Byron York explains that this was a case of a nimbler, more effective campaign organization.
Gingrich’s defeat of Romney in South Carolina Saturday was absolutely dominating. Just a week ago, Romney had a solid lead over Gingrich in the polls. On Saturday night, he lost to Gingrich by 12 points — a huge and disastrous swing. Gingrich won 44 of South Carolina’s 46 counties.
How did it happen? For one thing, all the talk about Romney having a hugely superior ground organization turned out not to be true. “They did not do the retail politics that a Santorum and a Gingrich have done over time,” said Kevin Thomas, chairman of the Fairfield County Republican Party. (Thomas was neutral in the race.) “I think Newt’s people, they had more on-the-ground staff, and they worked.” There were a lot of them, too; after Gingrich’s strong showing in the debates, said Susan Meyers, Gingrich’s media coordinator for the Southeast, “We have so many volunteers, our phones are melting right now.”
Gingrich’s campaign was also faster and more nimble than the Romney battleship. “There is a very strong contrast between the two campaign organizations,” said Gingrich adviser (and former George W. Bush administration official) Kevin Kellems. “In military terms, it’s speed versus mass. Newt Gingrich’s operation, and Newt Gingrich as a man, has a great deal of speed — intellectual speed, decisiveness. The Romney campaign is much more about money and size, having hired half of Washington D.C. And sometimes, speed beats mass.”
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Ed Rollins says that Mitt Romney never was a conservative and he can’t persuade people now that he is.
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Karl Rove thinks Newt Gingrich can thank CNN’s John King.
After Newt Gingrich was declared the winner of the South Carolina primary Saturday night, Karl Rove suggested that the candidate has CNN’s John King to thank for his victory in the Palmetto State.
“Taking on the media is always good in a Republican primary,†Rove said on Fox News. “John King couldn’t have set up the question in a more positive way for Gingrich to just nail it and haul it right out of the park.â€
Newt Gingrich has come to remind Bryan Preston of Abraham Lincoln’s response to demands that he dismiss Ulysses Grant because he was notorious for having a drinking problem.
Like a Civil War general once accused of letting his personal problems get in the way of doing his duty, we may not be able to spare Newt Gingrich. He isn’t perfect, far from it. But he fights.
That general later became president despite the accusations against him. For what it’s worth.
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Politico (cynically) observes Newt Gingrich’s unique ability to fire up a Republican audience.
The former Massachusetts governor’s awkwardness was underscored at every turn by Gingrich’s fluent, flamboyant performance. Already surging in South Carolina polls, the former speaker won his second standing ovation from a debate crowd in a week and put himself in a position to win Saturday’s primary with another impressive showing.
By twice castigating one of the right’s perennial boogeymen — the press — Gingrich made a gut-level connection with conservatives who think they get a raw deal from the news media.
His blistering response to CNN’s John King about the accusations lodged by Marianne Gingrich might even offer a short-term lift.
“Watch it help Newt,†predicted former South Carolina GOP Chair Katon Dawson, speaking of the interview Gingrich’s former wife gave to ABC, likening Marianne Gingrich’s claims to the unproven 2010 accusations that South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley conducted an extramarital affair. “It looked like they were picking on her. 
But the former speaker’s rejuvenation isn’t only a matter of being viewed by conservatives as the latest victim of the press.
Just as he did when he first returned from the political grave last year, Gingrich is finding his voice by appealing to the mad-as-hell wing of the GOP that has been searching for a candidate to match and articulate its anger.
“He does capture where the party is rhetorically,†said Republican strategist Jon Lerner, who is unaligned in the race. “But I don’t know if Saturday’s vote is tantamount to long-term success.â€
“Newt’s Rocky Balboa — he doesn’t mind fighting,†added former Rep. Bob Livingston, a Gingrich adviser, after the debate.
Romney is probably never going to be likened to a brawler and, in the long run, that may serve him well. If he gets the nomination, he may be the one most able to make the general election a referendum on President Obama.
I caught most of yesterday evening’s debate, missing only the opening portion.
Personally, I found all the candidate’s positions generally agreeable and it was refreshing to hear, openly expressed, so many heresies from the consensus of the elect. All the GOP candidates acquited themselves well. I thought Romney has mastered playing the role of still-young-and-vigorous mature father figure to perfection. His voice and manner are remarkably pleasant and agreeable. One reflects that watching him spout generalities and persiflage at press conferences for four-to-eight years would probably be less painful than other alternatives.
Newt Gingrich, of course, is everyman’s bright, but bratty, younger brother grown old. Rick Santorum astutely identified Newt’s special instability and unpredictability, pointing out his lack of complete domestication as a drawback. Santorum was right, of course, that Newt Gingrich is a bit of a loose cannon, but I think myself that we are facing a crucial watershed moment in which what is vitally needed is a radical and far-reaching change of direction and fundamental revisions and reforms. I think that an unconventional person capable of original thought and willing to flout established opinion is precisely what the times require. Electing an enthusiastic nerd has genuine appeal as a proposition, I think.
Newt Gingrich is my favorite candidate, despite my having literally cursed his name and cast him out of my regard more than once, specifically because I think he has earned the front running position in the race. Newt Gingrich has, again and again, elevated the level of the conversation, clarified the issues, and moved the conversation beyond the media’s range of comfort. We should be supporting the candidate who makes the national conversation more intelligent.
Rick Santorum, despite my personal prejudices against traditionalists, deeply impressed me with his sincerity, intelligence, and combativeness. I did think he was a bit appalling in his position on illegal immigration, a regionally characteristic streak of Pennsylvania (Presbyterian-culture) fascism, came out in him on that one. I recognize exactly where this kind of morally delusive interest in following the rules for the sake of following the rules comes from. I grew up in the same state. People like Santorum are actually generally better than they sound. Beneath the (totally insane) insistence on always following all and every one of the laws and rules, they are generally quite good-hearted. Fill out the form they are insisting on being completed correctly, and they’ll give you the shirt off their back.
Even Ron Paul (who has frequently been the most self-righteous and obnoxious of the candidates) was pleasant to listen to. Ron Paul tends to remind me of a different back-home type, one’s clever, but slightly crazy, uncle, who has lots of theories and knows a whole lot about certain things, and who is very eager to tell you all about them. For a change, I thought Ron Paul added more pleasantness and good lines to the debate than extravagant accusations, and I was even beginning to lean to seeing him as a useful and creditable contributor.
Watching the debate conclude last night left this conservative Republican feeling happy and optimistic. I grew up in the same state as Rick Santorum, but I’ve come to appreciate the South. I’m decidedly comfortable with a key role, perhaps the decisive role, in selecting the Republican nominee being played by South Carolina.
James Taranto, astutely explains that, when Newt Gingrich unlimbers the anti-capitalist “You liquidated companies and killed jobs!” arguments against Mitt Romney, Gingrich is not just being cynical and opportunistic. He is as well (possibly even a bit intentionally) inoculating Romney and developing his immunity to the same kinds of attacks when they are delivered again later by Barack Obama during the actual campaign.
It’s shameful for Romney’s rivals–especially Gingrich, who should know better–to be engaging in this sort of class-warfare idiocy. As Charles Murray asked in an ironically nocturnal tweet: “How can a conservative attack Romney for Bain and sleep at night?”
Yet all that said, assuming that Romney is the eventual nominee, Gingrich is doing him a huge favor. …
If Gingrich didn’t attack Romney over Bain now, Barack Obama would do so in the fall. In fact, Obama will do so in the fall anyway, assuming Romney is the nominee. Others on the left, such as some guy at the Puffington Host, are already doing it:
Romney’s statement [about firing people], and in fact his entire career at Bain Capital, shows that this whole Republican job creator mantra is, to steal a line from Newt Gingrich, pious baloney. The word pious fits because Republicans really do worship the top 1 percent and the Wall Street tycoons like Romney who manipulate money but don’t actually build anything or create net new jobs. In fact, not only do they not create them, they actually destroy them.
By attacking now, Gingrich ensures that it won’t be the first voters hear about the matter, which will take some of the sting out of the Obama attacks. He’s also acting as a proxy for the president–call him Barack Hussein Gingrich–giving Romney the chance to practice and improve his defense, something he unquestionably needs to do.
Contrariwise, if Romney is incapable of learning to defend himself effectively, Republicans are better off learning that now, while there’s still time to nominate someone else.
We’ve all seen this happen before.
Barack Obama’s intimate associations with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers were major issues during the nomination fight and caused his candidacy to reel a bit, but Obama survived, and later in the real campaign his former radical associations had magically become transformed into old news, not significantly relevant anymore.
When Republicans will opportunistically use left-wing, anti-capitalist agitprop to bash one another in a group race to the abyss of demagogy?
Jim Geraghty’s emailed Morning Jolt arrived first thing this morning and did a splendid job of beating up on the idiots and scoundrels.
If Mitt Romney’s opponents embrace the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street crowd any further, they’re going to start pooping on police cars.
So, here we are, on the day of the first primary, and the main objection to Mitt Romney from Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry is that he fired a bunch of people? They object to this more than to his liberal-softie-sounding rhetoric from 1994 and 2002? More than to his crusade to liberate us from the individual mandate of Obamacare in order to leave the states free to enact their own individual mandates? More than to the fact that he’s won exactly one general election in his life — in a year when the left-of-center vote was divided?
We’re hearing objections to private-sector layoffs from the party that wants to shrink government. How do we think all those employees of the federal bureaucracy will get off the payroll — mass alien abductions?
When you think about it, isn’t it possible that the layoffs implemented when Romney was at Bain constitute one of the boldest moves of his career? It was one of the times he was willing to do something unpopular because he thought it was right and in the long-term interest of the institution he was managing, instead of following the polls and telling people what they wanted to hear.
Much of the focus was on Romney’s comment that he likes being able to fire people who provide services to him if he’s not happy with the quality of the service. You know, the way you can’t with the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the way you can’t (or, at least, not without Herculean determination) with a crappy teacher at a public school. You can’t fire a tenured professor at a state university, whether or not he gives good value for his salary and benefits to students and the taxpayers. We can’t take our business to some other government without leaving the country.
“You like being able to fire people who provide subpar services? Well, don’t we all. In fact, there’s one guy in particular who I’m itching to fire in November,” quips Allahpundit at Hot Air.
In case you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s the outrageous outrage du jour, a Democratic attack so cheap and out-of-context that even lefty Greg Sargent felt obliged to defend Romney from it. The full, entirely unobjectionable quote: “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. . . . You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service, then I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.'” Surely, surely, only an especially desperate Democratic hack would stoop to twisting that.
Right?
Of course, Jon Huntsman jumped on it — as did Perry and Newt.
“Dying to know if second place in NH goes to the guy who disdains me or to the guy who latently disdains capitalism,” sighs VodkaPundit.
“They sound like a bunch of leftists. Listen to the rhetoric,” sighs Jedidiah Bila. She also quips, “McCain thinks SuperPACs are damaging the GOP field. I think most of the candidates are doing a good enough job of that themselves.”
Michelle Malkin entitles a post, “The abysmal incompetence of the non-Romneys.”
So that’s sorta, kinda an endorsement of Mitt, right, Michelle? (Ducks.) She writes:
If you were unfortunate enough to watch Saturday night’s GOP debate in New Hampshire, you saw a pageant of feckless non-Romneys fail to step up to the plate and forcefully challenge Mitt Romney’s presumptive claim to the GOP presidential nomination. Newt Gingrich, who has spent the last week whining about the liberal media, hid behind the liberal media when asked about attacks of Romney’s private-sector record at Bain Capital. . . .
All of that will get lost as the Occupy rhetoric seeps into attack ads by Republicans that will send tingles down the legs of anti-capitalists everywhere from Gingrich’s new favorite newspaper, the New York Times, on down. Click on that link to read about the $5 million boost to a pro-Gingrich super PAC (yes, super PACs — those evil entities that Gingrich was whining about last week after his Iowa drubbing) that will saturate South Carolina with Occupy-style demagoguery. With Newt’s explicit approval and endorsement.
“Obama’s re-election campaign’s going to be easy. He won’t have to make attack ads against Romney. He can just rent Newt’s,” quips Mark Evanier.
I have no great inclination to support Mitt Romney, but a bit more of this kind of thing and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry may yet talk me into it.
Mark Steyn titled his excellent frustrated rant “Debate Night in the Titanic Ballroom.”
This country is broke, and the unprecedented scale of its brokeness is an existential threat. Yet, with the exception of Newt’s occasional flashes of contempt for the questioners, everyone else plays along with this absurd game. It’s not merely that the GOP is letting the left frame the contest but that a party willing to dignify this pitiful charade is sending a broader message about the likelihood of its mustering the determination to stand up to a Democrat-media establishment once in office and effect meaningful course correction.
I see Terence Jeffrey and Andy McCarthy are having a disagreement about the correct response to a question on gay adoption. The correct response is to take an unconstitutional federally-funded supersized condom, roll it over George Stephanopoulos’ head, and say, “That’s odd. I can no longer hear a word you’re saying. So let me throw in my two bits on impending multi-trillion-dollar ruin…â€
Newt Gingrich remains the only GOP candidate rebellious enough occasionally to resist representatives of the mainstream media calling all the shots, defining all the issues, and orchestrating Republican debates to serve their own agenda, so I still prefer Gingrich of the available choices.
Now may be the winter of our discontent, but the punditocracy is already beginning to discuss what’s going to happen after Obama loses the election in November. A symposium appearing in Washington Monthly was summarized thusly in a promotional email quoted by Glenn Reynolds. Reading some of these is bound to raise a smile.
The Washington Monthly asked a group of distinguished journalists and scholars to think through the likely ramifications of a GOP victory in November. Here’s what they conclude:
David Weigel reports that the Tea Party will control the agenda regardless of which Republican wins the nomination.
Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann predict that there’s a “better-than-even chance†that the Senate filibuster will be destroyed.
David Roberts shows that the GOP won’t eliminate the EPA, but will permanently cripple it.
Harold Pollack disabuses liberals of the hope that health care reform can survive a Republican presidency.
Dahlia Lithwick writes that one more round of judicial appointments by a Republican president will lead to a generation of anti-government rulings no future Democrat can undo.
Plus: Jonathan Bernstein on why campaign promises matter; Michael Konczal on the end of Dodd-Frank; James Traub on the GOP’s “more enemies, fewer friends†doctrine; and Paul Glastris on why, this time, conservative anti-government aspirations will be fulfilled.
Peter Wehner marvels as the doomed democrat administration moves phantom divisions around its political positions map.
We are now reaching the point in which the president is running a truly post-modern campaign, in which there is no objective truth but simply narrative. Obama’s campaign isn’t simply distorting the facts; it is inverting them. This kind of thing isn’t unusual to find in the academy. But to see a president and his campaign so thoroughly deconstruct truth in order to maintain power is quite rare. The sheer audacity of Obama’s cynicism is a wonder of the modern world.
It is all so terribly sad, but actually pretty funny, too.
The Iowa caucuses are caucuses, not even a primary. They have a lousy record of predicting the eventual nominee, but their significance in the eyes of the media grows larger and larger and larger in the absence of any meaningful reportable activity in the presidential nomination contest.
Fred Cagle argues that we are all wasting our time by paying so much attention to Iowa. Iowa is like those NFL pre-season games: the teams don’t always have their acts together or even care all that much. The real contest season that counts starts later.
I’ve always considered the Iowa caucus a speed bump on the road to picking a president—the place where televangelist Pat Robertson beat George H.W. Bush, and it was won last time by President Mike Huckabee. My suspicions were confirmed when I went out there in 2008 to follow a group of Tennessee legislators campaigning for Fred Thompson.
Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia went to Iowa and spent time there in 1976 and when he won the caucus he was an overnight sensation. In addition to all his other sins, Carter injected an anonymous collection of house parties out on the prairie into the national conversation. Political reporters discovered they could start the coverage of the presidential campaign early and they learned to love Des Moines. Hey, it was the heartland.
The caucus season begins with presidential candidates slavishly kissing the ring of Archer Daniels Midland and ethanol subsidies. Then the candidates buy voters tickets and feed them to get them to a barbecue/straw poll and the press treats it like it means something. …
Will winning Iowa give someone momentum into the primaries? John McCain finished fourth in Iowa, and then won South Carolina.
New Hampshire takes pride in picking its own winner, rarely paying much attention to the farmers out on the prairie.
My point in all this is that the Iowa caucus has very little to do with who becomes president. It is a prelude to the real campaign and it entertains the press and political junkies. It is a place for candidates to practice a stump speech.
The results this time will not tell us anything about who will win the nomination, but we’ll have wall to wall coverage anyway. I don’t see any way we will ever relegate Iowa to the position it deserves.
