Mitt Romney was a hugely successful, brilliant, insightful, bold, tough business leader of the kind who has lent mightily to American sparkle in good times, and for Newt Gingrich, that’s all the ammunition he needs to destroy the man.
Why, Romney is a capitalist! He eats workers for snacks! Vengeance is mine, saith the Newt.
It’s the latest Newt you are seeing here, but also the old Newt. For a while, we had the new Newt, the one who would tell other participants in GOP presidential debates to quit having at each other so much. The point of the exercise, he would say, was to address substance, showing what a failure President Barack Obama had been and how wrong his policies are.
Newt seemed to have put aside the vituperation that used to define him. He himself said he had matured, and for a period was indeed mostly happy-faced, with no issue too remote to escape his brilliant exposition. His poll numbers began to rise to the point that he announced he would win the Republican nomination for president and beat Obama in the general election.