Newt Gingrich was an overpowering force on the Op-Ed pages, and could have provided crucial support over the next two years. He was always an establishment man, but his personal baggage meant that he could not return to the front. He cast away an important back-bench responsibility in pursuit of a post more glorious but impossible to attain, and is now hopelessly on the defensive. Newt is already defeated, because he should not have run.
For some reason, he chose to denigrate a damned good plan and along the way, to wound a man who is under a sustained personal attack from the other side, even from the President himself. Gingrich now says that he supports “improving the plan”, but for a man who has had twenty years to perfect his pitch, his approach has been reckless and damaging to the right. He can split hairs all he wants, and he may even be right, but that is all lost now. His prowess in the editorial pages was no use on the front line. There may even be an aspect of his personal life which drove him to this doomed candidacy.
Perhaps he wanted to slow down Ryan’s success in order to make room for himself in the debate. Perhaps he wanted to appear to mentor the young Ryan, as Gingrich likes to remind us that he (by the way) reformed welfare the same way Kerry (by the way) went to Vietnam. Whatever it was, he has strengthened the marxists in their defense of ObamaCare, damaged the republicans in their attempts to repeal and replace it, insulted Paul Ryan, a good man in a tight spot, and utterly destroyed his own candidacy. He’s just too stupid to know it.
Condensed and improved from Disappointed in Newt Gingrich.
