Mistah Gingrich, He Mad

“Carpet-bombing”—that was Newt’s big word on two of the Sunday morning shows today when describing the scope of Romney’s negative ads in Florida. (I assume that invitations were proffered to Romney as well and he declined, but you never know; if I were the booker on one of these shows, I’d always try to get Newt on before Romney.) I can see where that might cause some trouble for him, in that it’s a term so strongly identified with the Vietnam War. At the very least, I expect the requisite manufactured indignation from Romney: “And now the Speaker is comparing me to a military strategy that killed untold numbers of innocent Vietnamese citizens in a war that tore our country apart—gosh, that’s just reckless.”

The one thing I got out of this morning (beyond the fact that Newt continues to plug this blog, name-checking “managing the decay” no less than three times) is that even if Romney wins by 15-20 points on Tuesday, Gingrich will still be wreaking havoc a month from now. There are a lot of southern states that don’t come up till March, and Gingrich seems convinced that he just has to get Santorum out of the race and everything will turn his way again. There were also polls this week where Gingrich’s lead widened nationally, and even though they’ll again reverse themselves after Tuesday, no one’s going to walk away from a race any time soon where he was still leading national polls in late January. I’ve been resisting all along the idea that any of this will hurt Romney in the general, believing that it’ll all be forgotten down the road when it’s him and Obama and some new development (surprise or otherwise) suddenly becomes the focus of the election. But listening to Laura Ingraham on Meet the Press—not someone I care for, but I take it she ought to know—she framed what’s happening in a way that made me think, “Some of this really may be doing long-term damage to Romney.” Hardly a stunning revelation—you said the same thing a few posts ago, Scott, and people say it all the time on the message board. For me it’s just been an entertaining and mostly meaningless warm-up, but I’m starting to come around some on that. And the chance to lose the battle (the nomination) but win the war (irrevocably damage Romney) is a powerful incentive for Gingrich to stick it out.

I looked into ordering one of these, but they’re $100!

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