Via the NYT‘s The Caucus:
“He’s done. He didn’t have a big chance from the beginning, but now it’s over,” said Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist, adding that Mr. Gingrich appeared “contradictory and incoherent” during the NBC interview. “It’s deadly.”
This from a piece on Special Report with Brett Baier:
I’m not at all surprised at his comments or the reaction, though I must say that this must be a record for the quickest self-implosion of a presidential campaign. Frankly, my money was on Ron Paul for that honor.
Look, even before this blew up, Paul Ryan had a better shot at getting nominated and winning the White House than Gingrich ever did. Gingrich is no idiot, and should have known this. He has a habit of popping out what’s in his head at the moment, which to my way of thinking makes him a poor president, much less a presidential candidate. Gingrich’s history is replete with many such unguarded comments. This one was unforgivable. He’s spent a lot of time in the last 48 hours trying to back away from his comment. It won’t work.
The Democrats now will have Gingich’s comments in all their ads for the whole of the next election cycle. He’s basically written their whole campaign for them.
But you know there are a number of things that these events tell us. First, as to what it says about the current crop of contenders; It is lacking. As I’ve said, Newt Gingrich is not a total idiot. He looked at the field, and correctly identified that there was a weakness out there, and so figured he had a shot at the thing.
His problem of course is that he has seriously mis-identified the mood of the GOP rank and file, which is the other thing it exposes to us; The mood is far more seriously conservative than Gingrich saw… and frankly, more serious than any of the establishment GOP has seen fit to acknowledge as yet. Gingrich was obviously going for the triangulation thing that Clinton and Bush used…. and once so identified, the rank and file shut him down before the echoes of “right wing social engineering” died.
Here’s a clue, Newt; There’s no such thing as “right wing Social Engineering”. The right is about undoing the social engineering the left has been subjecting us to. That even for a brief moment, you couldn’t identify that as such, disqualifies you.
