Newt needs to pick a fight with the lying Republicans

A Washington Times headline from yesterday reads, “Gingrich: I won’t quit if I lose Tuesday in South.” Steve Deace, a Townhall.com columnist writes in his piece titled, “Newt, Santorum: Avengers Assemble,” what many of the rest of us are thinking:

There is a window of opportunity to avert another four years of the Obama Regime, as well as a devastating down ballot disaster that would threaten many of the substantial gains conservatives just made in 2010.

But it’s up to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to team up and take advantage of it.

If the two campaigns can’t set individual agendas for the good of the country in the next few days/weeks, we may look back on this time period as the moment when the last, best hope to return America to its republican roots was lost once and for all.

Deace also captures my own sentiment regarding Newt with this:

I am a Gingrich supporter, but I do not foresee a path to him winning the nomination either via the delegate math or a potential brokered convention…

[…]

I still believe Newt is the only chance we have among the current candidates running to truly play offense in the arena of ideas the next four years. And I still believe Newt best understands historically what the nation faces, what to do about it, and has the God-given ability and skill-set to communicate it effectively via the bully pulpit (where we have lost so much ground as conservatives the past two decades).

It’s been clear for a long time that Newt Gingrich needs better advisers – and if he’s listening too much to himself, he needs to stop. His campaign is quickly moving towards the ridiculous.

Rick Santorum’s isn’t much better – he is only winning more states than Gingrich because Romney spent millions of dollars lying about Newt. The problem for Newt is that he hasn’t done anything about all those lies. Every now and then he squeaks something about Romney’s ads. That’s not good enough.

Newt doesn’t understand why he was in the lead in last November. It wasn’t his big ideas. It was that it was his turn to be the anti-Romney person. Then the slimy lying Mitt Machine destroyed him via millions in TV and radio ads before Iowa. After that, goofy Rick thinks, like that infamous actress telling the Academy, “you like me, you really like me!” Duh. It was just his turn.

And then Newt wins South Carolina because of a good ground game, the state’s proximity to Newt’s home state of Georgia, and the fact that he actually grabbed a hold of the narrative with a powerful message in the couple debates leading up to it. History repeated itself as the scummy Romney lie machine did its work in Florida. And then Newt pretty much disappeared.

Newt’s supporters appreciate him because of his ideas, his intellect, his depth. But the problem in this country is the Republican Party’s corrupt establishment. You can’t blame Democrats for the nation’s ills – they are like a dog peeing on the rug. Dogs and Democrats are going to do unpleasant things because it’s in their nature. The question is always – what is the GOP going to do about it?

Well, if the wrong Republicans are in charge, we do what George W. Bush and Dennis Hastert did – which was make it possible for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to win power.

This simple but important reality needs to be a part of Gingrich’s message. Newt needs to add the intramural fight aspect to his campaign. And there’s nowhere better to do that than in Illinois, the state which gave the country Hastert and Obama. This isn’t Massachusetts or California or Oregon or Minnesota. The voters here are not hopeless lefties. This is only a “blue state” because of our inept and mal-motivated Illinois GOP.

Romney lies. Everyone ignores it. We move on and pretend it never happened. Well, we’re never going to get to policy fixes until we deal with the rot in our politics. Newt is smart, but he’s not running a smart campaign because he never has quite gotten it regarding the low-lifes that dominate his party and who could care less about policy fixes.

If we nominate Romney – Gingrich will have to share the blame because he let those [expletive deleted] people get away with what they always do – especially in Illinois – successfully destroy the good guys.

Newt had better couple that big ideas thing with a message explaining why the GOP hasn’t already succeeded in implementing at least some of those big ideas. He needs to pick a fight. We all know his powers to articulate. He needs to articulate this: We need a better Republican Party – or else we lose no matter who wins the election.