Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning. 
 
 Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter. 
 
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 reset VandeHei on anti-Newt attacks Gingrich fires back in Florida 
 
 If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud. 
 
 It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late. This is just a sampling of what’s hitting Newt: 
 
 • The overnight Drudge Report banner: “Insider: Gingrich repeatedly Insulted Reagan.” The headline linked to a devastating takedown by Elliott Abrams in the National Review, who wrote, among other things, that Gingrich had a long record of criticizing and undermining Reagan’s most transformative policies. 
 
 • Drudge also linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.” 
 
 Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past. 
 
 • Bob Dole issued a scathing statement Thursday that the Romney campaign provided to the National Review in which he said “it is now time” to rally to stop Gingrich, blamed the former Speaker for losing House Republican seats in 1996, and warned that it could happen again, at all levels of government. 
 
 “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late,” Dole said. “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.” 
 
 Dole added, “In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year.” 
 
 • Conservatives are circulating a piece written by the editors of the National Review: “The Hour of Newt.” The editors, who have been extremely critical of Gingrich for weeks, waved conservatives off the Gingrich bandwagon. “Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.” 
 
 • Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist writing on her self-titled website, warns: “Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!” She, too, gets Drudge promotion, with a column punctuated with this punch: “Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.” 
 
 • Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: “He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.” ||||| How long have I been saying it? At least for 15 years, but in private I have been aware of it longer. Newt Gingrich is conservatism’s Bill Clinton, but without the charm. He has acquired wit but he has all the charm of barbed wire. 
 
 Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping. It is not as egregious as Bill’s, but then Newt is not as drop-dead beautiful. His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out. 
 
 If I have heard of some, you can be sure the Democrats have heard of more. Nancy Pelosi’s intimations are timely. Newt up against the Prophet Obama would be a painful thing to watch. He might be deft with one-liners but it would be futile. There are independent and other uncommitted voters to be cultivated in 2012 — all would be unmoved by Newt’s juggling of conservative shibboleths. 
 
 Newt and Bill, as 1960s generation self-promoters, share the same duplicity, ostentatious braininess, a propensity for endless scrapes with propriety and the law. They are tireless hustlers. Now Newt is hustling my fellow conservatives in this election. The last time around he successfully hustled conservatives in the House of Representatives and then the conservatives on the House impeachment committee. 
 
 He blew the impeachment and in fact his role as Speaker. He backed out in disgrace. He now says Republicans in the House were exhausted with his great projects. Nonsense, I knew many of them, and they were exhausted with his atrocious leadership. He is not a leader. He is a huckster. Today Mitt Romney has 72 Congressional endorsements. Newt has 11. Possibly the 11 have yet to meet him. 
 
 Now he has found his key for hustling conservative electorate. He is playing the liberal media card and saying he embodies conservative values. Like Bill with his credulous fans, Newt is hoping conservatives suffer amnesia. Possibly some do. Perhaps they cannot recall mere months ago when this insufferable whiz kid was lambasting the great Congressman Paul Ryan for “right-wing social engineering” — more evidence of Newt’s not-so-hidden longing for the approval of the liberal media. 
 
 After his Ryan moment Newt’s campaign was a death wagon, and it will be so again — hopefully before he gets the nomination. Conservatives should not climb onto his death wagon. He is a huckster, and I for one will not be rendered a contortionist trying to defend him. I did so in his earliest days and learned my lesson. 
 
 After Newt’s and Bill’s disastrous experiences in government both went on to create empires, Bill in philanthropy and cheap thought, Newt in public policy and cheap thought. As an ex-president Bill has wrung up an unprecedented $75.6 million since absconding from the White House with White House loot and shameless pardons. I do not know how much Newt has amassed, but he got between $1.6 million to $1.8 million from Freddie Mac, and he lobbied for Medicare Part B while receiving, according to the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, “Big Bucks Pushing Corporate Welfare.” Now after a lifetime in Washington he is promoting himself as an outsider. 
 
 Contending with Newt for the Republican nomination are Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney. All three are truer conservatives than Newt. I like them all. But John Bolton, former ambassador the United Nations, and John Lehman, President Reagan’s secretary of the navy, are for Mitt, and they are solid conservatives. Governor Christie and the economic pundit Larry Kudlow laud Mitt on taxes, on spending, and on attacking crony capitalism. Mr. Kudlow calls Mr. Romney “Reaganesque.” Ann Coulter seems to loathe Newt. That is good enough for me. 
 
 Back in 1992 I appeared with Chris Matthews on some gasbag’s television show. Was it Donohue? At any rate, I said candidate Clinton had more skeletons in his closet than a body snatcher. It was a prescient line then, and I always got a laugh. I can apply the same line today to Newt, though he has skeletons both inside and outside his closet. 
 
 Conservatives should not be surprised by the scandals that lie ahead, if they stick with him. Those of us, who raised the question of character in 1992, were confronted by an indignant Bill Clinton, treating the topic as a low blow. To listen to him, character was the “c” word of American politics. It was reprehensible to mention it. By now we know. Character matters. Paul, Santorum, and Romney have it. Newt has Clinton’s character. ||||| Republicans figured that once voters learned of President Clinton’s White House trysts with intern Monica Lewinsky and dalliances with other women, they’d turn on him and give Republicans a big victory in the 1998 midterm elections. Instead, Clinton’s popularity held steady, and Republicans lost five House seats. 
 
 A similar phenomenon occurred in 2003 when Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for California governor in a recall election. The media dredged up stories of his chronic groping of women. Voters, intent on ousting Governor Gray Davis, didn’t care. Schwarzenegger won and was reelected in 2006. 
 
 They were wrong. It wasn’t that voters ignored Reagan’s offbeat comments. They just didn’t think eccentric statements he’d made over the years were important. Bigger things were at stake, like Soviet aggression and a stagnant economy. And Reagan had better answers than Carter. 
 
 In 1980, when Ronald Reagan emerged as the likely Republican presidential nominee, President Carter’s advisers were thrilled. They’d done extensive opposition research. By pointing to what Reagan had said in speeches, radio commentaries, newspaper columns, and conversations, they assumed it would be easy to characterize him as a right-wing extremist. And enough voters would reject him and reelect Carter. 
 
 Before you dismiss Newt Gingrich for having too much “baggage” to win the Republican presidential nomination, much less the presidency, consider this: 
 
 The point is this: Gingrich probably has at least as good a chance of getting a pass on his various transgressions in 2012 as Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Clinton did. If 2012 were an ordinary election year, Gingrich would be doomed by his gaffes, three marriages, and fleeting alliances with Hillary Clinton on health care and Nancy Pelosi on global warming. But 2012 is different. Republicans are fixated on defeating President Obama. They’re obsessed. They think about little else. And if that means choosing a candidate with a lurid past and a penchant for self-destruction to beat Obama, Republicans are likely to swallow hard and nominate Gingrich. 
 
 In their hearts, Republicans have always wanted a candidate who is bold and tough, and Gingrich is. They’re not sure about Mitt Romney, who is cautious, conventional, and sounds more conciliatory than Gingrich. There’s a reason Romney’s support has been stuck for months at roughly a quarter of the Republican electorate. His blandness explains it. Gingrich is anything but bland. 
 
 To rally behind Gingrich, Repub-licans wouldn’t have to forgive his past sins, just treat them as irrelevant. They already talk about how sweet it would be to see Gingrich crush Obama in presidential debates. They don’t see Romney that way. 
 
 But Romney has two important traits Gingrich lacks: carefulness and self-discipline. He doesn’t shoot off his mouth recklessly, as Gingrich often has. In May, the former House speaker practically blew up his campaign by attacking Representative Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform plan as “right-wing social engineering.” He later apologized. 
 
 Talk to any of Gingrich’s current or former associates and you hear about the “bad Newt.” This is the undisciplined Gingrich, prone, as one long-time friend says, “to overshoot the runway on something,” perhaps with a wild and inappropriate comment that’s ruinous to his campaign. Many of those who know him believe it’s only a matter of time before he runs amok. 
 
 Believe it or not, his press secretary, R.C. Hammond, insists Gingrich has gotten a grip on himself. According to Hammond, “the only thing Newt says to himself before each debate is, ‘My goal tonight is to not screw anything up.’ ” 
 
 He’s largely succeeded. True, he called Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke “corrupt” and labeled President Obama “the most effective food stamp president in American history.” And in a debate in October, Gingrich said, “If you want to put people in jail . . . you ought to start with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.” In other debates, he said Congress should immediately “defund the National Labor Relations Board” and abolish the Congressional Budget Office. Amazingly enough, the press barely raised an eyebrow. 
 
 Even when Gingrich made a specialty out of quarreling with questioners at the debates, the media response was tepid. In August, he asked Chris Wallace of Fox News to “put aside the gotcha questions.” Later in the same debate, Gingrich said he’d “love to see the rest of tonight’s debate asking us about what we would do to lead an America whose president has failed to lead instead of playing Mickey Mouse games.” ||||| ROCK HILL, S.C. — Clear signs Mitt Romney is again worried about Newt Gingrich: He released two new negative web videos, unleashed attacking surrogates and even went after the former House speaker himself. 
 
 And that was all before lunch on Wednesday. 
 
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 Romney hasn’t engaged directly since December, when he scrambled to stop Gingrich’s sudden surge to the top of the polls. But Romney’s campaign feels Gingrich’s new momentum — and isn’t concerned about a credible challenge from Rick Santorum — and they’re eager to cut him off now so he doesn’t remain a problem past Saturday’s primary. Romney’s hoping a win then will eliminate Gingrich as a contender and help him wrap up the nomination early. 
 
 Romney led the charge himself, even saying Gingrich’s name aloud from the stage, which he rarely does. 
 
 After a digression about how he expects Barack Obama to campaign against his record running Bain Capital, Romney brought the argument to Gingrich. 
 
 “Some Republicans have jumped on that bandwagon. Recognize, its not the way to build a strong economy to tear down fellow Americans or to attack capitalism,” Romney said. “My goodness, I listened to Speaker Gingrich the other night talking about the enterprises that I’m associated with, I’m proud of the fact that I’ve worked in the private sector, that I’ve achieved success, that we were able to build jobs in America and I’m going to keep using that experience to make sure that we build jobs for the entire country.” 
 
 Romney’s comments followed a day of emails fired off by his campaign attacking Gingrich’s positions of free enterprise and a morning event where he attacked Gingrich unprompted and at length in front of a crowd of about 300 people under a warm sun at Wofford College in Spartanburg. 
 
 “I was disappointed over the last couple of weeks to see one of my opponents attacking free enterprise, just like the president was,” Romney said. “That’s not the role of the Republican Party, that makes us sad.” 
 
 Then he twisted the knife, comparing Gingrich with one of the right’s favorite boogeymen. 
 
 “You know, the speaker just the other day at the debate was talking about how he created millions of jobs when he was working with the Reagan administration. Well, he’d been in Congress two years when Ronald Reagan came to office,” Romney said. “That would be like saying 435 congressmen were all responsible for those jobs. Government doesn’t create jobs. It’s the private sector that creates jobs. Congressmen taking responsibility or taking credit for helping create jobs is like Al Gore taking credit for the Internet.” 
 
 Acknowledging the rave reviews Gingrich garnered for his debate performance Monday night, a Romney campaign source told POLITICO on Wednesday that the attacks on Gingrich are coming because he is “the one left who can go the longest.” 
 
 “South Carolina is like Iowa — an opportunity that we never thought we would get,” the source said. “If you dust Newt up there so that Santorum stays alive, Newt gets no traction heading into Florida, where he has no structure, and then into a month, February, where there is no obvious good state. Points fell off Newt fast when voters were reminded of his entirety, not just his facility as a debate presence.” 
 
 The source said the Romney campaign’s goal in South Carolina remains the 34 percent John McCain won here in 2008, which the campaign estimates will be enough to win, so long as conservatives don’t consolidate around either Gingrich or Santorum. And the campaign is not worried about Santorum. 
 
 The source said Romney’s internal polling for South Carolina shows the former Massachusetts governor in the “low 30s,” with other candidates in the low 20s or high teens. That tracks with a CNN/Time/ORC poll released Wednesday afternoon had Romney at 33 percent and Gingrich at 23 percent — though most of the polling done over the days preceding Monday’s debate. ||||| Updated 10:04 p.m. ET 
 
 Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Republican primary, capping off a remarkable comeback for his presidential bid that reshapes the trajectory of the battle for the GOP nomination as the race now heads to Florida and beyond. 
 
 The results mark the end of a tumultuous week in politics that saw Gingrich erase and then overcome the lead former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had in the Palmetto State following his victory in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary. Gingrich came on strong in the closing days of the campaign, looking to rally under his banner the many conservatives unwilling to get behind Romney, who had sought to posture himself as the eventual nominee. 
 
 "We don't have the kind of money at least one of the candidates has," Gingrich said in his victory remarks. "But we do have ideas and we do have people. And we proved here in South Carolina that people power with the right ideas beats big money." 
 
 VIEW full South Carolina primary results 
 
 Gingrich spent most of his speech Saturday night lashing out at "media elites" in New York and Washington, D.C., while castigating President Obama. He leaned on wonky explanations of policy to draw contrasts with the president, whom Gingrich accused of representing values antithetical to "classical" America. 
 
 "It's not that I am a good debater. It's that I articulate the deepest-felt values of the American people," said Gingrich, who admitted at a Thursday debate to sometimes thinking in grandiose terms. 
 
 Amidst cheers of "Newt can win," Newt Gingrich calls the S.C. race "humbling" and "sobering" to see so many supporters rally behind his political message. 
 
 The evening's second-place finisher, Romney, drew on elements of his stump speech, but also started to preview rhetoric that will become part of his pitched case versus Gingrich in Florida's primary on Jan. 31. 
 
 "We're now three contests into a long primary season ... We've still got a long way to go, and a lot of work to do," Romney said in his remarks Saturday night. 
 
 Gingrich, Romney said, had joined Obama in launching a "frontal assault on free enterprise," referencing the ex-speaker's attack on Romney's record at Bain Capital. 
 
 "Those who pick up the weapons of the left today will find them turned against us tomorrow," Romney said. "If Republican leaders want to join this president in demonizing success...then they're not going to be fit to be our nominee." 
 
 After finishing second in the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney says the race is "getting even more interesting," and tells the crowd, "there is so much worth fighting." 
 
 The results in South Carolina only raise the stakes for the battle in Florida, a traditionally expensive contest where voting is closed to only registered Republicans, and the winner is awarded all of the delegates. 
 
 The Romney campaign is hoping that contest will be its firewall. They appeared poised to make their argument versus Gingrich even more sharply in the state. They circulated a “flashback” video on Saturday reminding voters of the ethics investigation Gingrich had faced during his speakership. 
 
 The former speaker made reference to the next primary several times in his victory speech Satuday. 
 
 "With your help, we are now moving onto Florida and beyond," he said, later asking for supporters' help in reaching out to Floridians. 
 
 Gingrich, who will appear on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday morning, hopes to capitalize there on his finish in South Carolina, which was driven in part by late deciders, who broke decisively in his direction in the last few days of the campaign. That stretch saw two debate performances by Gingrich, on Monday and Thursday nights. Almost two-thirds of voters said the debates were an important factor in their decision, and Gingrich won about half of them. 
 
 More broadly, core elements of the GOP base in South Carolina – conservatives, Tea Party supporters and evangelical Christians – broke for Gingrich. And the former speaker even edged Romney in two important constituencies for the former Massachusetts governor: voters who said electability in November was their most important concern in a nominee, and voters who said the economy was their top issue. 
 
 The South Carolina results underscore Romney’s lingering inability to overcome skepticism from conservatives about electing him as their standard-bearer against Obama this fall. 
 
 RELATED: Conservatives, evangelical Christians rebuff Romney in South Carolina 
 
 Gingrich had erased Romney’s lead by abandoning his previous pledge to wage a “relentlessly positive” campaign. The former speaker eventually embraced a strategy of drawing strong contrasts with Romney and benefited from the negative advertising run on his behalf by a super PAC – a practice Gingrich loudly denounced in Iowa, where he saw his poll numbers collapse amid attacks by a pro-Romney super PAC. 
 
 His victory provides, if nothing else, a symbolic imprimatur; the winner of the South Carolina primary has gone on to win the nomination in each Republican primary since the contest’s inception in 1980. 
 
 The South Carolina results capped one of the most unpredictable weeks in the presidential campaign thus far, a week that saw two candidates leave the race and the veneer of inevitability the Romney campaign had built for itself erode by the end. 
 
 Watch Newt Gingrich's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday 
 
 Recertified results in the Iowa caucuses found that he had actually lost the contest by a handful of votes to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. And Romney has fought to withstand some of the most intense scrutiny he’s faced during the campaign; critics have assailed his private equity career and demanded Romney release his tax returns – demands which only reached a fever pitch after Romney estimated he pays an effective rate of 15 percent of his income in taxes. 
 
 Moreover, Romney’s performance in South Carolina will speak volumes about his fractious relationship with movement conservatives. He’s struggled at times to break through a ceiling on his support from those voters, who are skeptical of Romney’s past conversion on abortion rights and his embrace of authorship of a health care law as governor that closely resembles Obama’s 2010 reform law. 
 
 Nonetheless, the fact that Gingrich has arrived at the precipice of political resurrection – again – this cycle is itself remarkable. 
 
 Political observers had questioned when, not if, he would drop out after suffering missteps at the outset of his campaign that led to the defection of virtually all of his top staff last June. But Gingrich stuck with it and climbed to the top of the polls in Iowa, only to see his numbers implode again after weathering attacks from super PACs and Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s campaign. 
 
 In South Carolina, the former speaker has been aided by a variety of factors contributing to his potential comeback. He’s scored major points with voters with a couple of strong debate performances this week, particularly by way of launching acerbic attacks on the media. His angry refusal to answer allegations made by an ex-wife topped headlines coming out of a debate on Thursday – the same day that saw Texas Gov. Rick Perry drop his own campaign and endorse Gingrich. 
 
 GOP candidate Rick Santorum talks about the state of the race and reaffirms that he wants to be the voice for those people in America that don't have one in government 
 
 The winnowed field (Jon Huntsman also ended his campaign and endorsed Romney), only reduced the number of candidates threatening to divide the anti-Romney vote in South Carolina. 
 
 Santorum, crowned the winner of the Iowa caucuses upon further review of the vote totals, had doggedly criticized both Romney and Gingrich in hopes of rallying conservatives behind his unflashy, if consistent, record. 
 
 "Three states, three winners -- what a great country," he said in remarks Saturday evening, vowing to continue his campaign through Florida and subsequent nominating contests. 
 
 NBC’s Jamie Novogrod, Garrett Haake, Alex Moe and Andrew Rafferty contributed. ||||| Topics: Opening Shot 
 
 Mitt Romney spent the 10 days between South Carolina and Florida acting very much like a man with a primary to worry about, viciously and repeatedly attacking Newt Gingrich in speeches, interviews and debates. 
 
 But when he took the stage at his victory party in Tampa Tuesday night, he abruptly switched gears and presented himself as the presumptive Republican Party nominee, acknowledging Gingrich (and Rick Santorum and Ron Paul) only in passing and littering the air with carefully scripted put-downs of Barack Obama intended for general election ears. 
 
 “Thomas Paine is reported to have said, ‘Lead, follow or get out of the way,’” Romney declared. “Mr. President, you were elected to lead, you chose to follow and now it’s time for you to get out of the way!” 
 
 This was a speech by a man who dearly hopes the Republican leaders and voters who have been so hesitant to embrace him will consider the Florida results and at last yield to his inevitability, bringing the competitive phase of the GOP primary season to an end before it hurts him any further. 
 
 And then Newt took the stage at his own Florida party and delivered a rambling and somewhat bizarre speech that nonetheless guaranteed Romney will face at least six more weeks of grief before he can put the nomination battle behind him. Standing at a podium decorated with a sign that read “46 states to go,” Gingrich vowed that “we are going to contest every place and we are going to win.” 
 
 His defiant posture was more of a confirmation than a revelation. As it became clear he was going to lose Florida by a wide margin the past few days, Gingrich repeatedly affirmed his intent to keep his campaign alive through the GOP convention. Since he’s 68 years old and not angling for position in a future election, it’s easy to believe that he means it, and that he’s made his spite with Romney clear only adds to his motivation to press on. And since Gingrich only really knows the language of attack politics, the potential problem for Romney is obvious. How do you unify your party if your main opponent won’t stop shouting that you’re a dirty, dishonest apostate? 
 
 So the real question coming out of Florida is how long Gingrich can actually go on. The literal answer is: as long as he wants. But from Romney’s standpoint, the issue is how long the political world will continue to treat Gingrich like a serious candidate. That is to say, Gingrich can remain an active candidate until the convention balloting if he wants; but if he’s getting clobbered in primaries and caucuses, accumulating few delegates, unable to force Romney into debates and largely ignored by the media, then his lingering presence won’t really be a problem for Romney. This makes the next move of Sheldon Adelson, the 78-year-old Las Vegas casino magnate who has underwritten the last few years of Gingrich’s political life, crucial. When Adelson unexpectedly poured $5 million into a pro-Newt super PAC after the former speaker crashed and burned in Iowa and New Hampshire, it made it possible for Gingrich to bounce back and win South Carolina. If Adelson, whose wife gave another $5 million to the Super PAC in the run up to Florida, makes a similar play now, it will buy Gingrich priceless credibility with the media and political class. As long as Adelson keeps writing monster checks, Gingrich will be a factor, if only because the money will have the potential to damage Romney. The other major factor is the calendar. February will be a light month when it comes to primary and caucus activity, with the limited playing field tilted heavily in Romney’s favor – Nevada, Arizona and Michigan are the headline contests. Assuming Romney wins these states comfortably, he’ll have an opportunity to build momentum in February and open up a significant lead over Gingrich in national polls, delegates and in later-voting states. But Gingrich can probably maintain his relevance through all of this simply by pointing to the early weeks of March, when the Old Confederacy will finally get its say. The basic cultural and demographic characteristics that defined the South Carolina GOP electorate – heavy on Yankee-phobic, Tea Party-friendly conservative evangelicals – will be present in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Louisiana when they vote in March. Gingrich can credibly sell those contests as the ultimate test of his “bold Reagan conservative” versus “timid Massachusetts moderate” framing of the GOP race, making it difficult to ignore him between now and then. If he were then to win those states, all of the talk about Romney as a fatally flawed candidate for the Tea Party era would restart and the race would almost certainly last all the way to the GOP convention. It would be the modern equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s upset win in the 1976 North Carolina primary, which stopped Gerald Ford from putting away with the GOP race and triggered a late string of Reagan wins that kept the nomination from being settled before Kansas City. On the flip side, a Romney sweep of Dixie in early March really would shatter the rationale for Gingrich’s campaign. At that point, it wouldn’t really matter if Gingrich stayed in the race; he would then be about as relevant to the GOP race as Jerry Brown was to the Democratic contest in the spring months of 1992. But that’s six weeks from now. Between now and then, Romney can pretend all he wants that the race is over and that his new opponent is Barack Obama; every time Newt Gingrich opens his mouth, the press will be there to cover it, reminding Romney that he’s not out of the woods yet. 
 
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 Close ||||| We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent. 
 
 We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race. 
 
 I am sadly too familiar with these tactics because they were used against the GOP ticket in 2008. The left seeks to single someone out and destroy his or her record and reputation and family using the media as a channel to dump handpicked and half-baked campaign opposition research on the public. The difference in 2008 was that I was largely unknown to the American public, so they had no way of differentiating between the lies and the truth. All of it came at them at once as “facts” about me. But Newt Gingrich is known to us – both the good and the bad. 
 
 We know that Newt fought in the trenches during the Reagan Revolution. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out, Newt was among a handful of Republican Congressman who would regularly take to the House floor to defend Reagan at a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News or talk radio or conservative blogs to give any balance to the liberal mainstream media. Newt actually came at Reagan’s administration “from the right” to remind Americans that freer markets and tougher national defense would win our future. But this week a few handpicked and selectively edited comments which Newt made during his 40-year career were used to claim that Newt was somehow anti-Reagan and isn’t conservative enough to go against the accepted moderate in the primary race. (I know, it makes no sense, and the GOP establishment hopes you won’t stop and think about this nonsense. Mark Levin and others have shown the ridiculousness of this.) To add insult to injury, this “anti-Reagan” claim was made by a candidate who admitted to not even supporting or voting for Reagan. He actually was against the Reagan movement, donated to liberal candidates, and said he didn’t want to go back to the Reagan days. You can’t change history. We know that Newt Gingrich brought the Reagan Revolution into the 1990s. We know it because none other than Nancy Reagan herself announced this when she presented Newt with an award, telling us, “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.” As Rush and others pointed out, if Nancy Reagan had ever thought that Newt was in any way an opponent of her beloved husband, she would never have even appeared on a stage with him, let alone presented him with an award and said such kind things about him. Nor would Reagan’s son, Michael Reagan, have chosen to endorse Newt in this primary race. There are no two greater keepers of the Reagan legacy than Nancy and Michael Reagan. What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst. 
 
 But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all. 
 
 I spoke up before the South Carolina primary to urge voters there to keep this primary going because I have great concern about the GOP establishment trying to anoint a candidate without the blessing of the grassroots and all the needed energy and resources we as commonsense constitutional conservatives could bring to the general election in order to defeat President Obama. Now, I respect Governor Romney and his success. But there are serious concerns about his record and whether as a politician he consistently applied conservative principles and how this impacts the agenda moving forward. The questions need answers now. That is why this primary should not be rushed to an end. We need to vet this. Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival. 
 
 As I said in my speech in Iowa last September, the challenge of this election is not simply to replace President Obama. The real challenge is who and what we will replace him with. It’s not enough to just change up the uniform. If we don’t change the team and the game plan, we won’t save our country. We truly need sudden and relentless reform in Washington to defend our republic, though it’s becoming clearer that the old guard wants anything but that. That is why we should all be concerned by the tactics employed by the establishment this week. We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008. Many of these same characters sat on their thumbs in ‘08 and let Obama escape unvetted. Oddly, they’re now using every available microscope and endoscope – along with rewriting history – in attempts to character assassinate anyone challenging their chosen one in their own party’s primary. So, one must ask, who are they really running against? 
 
 - Sarah Palin
– The conservative media have apparently figured out that Newt Gingrich could actually win the Republican nomination, and they are responding with a breathtaking collective attack on the candidate. Politico rounds up the highlights, noting that "this is just a sampling of what's hitting Newt." In the National Review, Elliott Abrams writes that Gingrich often undermined Ronald Reagan, in what Politico calls "a devastating takedown." In another recent National Review piece being circulated by conservatives, the editors ramp up their opposition to Gingrich and urge conservatives not to support him. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of the American Spectator compares Gingrich to Bill Clinton, calling them both "1960s generation narcissists" and noting that, for "girl hopping" Gingrich, "there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out." On her website, Ann Coulter minces no words: "Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!" Her column blasts Gingrich's "hotheaded arrogance." The Drudge Report linked to the Abrams piece with a banner reading, "Insider: Gingrich Repeatedly Insulted Reagan." The site, which has been viewed as pro-Romney in the past, also linked prominently to Tyrrell and Coulter. Tom DeLay told KTRH, "He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. … When he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined." A top figure in the conservative media tells Politico that Republican leaders and media are beginning to realize, "It could happen, and it would be a disaster. All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker—there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen." Politico notes that dozens of GOP lawmakers, governors, and other VIPs have said the same, privately, in recent weeks. Click for more on why tonight's debate is crucial for Gingrich.