Politics is Weird and Creepy

Posted on May 18, 2012 at 5:30 pm by JM Ashby

Newt Gingrich is making his first public appearance in support of Mitt Romney for president this weekend.

WASHINGTON – Newt Gingrich makes his first major appearance since leaving the presidential race this weekend and will try to boost Mitt Romney to a group that preferred Gingrich as the party’s nominee: Georgia Republicans. [...]

The embrace of Romney puts Gingrich in an awkward spot, said University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock. If he were to start gushing about his former primary foe, it would look insincere.

“I expect Gingrich is also concerned about his own credibility,” Bullock said. “There’s only so much you can recant.”

Indeed, there’s only so much you can recant.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. This is a video ad from the Newt Gingrich super PAC, not OFA.

Gingrich is now downplaying the effectiveness of hitting Mitt Romney for his time at Bain, and while it didn’t work out very well for Newt, I don’t believe that will be the case in the general election.

Newt Gingrich was handicapped by the fact that he’s Newt Gingrich. The president doesn’t suffer from that affliction.

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  • jaywillie

    The only time Gingrich attacked Romney for Bain was in the run-up to South Carolina. Romney had been leading there in the previous months, and suffered a terrible loss, which Bain no doubt played a significant role in. Afterwards, Gingrich was severely criticized by his fellow Republicans for mentioning Bain, and, indeed, in the weeks following the South Carolina primary, he backed off and even let Romney twist the Bain attack around to make Gingrich look bad (ie, Gingrich got weak in the knees, and, much like Pawlenty’s refusal to criticize Romney to his face, Gingrich buckled because he didn’t keep at it).

    The surest sign that Bain is bad news for Romney is in how quickly his campaign went from talking up Bain recently to describing any reference made to Romney’s stewardship of Bain as “character assassination.” Hell, the guy can’t even decide how many jobs he “created” at Bain.

    My favorite Romney response to Bain is the following, as reported by TPM earlier this week:

    “My work at Bain was to try to make the enterprises more successful, to grow them,” he said. “There is this fiction that some have that somehow you can be highly successful by stripping assets from enterprise and walking away with a lot of money…there may be some people that know how to do that. I sure don’t.”

    He describes how he made his money precisely; there isn’t a better way to describe it. After all, who would know better than the guy who made millions in that manner and now expects everyone to buy his “Golly gee, I sure don’t know anything about that” act? Why else would someone be so adamant about not doing something that was a “fiction?” Maybe because he wrote the book on vulture capitalism.

  • D_C_Wilson

    “I expect Gingrich is also concerned about his own credibility,” Bullock said. “There’s only so much you can recant.”

    Newt’s about 20 years too late to start worrying about his credibility now.