Wednesday afternoon Newt Gingrich is expected to announce that he will suspend his presidential campaign. After yo-yoing from the bottom of the heap to the top of the pack and back down to the bottom again, his time to win delegates and the opportunity to raise money both have finally ran out.
There is an overwhelming temptation among many in the world of political commentary to dismiss this news as the inevitable prevailing over the impossible. “Newt never stood a chance against Romney. He had no money, no organization, no institutional support” likely summarizes the conventional wisdom about the end of his short-circuited campaign.
However, Gingrich is hardly a victim. As has been the case throughout the year, he makes it easy for his critics to marginalize and lampoon him, mainly because his ego is considered as “big” as his ideas.
Take Wednesday’s announcement as an example. The Gingrich campaign attempted to generate massive build up around an event that essentially features the former House Speaker dropping out of the race.
Few outside Gingrich's intimate group of family and advisers think his speech today, focused on "the important role citizens can play in stopping a second Obama term and helping Mitt Romney and the Republican Party build a governing coalition in Washington”; will ultimately have any impact on the race. So what justifies such a prolonged exit from the political stage?
“As a man who wants to run for president of the United States who can’t be honest with the American people, why should we expect him to level about anything if he’s president?” the former House speaker asks matter-of-factly in one clip.
Next question: Is it Romney’s business record that Newt supports?
“You’d certainly have to say that Bain at times engaged in behavior where they looted a company leaving behind 1,700 unemployed people,” Gingrich says, referring to the private-equity firm that Romney formerly headed.
Then: “There was a pattern, in some companies, a handful of them, of leaving them with enormous debt, and then within a year or two or three, having them go broke. I think that is something he ought to answer.”
Follow that with slams on Romney’s Swiss bank account, a “Romney machine” that’s “not capable of inspiring positive turnout,” positions that are “anti-immigrant,” and another attack on Romney’s honesty, and you’ve got a tidy message against the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.
Romney finished the competitive part of the primary season with the lowest likability of any major-party nominee in modern history – thanks in part to attacks from Gingrich and the other GOP candidates. Now Gingrich is reportedly set to endorse Romney in the next couple of weeks. The Obama campaign is making sure we don’t forget what Gingrich thought just a few months ago.
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