Negative ads work; whining about negative ads doesn’t. Newt
Gingrich is just wasting time by complaining about them. Who cares
if Mitt Romney hasn’t disavowed attack ads? The question is: Why
haven’t Newt and his friends launched their own?
Voters want a “positive” candidate, says Newt. No, they
don’t. Candidates whose supporters have the money to run ceaseless
attack ads against their opponents do just fine with
voters.
“And you now understand my entire strategy for the next
two weeks,” Gingrich said to the press this week. “The state of
Iowa must choose between the negative and somebody who wants to be
positive.”
Iowans look ready to take up this dare and choose the
negative. Ron Paul, who has no qualms about running negative ads,
is thriving there.
This is no time for Newt to reinvent campaigning and
bemoan the inevitable. If he has any chance of beating Romney, he
will need to go negative too and fast. To the extent that Tea
Partiers respond to Newt, they respond to his negativity — those
moments when he taps into his inner reactionary.
Newt once memorably described Bob Dole as the “tax
collector for the welfare state.” He needs to coin a similarly
devastating description of Romney. That would be a much better use
of his time than bleating about Romney’s refusal to condemn attack
ads from a Super Pac run by former staffers. That idle complaint
from Newt has just allowed Romney to shift the focus from his thin
skin (on display during the Bret Baier interview) to
Newt’s.
Were the field less wobbly, Romney’s past as a liberal
Republican from Massachusetts would have sunk him a long time ago.
But Romney and his supporters have skillfully succeeded in making
the race about Newt’s disqualifying past as a scandal-tarnished
insider and erratic leader. Gingrich had deftly pushed back against
this line of attack in one of the debates — noting that Romney’s
inability to beat Ted Kennedy explains his status as an outsider —
but not so well recently.
And so much of the talk in the last couple of weeks has
been about how Gingrich’s past makes him permanently untrustworthy.
But if that is the case, why doesn’t Romney’s past as a RINO define
him forever too? After all, both candidates , perhaps implausibly,
say that they have changed. Why is only Romney’s declaration of
change accepted?
By not skewering Romney’s past, Gingrich has allowed the
focus to stay on his. Where are the attack ads reminding primary
voters that Romney voted for Democrat Paul Tsongas, gave money to
Planned Parenthood, supported homosexual scoutmasters, supported
homosexual domestic partnerships, didn’t want to “return to
Reagan-Bush,” supported Global Warming alarmism, and accepted the
politically correct consensus on any number of issues? Gingrich and
his allies have plenty of material to mine for ads.
Typical of Gingrich’s haplessness this week were the
attacks on him for lashing out at judicial tyrants. Hit from all
sides, he is seen as at once too liberal and too extreme. At a time
when Romney should be explaining himself to conservative voters,
Gingrich is doing all the explaining.
So his proposal for curbing judicial activists became the
focal point of frenzy while Romney’s record of actually appointing
them continued to go largely unnoticed. Republicans will have no
grounds to complain if Romney becomes President and appoints
Souters to the court. That’s what he did in Massachusetts. The
Boston Globe and others have noted that Romney’s recent
rhetoric on judicial activism bears no relationship to his record.
He nominated plenty of judicial activists to the courts.
Why isn’t Gingrich talking about that? That is of far more
interest to conservative primary voters than a boring debate about
Super PACs.
