BATON ROUGE, Louisiana — Newt Gingrich was explaining to a Tea
Party forum here Thursday night why he is best qualified to be
President Obama’s Republican opponent. Citing his involvement in
the 1980 and 1988 presidential campaigns and his leadership of the
1994 “Contract With America” campaign that elected a GOP
congressional majority, Gingrich said, “I helped design campaigns
that won huge elections.”
Unfortunately for Newt, he has failed to design a campaign
that can win him the Republican nomination, and he is expected to
lose Saturday’s Louisiana primary. The most recent polls (including
the
latest from Rasmussen Reports) show the former Speaker of the
House in third place here, trailing far behind Rick Santorum and
Mitt Romney. Another defeat in the Deep South, coming after last
week’s losses in Mississippi and Alabama, will likely bring his
presidential bid to an effective end. And then the blame game will
begin.
Through the 2012 campaign, Newt Gingrich has been
consistent in one thing: He has always blamed others for his
defeats. His finger-pointing was plausible in Iowa and Florida,
where Gingrich rightly excoriated Romney for the
multimillion-dollar attack ad campaigns the former Massachusetts
governor’s campaign (and the pro-Romney “super PAC,” Restore Our
Future) unleashed against him. Can anyone recall a precedent for
such an overwhelming volume of negative ads in a GOP presidential
primary campaign? If the Romney campaign wished to prove that
negative advertising works, especially when one candidate can
afford to vastly out-spend his opponents, they have succeeded. But
by making conservative Republicans the targets of such attack-ad
blitzes, Team Mitt has embittered many opponents of the moderate
whom pundits and GOP leaders are now calling the party’s
“inevitable” nominee.
This is a legitimate grievance, and one that Gingrich
addressed in his Thursday speech to the Tea Party forum at
Louisiana State University’s Dodson Auditorium. “One of the things
that most worries me, frankly, about the Romney campaign, if you
watched Illinois — yes, he won with 46 percent of the vote,”
Gingrich said. “It was the lowest turnout in 70 years. This
constant negative campaigning is dangerous, because if we suppress
Republican enthusiasm, we’re not going to have the turnout. We’ve
got to have our base turn out.… The conservative movement has to be
excited, in order for us to win. We tried a moderate in ‘96. They
lost badly. We tried a moderate in 2008. They lost badly. You
cannot try to win this election by getting in the middle. You’ve
got to offer a clear and vivid choice.”
This is true, and both Gingrich and Santorum have spent
the past two days mocking the GOP frontrunner as the
“Etch-a-Sketch” candidate, employing a memorably mistaken metaphor
that Romney adviser Eric Ferhnstrom used Wednesday on CNN to
suggest that, as the Republican nominee, the candidate could
“reset” the conservative positions he has taken during the long
primary season.
Romney’s wrongs, however, cannot explain the failures of
Gingrich’s campaign, and Gingrich evidently does not want to
address his own role in his defeats. After losing the Nevada
caucuses Feb. 4, Newt began blame-shifting and excuse-making,
holding a memorably petulant Las Vegas press conference (the
Washington Post called it “bizarre”) where he
attacked Romney and dismissed Nevada as a “heavily Mormon state.”
Whatever validity there was in making mention of Romney’s religion,
the fact was that Gingrich’s Nevada campaign was disastrously
mismanaged — one of his supporters in the state described it to me
as a “clusterf**k” — and Newt never admitted any responsibility
for that disaster.
The implausibility of Gingrich’s blame game became
apparent three days after his Nevada meltdown, when Santorum won
caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and a primary in Missouri where
Gingrich had failed to make the ballot. What prevented Gingrich —
who in 2011 raised more money than Santorum by a factor of 6-to-1—
from mounting the kind of low-budget effort that enabled Santorum
to score a triple victory Feb. 7? Why was Gingrich’s campaign in
Minnesota so weak that he did not merely lose the caucus, but
placed fourth behind Santorum, Romney, and Texas Rep. Ron Paul?
Newt’s Minnesota embarrassment was the first in a series of
fourth-place finishes that continued from Maine on Feb. 11 to
Wyoming on March 10, reflecting his campaign’s failure to organize
even a semblance of an organized effort in many states. While
Gingrich was able to win his home state of Georgia on March 6, his
efforts elsewhere on “Super Tuesday” were so feeble that he lost
Tennessee to Santorum, an unexpected Southern defeat that was an
ominous precursor to his March 13 losses in Alabama and
Mississippi.
The fact is that, despite having raised more than $20
million for his campaign, Newt is now broke — the latest Federal
Election Commission report showed Gingrich’s campaign running
in the red. He has won 135 delegates, according to Associated Press
projections, and has vowed to go “all the way to Tampa,” but if
he loses in Louisiana on Saturday, it’s impossible to imagine how
he can continue actively campaigning even another week, much less
until the GOP convention in August.
Contemplating the “internals” in Rasmussen’s Louisiana
poll,
Ed Morrissey of the conservative Hot Air blog said Newt is
unlikely to win any delegates here, a result that “would end
whatever credibility he has left as a candidate even in a
delegate-gathering sense.” Morrissey said the poll “suggests no big
surprises Saturday… barring a last-minute gaffe by Santorum.”
Santorum did indeed
commit such a gaffe Thursday, saying that nominating an
“Etch-a-Sketch” Republican like Romney might be even worse for the
GOP than Obama’s re-election. Even such a gaffe by Santorum — who
appears set to win Louisiana handily — is unlikely to save
Gingrich from another Deep South defeat.
It is perhaps too much to hope that Gingrich, a former
history professor, will have the grace to say of his Louisiana
loss, as one Southerner famously said in defeat, “It is all my
fault.”
