THE GOOD FIGHT: Newt-ering the Mitt

When Newt Gingrich rolled into South Carolina, he immediately started attacking Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital.  He also called on Romney to release his tax returns.

Mitt’s responses were nothing short of pathetic.

On Bain, he said he was sorry to see Republicans — of all people — attacking capitalism.

“It makes me sad,” he stated.

No explanation of what he actually did at Bain, no defense of the free enterprise system, no teaching moment about how our economic system is supposed to work.

Nothing.

Except, that is, to say this line of attack makes him sad.

Really?  Are you kidding me?

Then, when questioned whether he would release those tax returns, it got even worse.

“Maybe,” he responded with a goofy smile.

At the time, there was a great deal of resentment in Republican circles, and a lot of anger too, about the incendiary nature of the attacks by Newt as well as Gov. Rick Perry (before he dropped out of the race, and endorsed Newt) over Bain Capital.  So Mitt could have made a lot of hay on the issue and scored some big points with South Carolina voters.  But he didn’t.  Instead, it was a missed opportunity.

Then came the bombshell ABC News interview with one of Newt’s ex-wives in which she claimed that, when they were still married, he demanded she agree to an “open marriage” or he would divorce her.  The story threatened to stop Newt’s momentum in South Carolina, where he had been surging due to a dominant Fox News debate performance a couple nights earlier.

However, all that changed when moderator John King chose to open a CNN presidential debate with a pointed question to Newt about his ex-wife’s explosive allegations.

Newt turned the tables on King, as the representative of the liberal media, accusing him/them of the most rancid type of political partisanship imaginable as evidenced by the first debate question, all to protect Pres. Obama and help get him re-elected.

The Republican audience erupted in applause, and at that point the debate — as well as the primary itself — was over.  A big portion of the South Carolina electorate decided who to support in the final days of the campaign, and those late-deciders broke overwhelmingly in favor of Newt, giving him a landslide victory.

This just goes to show once again how deep-seated that conservative disgust is over the liberal media, and how detested the liberal media elites are within the Republican Party.  Newt not only understands this, but he knows how to tap into it with indignant replies and, when necessary, outright rage.

So for the voters of South Carolina, it was an easy choice — notwithstanding Ann Coulter’s observation that, by choosing Newt, they “threw out the baby and kept the bath water.”

I’m no cheerleader for Romney, as Ann Coulter is, but the fact remains that Newt is still the same guy who had to step down as Speaker of the House when conservatives in Congress revolted against him after his self-inflicted wounds harmed both his own political career and the Republican Party at large.  He’s still the same guy who sat on that couch with Nancy Pelosi and championed climate change legislation — and even tacitly supported the Democrat cap-and-trade bill which would have decimated our economy to help “solve” global warming, a non-existent crisis which was created by liberals as part of their neverending power grab.  And he’s still the guy who cheated on both of the wives he divorced, and to say this wouldn’t be an issue in a general election campaign — or to think that Newt would be able to overcome it by attacking the media — is, I think, naive at best and highly dangerous at worst for the entire GOP field this November.

Newt says he has sought God’s forgiveness for his personal transgressions and received it, and if he is sincere then there is no doubt that’s true.  But it doesn’t necessarily mean that a majority of voters this fall would deem him qualified to hold the nation’s highest office and become the leader of the free world.

So Romney may not be the ideal candidate — but Newt certainly isn’t.

Furthermore, as I’ve pointed out all along, Rick Santorum is still the only real conservative left in the race.

The other three have strengths, to be sure.  Romney’s expertise is on the economy (though he clearly has trouble articulating it), and he has prospered greatly in life thanks to his financial acumen.  Gingrich is at his best when it comes to explaining the conservative philosophy, as we’ve witnessed in the debates, and I’d love to see him as the next Press Secretary taking on the liberal media every day.  As for Ron Paul, he is a prophet on monetary issues, with his plan of cutting $1 trillion from the budget — in his first year as president alone — to deal with the debt crisis (he’s the only one taking this crisis seriously, or at least seriously enough) and his barbs about the Fed’s scandalous money-printing schemes.    

And, yes, any one of the three would be infinitely better than Obama.

But if Republicans want a true conservative who has been consistent on the issues both in his personal and in his political life, then it has to be Rick Santorum.

The problem is that he doesn’t have the kind of money or organizational strength that Romney and Gingrich have, and the next primary state of Florida is a big-money market.  That means he may not be able to compete there, and with another poor showing may not be able to regain the ground he won in Iowa.

That would be too bad for Santorum, and for the country, too.

But politics ain’t beanbag, as they say, and this race may get a lot tougher, and stay that way a lot longer, than anyone but Barack Obama and the Democrats would like.

e-mail: tom3264@msn.com, or go to tom’s Facebook page to send a message