Ballroom Blitzer
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: CNN, Debates, Mitt Romney, Newt Newt, Obits 1 Comment »John Dickerson on the night’s key exchange:
[Gingrich] was even the least effective attacker of the media. He had to follow on after Rick Santorum had interrupted the bickering of the front-runners to call for a return to the issues. Gingrich tried to echo him, arguing that it was OK to attack Romney for his tax returns in a TV interview but “nonsense” to try to get him to talk about it during the debate — a theory that is itself nonsense. Moderator Wolf Blitzer stood his ground. For a man who has profited from the debates and promises to whup Obama in the debates, to shrink from repeating onstage what he says in interviews was confusing and weak.
Yeah, this, for me, was where the Gingrich candidacy effectively shot itself in the face, from the Speaker’s all-too-transparent technique of sidling up to the moderator before delivering a smackdown (“Wolf, you and I have had a good relationship over the years, but…”) to his opponent’s masterful reading of the situation, which enabled him to step right in and deliver said smackdown himself — not on Blitzer or “the media,” but on the Speaker. The Europeans have a phrase for this sort of thing; it’s called getting your ass handed to you on a silver platter.
Au revoir, Newt.
A day later, I’m still thinking about how abysmally Gingrich came off in that bizarre five-minute detour. Trying the John King gimmick all over again was bad enough—he could pull it off there because King’s question was directed squarely at Gingrich, whereas Blitzer’s concerned something Gingrich had said about Romney; totally different calculus—but then, after Romney was smart enough to spot an opening, to suddenly do a one-eighty and say, “Okay, you’ve forced me to do the very thing I was just pretending to be indignantly against doing,” that was painful to watch. The disconnect between “I’m happy to talk about this stuff in attack ads and radio spots, but not in debates”—which is exactly where you should be talking about such stuff!—was surreal. Terrible night for Gingrich.
So Romney’s going to win for sure now, but he does have one problem that’s becoming a story: he keeps getting caught telling flat-out lies. Last night there were at least two: 1) the ghetto-language ad he said he hadn’t seen (“We just checked, Governor, and the ad does say that—and it ends with ‘I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this ad’”); 2) saying he’s never voted for a Democrat when a Republican was on the ballot—turns out that when he voted for Tsongas in ’92, he could have instead voted for either Bush or Buchanan. There was other stuff about his blind trust and his alleged time away from politics in the ’90s that, going by what I’ve read today, comes right up to the line. He may be grievously at odds with the Google/YouTube world.