Our political Quote of the Day comes from the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm who analyzes the impact of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s implosion on the race for the 2012 Presidential nomination:
The real import of Thursday’s aide walkout from Newt Gingrich’s flailing presidential campaign has little to do with the former House speaker himself.
It’s like a football expansion draft, the players from Gingrich’s now-crippled political franchise will get picked up and signed on to other GOP campaigns, this being the eve of prime-time for these savvy hired guns who live for the unpredictable adrenalin rush and constant predictable grind of campaign days.
Immediately, Sonny Perdue, the former Georgia governor and national co-chair for Gingrich 2012, signed on to Tim Pawlenty’s political team.
But what’s more important is that two of these now-departed Gingrich campaign aides were actually on loan from another governor, Texas Republican Rick Perry. Chief among them Rob Johnson, Gingrich’s campaign manager, and Dave Carney.
The tall conservative Eagle Scout, now Texas’ longest-serving governor ever, has stated several times that he’s not running for his party’s 2012 nomination, which is smart. He’s been dealing with the state legislature all spring. And why ask to be targeted by opponents sooner than necessary?
But he’s waffled enough to keep the hopeful murmurs smoldering like a Texas wildfire during the night, especially among fiscal conservatives dissatisfied with the fiscal and smaller government bona fides of the current crop of Republican wannabes.
Read the rest of it.
Indeed, a variety of reports about Gingrich’s self-inflicted political catastrophe suggests that his top, professional staffers reached that he was not even a Presidential wannabe. They concluded they had hitched their resumes to someone who was doing it as a lark, because he wanted attention, or because he sought to enhance his speakers fees.
From rollout to irrelevance, compared to Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump waged an absolutely masterful campaign.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.