Romney and Gingrich Take Their Own Medicine
January 10, 2012 | 1:05 PM
It's been fascinating (and let's be honest, quite amusing) to watch Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney cope with tactics they have used, turned against them.
For weeks I wondered if Gingrich would be another Bill Bradley. Don't laugh. The former senator told me toward the end of his 2000 Iowa caucus campaign against Al Gore that he had no plans to shift away from a strategy so aggressively positive that sometimes he even neglected to defend himself against attacks. But what if polls show you can't win that way? I asked. He was immovable. He had to stay positive, he said, because he had to prove that a candidate could win that way.
The results, obviously, proved the opposite.
At least Bradley's approach was consistent with his demeanor and
bipartisan history. Gingrich's cheerful schtick seemed less credible and
his constant complaints about negative campaigning beyond the pale.
This is after all the man who back in the 1990s coached Republicans to
brand their opponents as corrupt, pathetic, incompetent, selfish traitors.
Who calls judges he disagrees with anti-American and the president a
Kenyan anti-colonial socialist, and says Barney Frank and Chris Dodd
should go to jail for writing a law to rein in Wall Street. For weeks I wondered if Gingrich would be another Bill Bradley. Don't laugh. The former senator told me toward the end of his 2000 Iowa caucus campaign against Al Gore that he had no plans to shift away from a strategy so aggressively positive that sometimes he even neglected to defend himself against attacks. But what if polls show you can't win that way? I asked. He was immovable. He had to stay positive, he said, because he had to prove that a candidate could win that way.
The results, obviously, proved the opposite.
Gingrich is a smarter politician than Bradley, or maybe just one with less patience and wealthier friends. He and a super PAC with millions are finally taking up arms against Romney and it's quite a relief, actually. Demanding that Romney stop the "pious baloney," painting him as a bloodless corporate job-killer -- that's the Newt we know. No authenticity questions need be pondered anymore.
There is one place Gingrich says he won't go, which is to exploit Romney's unfortunate "I like to fire people" line. That would be wrong, he said, because the line is being taken out of context. That's true. Romney was talking about firing service providers who don't deliver good service. But heck, why let a little context problem get in the way of a great quote? It certainly didn't stop the Rick Perry camp from immediately -- and brilliantly -- creating a ringtone of Romney saying "I like to fire people."
Nor did it stop Romney in November when he made an ad showing President Obama saying that if he talked about the economy, he'd lose the election. Obama was quoting a John McCain aide during the 2008 campaign, but whatever. The Romney team insisted its wildly distorted clip job was perfectly fair game.
"I understand that in politics people are going to try and grasp at anything, take it out of context and make it something it's not," Romney said Monday after his "firing" offense. Spoken as a veteran practitioner of do-what-you-must politics. So far, Romney has shown he can dish it out and he can take it. The same can't be said for Gingrich.
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