After a week of increasingly harsh attacks on Mitt Romney’s business record, Newt Gingrich may have finally recognized he has gone too far. According to Politico, when asked to reconsider his attempt to brand the Republican frontrunner as a “predatory capitalist” by a Rick Santorum supporter at a South Carolina event, Gingrich admitted it was a mistake:
“I’m here to implore one thing of you. I think you’ve missed the target on the way you’re addressing Romney’s weaknesses. I want to beg you to redirect and go after his obvious disingenousness about his conservatism and lay off the corporatist versus the free market. I think it’s nuanced,” Dean Glossop, an Army Reservist from Inman, S.C., said.
“I agree with you,” Gingrich said. “It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background. Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect. … I agree with you entirely.”
But it remains to be seen whether supporters of the former speaker will get with the program.
A pro-Gingrich super PAC has made a $3.4 million airtime buy in South Carolina for a documentary that portrays Romney’s career at Bain Capital in a negative light. The blowback from what many conservatives consider a leftist line of argument pursued by Gingrich and Rick Perry has hurt them more than the charge has damaged Romney. If the documentary airs after Gingrich’s admission that the line of attack is inappropriate, the controversy could prove to be yet another setback for his faltering campaign.
The attack was the product of Gingrich’s bitterness at the negative ads run by pro-Romney super PACs that highlighted negative aspects of his record. But the revenge that Gingrich attempted to exact said a lot more about his hypocrisy and well-known intolerance for criticism than anything else. Though some conservatives defended Gingrich’s decision to portray Romney as a heartless plutocrat laying off defenseless workers on the grounds that the Democrats were bound to use it anyway, even some of Romney’s critics were repelled by the tactic that struck them as adopting the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
By now admitting his mistake, Gingrich might help get the conversation in South Carolina back to Romney’s weaknesses to conservatives such as his flip-flops on social issues and health care. But if the film airs and Gingrich tries to rationalize it or distance his candidacy from the attack, it will make him look even worse than if he had never disavowed it. Ironically, though Gingrich claims he is the “true conservative” running against a moderate, so long as Republicans are discussing this issue, Romney can put himself forward, as he did last night in his New Hampshire victory speech, as a defender of free enterprise against liberal Democrats and “desperate Republicans.”
That’s a formula for another disastrous defeat for Gingrich that could mean the end of his presidential run.
People who know Rick Tyler should be advising him that fronting for these despicable and utterly false attacks on Bain's record might just be a career ender for him — unless he plans to become a Democrat.
From what I've seen, Rick Tyler is enthusiastically leading the charge, sad to say. But I wonder if Shel Adelson might begin to question his rather large private investment in such a despicable venture. The backlash could hurt him too, and I am rather sure that Shel does not share the cheap populist accusations of 'looting' and 'vulturism' given his background, causes, and public demeanor.
Critics of Gingrich apparently fail to acknowledge that it was Romney that started throwing dirt at Gingrich. If Gingrich is angry, he is fully justified. In the final analysis, the dirt should be thrown at Paul. He well deserves it for being a racist, anti-Semite, anti-Israel, just plain old fool. That he gets the kind of recognition that he is receiving in New Hampshire and Iowa, gives me pause as to whether Obama might be a better choice. I used to say that Obama was a Republican maker – out of former Democrats of which I was one. I can assure you that Paul is a magnificent Democrat maker out of possible Republicans. If Paul isn't thrown into the gutter where he belongs by the other candidates very soon, Obama may have the election given to him as a gift from Paul.
Newt Gingrich is a Washington Insider Lobbyist making a fortune from bad government. Honestly, what is the likelihood that he will turn the ship of state from the fiscal iceberg ahead. n nRight or wrong on policy, I get the feeling that Mitt Romney cares about this country and that Newt Gingrich cares only about himself and what politics can do for him.
Mitt Romney’s Bain hired people and it fired people, it made money and it lost money, created business and destroyed businesses, won some and lost some and allocated capital as effectively as allowed in the real world and certainly more effectively and rationally than coercive government’s fiat could have or has. This is creative progress in the best sense of the word. nResources can be allocated in either of two ways by voluntary, cooperative free market or by government rationing, a system of coercive redistribution of resources tainted by selfish political power. nThere is not a hint of Corporatism in what Mitt Romney’s Bain has done. nRick Perry’s Texas Model personifies the Bain model. Less government; more jobs and a higher standard of living for all. nIt is good thing that this primary is forcing us to articulate the case for the free market, where a productive order emerges spontaneously and evolves unpredictably n nAll good to Commentary Contentions, a free market of ideas and to Jonathan Tobin and John Podhoretz. n n n