I didn’t watch the debate, but the clip above shows Newt Gingrich swatting away Mitt Romney’s attack the Newt is a career politician, whereas Mitt is a businessman.
Romney also got in trouble for challenging Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet.
Romney has generally done well in the debates, and yet he still couldn’t break through. Now that he’s slipping and Newt is surging, he picked the wrong time to finally have a bad debate performance.
Things aren’t looking good for him.
Rick Perry really is a caricature of George W. Bush. This ad is just hilarious as he makes a desperate plea for religious conservatives in Iowa.
Perry and Michele Bachmann are part of the Dominionism movement. Interesting stuff.
Yesterday, I saw a clip of Mitt Romney ripping Newt Gingrich for being a flip-flopper. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of his opponents used Romney’s own words against him. The Jon Huntsman campaign produced this ad.
It’s hard to think of a major candidate in modern history who comes across as more opportunistic than Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has plenty of problems and he’ll be a disaster for the GOP, but his flips and flops come more from his flaky mind and his constant desire to come up with creative proposals to puff up his ego. With Mitt, it’s all calculated, and then he makes things worse by lying about it.
Newt Gingrich spent some time today kissing the ring of reality TV star and goofball birther Donald Trump. Meanwhile, establishment conservatives like George Will are recoiling in horror watching these clowns hijack the conservative movement.
This past weekend, George Will actually suggested that conservatives ought to take a second look at Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman given the prospect of Newt or Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. Yes, he’s desperate. Rick Perry sounds like George W. Bush after downing a 12-pack, and Huntsman is stuck in single digits in the polls after trying to run as a moderate.
But Will has to turn somewhere, as he has no use for flip-flopper Romney and he can’t stand Newt. With his usual rhetorical flair, Will eviscerates the former Speaker:
Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.
Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining: Recently he compared his revival of his campaign to Sam Walton’s and Ray Kroc’s creations of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, two of America’s largest private-sector employers. There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.
His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On Election Eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. . . . The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal (http://bit.ly/vFbjAk). And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.
Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how. Conservatism, in contrast, is both cause and effect of modesty about understanding society’s complexities, controlling its trajectory and improving upon its spontaneous order.
Most people would agree with Will, as Newt is widely regarded as a mean-spirited buffoon. But in today’s Republican Party, the fear and loathing caucus calls the shots, and contempt for Obama and the left is by far the most important quality. In that area Newt is unmatched and he has a long track record, so his flaky deviations from conservative policies are more easily forgiven by those eager to see someone stick it to Obama in the debates.
Perry is toast, so Will won’t get his wish there. As for Huntsman, Will and other writers like Erick Erickson of RedState.com have been pointing out how conservative Huntsman is when it comes to policy. Yet Huntsman shows more contempt for the far right than he does for Obama, and that’s why he’s been going nowhere. Perhaps he can change the tone of his campaign, but he has mocked conservatives for not believing in global warming, and stuff like that will make it difficult for him to win GOP primaries.
I think Will is stuck with Mitt or Newt.
The Herman Cain candidacy had become a joke over the past several weeks. The allegations of sexual harassment took their toll, the the alleged affair probably hurt him even more, but his utter lack of knowledge of the issues made all of this personal stuff a sideshow.
Herman Cain is a radio personality, and he ran his campaign like one. He wasn’t serious about the issues. Instead, he had a bunch of handy slogans that appealed to the angry right. When he was pressed on specifics, he usually answered with more slogans, or just said he would sit down with smart advisers and come to a decision.
He mocked the notion that he needed any working knowledge of foreign policy issues, and simply offered contempt for those who would actually take the time to study these sorts of things. This caught up to him, however, when he looked like an uniformed fool in the face of a simple question about his Libya strategy. Unfortunately for the Herminator, this pathetic exchange with the uncomfortable long pause was caught on tape.
His 9-9-9 plan got plenty of attention, but he was utterly incapable of explaining it. He seemed to not understand how adding a 9% national sales tax would result in a huge tax increase on the poor and the middle class. When the notion finally sunk in weeks later, Cain meekly offered a 9-0-9 plan for the working poor.
Sex scandals will destroy most politicians, and Herman Cain is no different. Ginger White came across as a believable woman as she didn’t seek the public eye. Rather, she came forward when a local TV station threatened to expose her affair with Cain.
Cain of course tried to paint the media and the Democrats as the villains, but he had nothing but his charm to fall back on. By the time he “suspended” his campaign today, Cain was plummeting in the polls as evangelical voters started to abandon him.
Today’s announcement was classic Herman Cain – all fluff and zero substance. He announced his “Plan B” decision to suspend his campaign yet fight on for the issues (slogans) he cares about. Cain is probably in for a rude awakening as the media will start to ignore him again. Losers and quitters don’t get much press. Just ask Sarah Palin. She was a media sensation as long as she was a potential candidate. Now she’s just another shrill commentator. Sure, she has a following and can generate news, and Cain will probably get enough press to help him sell some books and book some paid speeches, but the frenzy will end.
The Herman Cain reality show is over.
© 2026 NorthCoastBlog.com
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑