was his basic problem,” said Rich Galen, the veteran Republican strategist and former Gingrich aide. “Sooner or later, I suspect, unfortunately, the campaign will collapse from the top because people are going to say, ‘I love him and he’s really smart, but he can’t be president.’”

The campaign, Galen added, is “close to being functionally over.”

Gingrich supporters object that it’s far too early to count him out. The former Georgia congressman has come back from the brink of political death before, and there’s still time for him to recover in the slow-starting presidential race.

The candidate himself sounded a defiant note on Fox Tuesday night, largely blaming the media for his woes and vowing not to participate in any more “gotcha games.” Gingrich also refused to answer a question about a POLITICO report that he and his wife, Callista, amassed up to $500,000 in debt at Tiffany’s.

“If it doesn’t relate to solving our problems, from now on my answer’s going to be, ‘I’m not commenting on it,’” Gingrich said. “I’m not playing Trivial Pursuit.”

Gingrich has faced questions about his stance on the Ryan budget during his trip this week to Iowa, where advisers expressed optimism that he’s persuading voters his remarks were taken out of context.

“Newt’s done a great job explaining, ‘Hey, Paul Ryan is a friend of mine. The budget he put together was’ – I think he used the word ‘courageous’ – ‘in getting out there and starting the conversation,’” said Craig Schoenfeld, an attorney and former George W. Bush organizer in the Gingrich camp. “Once folks have actually had a chance to question him, and then interact and hear more than you’re ever going to get in a 30-second sound bite, they say, ‘Ok, that makes sense.’”

Back in Washington, party leaders aren’t quite so convinced.

While Gingrich expressed regret for some of the language he used on “Meet the Press,” neither he nor his advisers backed away from his basic message about Ryan’s budget: it’s a political loser that’s dead on arrival in the Senate.

“In terms of the underlying advice, I think Newt Gingrich would love to help Paul Ryan get it done and I think Newt Gingrich is the only person who’s uniquely qualified, with a track record to get it done,” spokesman Rick Tyler said. “What we want to do is design a campaign that gets the country in a conversation, understanding what’s at stake and how to fix it.”

That attitude is bound to frustrate congressional Republicans, who are in no mood to take legislative advice from a man who launched a thousand Democratic attacks by casually dropping terms like “radical” and “right-wing social engineering.”

Gingrich vowed to call out any Democratic campaign commercial that “quotes what I said on Sunday,” but much of the damage is already done.

Republicans are already fretting about the prospect that backlash over Ryan’s budget could help cost them a special House election next week in New York. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee seized on Gingrich’s remarks in a flurry of press releases Tuesday saying that “even Newt Gingrich” believed Ryan’s plan was out of the mainstream.

To Republicans looking to protect their House majority and run as the party of fiscal responsibility in 2012, it’s an almost unpardonable offense to give that kind of ad copy to the opposition party.

“It’s the characterization of social engineering and radicalism” that’s so objectionable, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former economic adviser to John McCain. “He didn’t say, as the president did, ‘I respect this as a serious proposal. I would have preferred X, Y and Z.’”

Holtz-Eakin, who is neutral in the 2012 race, added that the blowback against Gingrich is “also personal.”

“It’s Newt, with his reputation as a policy loose cannon, a guy that’s got 11 good ideas for every 6,000 that he’s thought of,” he explained. “All of that came back.”

That, Republicans say, is the part of this week’s imbroglio that will be hardest for Gingrich to undo.

“It’s clear to me that he did not want to be identified with all of the solutions of the Ryan plan. The words he chose certainly shot a message across the bow,” said former New York Rep. Tom Reynolds. “Conservatives in Congress, as well as conservatives across the country, will take a close look at why Newt said what he did. And I’m sure Paul Ryan isn’t the only person disappointed in the choice of words Newt used.”

The news cycle will move on and the policy debate will shift to other topics. And if Republicans start to suffer more obviously with voters thanks to the focus on Ryan, Gingrich could actually look prescient.

But even under those circumstances, Republicans say, it will be difficult to shake the fear that Gingrich will never really be a team player – or to overlook what Galen called Gingrich’s “disdain or intellectual superiority about how you’re going to run for something.”

“I just don’t think he cares,” Galen said of Gingrich. “I think Newt is going to say what he wants to say.”

 

Criticizing Clinton for cheating on his wife while he was cheating on his.He was for forcing everyone to buy health insurance before he was against it.The GOP has a real winner with this guy

 

$500,000 in debt at Tiffany’s... that's pretty hilarious.

Just another Republican scumbag.

 

Gnat Gingrich: squashed again.

 

Look at the lefties coming out with moral objections.
It makes you wonder what they are afraid of?

 

I have to agree, watching Newt's "campaign" is like watching Michael Moore trying to run a marathon.

He advocated for death penalty for drug dealers, like some 3rd world Arab state or some shit.

 

That he will embarrass US ?>.

 

LOL, so true..... The guy who told Newt off in Iowa pretty much spoke for every conservative who doesnt have his head up his ass.

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If this guy joined the primary he would have my vote.