Big Mouth Newt

............................................
Newt Gingrich's Disastrous Rollout

Can the ex-speaker’s 2012 campaign recover from a stumbling start that has infuriated the right? Howard Kurtz on why conservatives are so angry at their onetime champion.

Rich Galen, who worked for Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, says his former boss has really damaged himself with his bungled presidential campaign launch.

“On the Richter scale it’s pretty serious—7.2. It feeds into the greatest fear about Newt’s candidacy, that he can’t help himself. He’s missing the gene that says because it comes into your head, it doesn’t have to come out of your mouth.”

[snipped]

National Review Editor Rich Lowry rolls his eyes at the Gingrich rhetoric:

“That’s Newt being Newt…He can’t help himself. Gingrich prefers extravagant lambasting when a mere distancing would do, and the over-arching theoretical construct to a mundane pander. He is drawn irresistibly to operatic overstatement—sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and occasionally downright absurd,…

[snipped]
............................................