Very good point -- and I'm going to tell you something now that will make you sick: back before SC and right after SC, I told the super PAC to run ads showing Santorum praising Newt (it was a clip from one of the debates) - praising Newt as his conservative mentor. I said run these ads to start gently peeling off Santorum's voters who think he's the true conservative and as a way to convince Perry, Palin, Bachmann, Cain, etc, supporters to come to Newt.
DAMN I wish they had taken my advice. Had they done that in SC and Florida, I think the race would be totally totally different.
Newt took most Santorum votes in South Carolina anyway, and he won.
And in Florida, Santorum didn’t break 20%, and if you gave Newt every vote Santorum got, Romney still would have won.
So I’m not sure how running an ad with Santorum praising Gingrich would have done much of anything. It’s not like at the time Santorum was a major player. Who really cared in Florida what Santorum thought of Gingrich.
I mean, the one argument that has some degree of accuracy is that Santorum, even with his win in Iowa, was an also-ran candidate, until Newt crashed and burned. Then Santorum was “last man standing”. But that being true, Gingrich had to fight Romney in Florida, not try to gain by using the back-bencher Santorum to try to build himself up. There just wasn’t value in that.
If we are armchair quarterbacking, I think Newt would have done much better if his response to his loss in Iowa hadn’t been to claim he was switching to an all-out negative assault on Romney, and was “sacrificing” himself to take out Romney.
Newt’s biggest positive was that he had managed to STAY positive, to attack only the right people, and to cast himself as the republican uniter.
But when he declared war on Romney, I think it hurt him. Romney’s ads clearly stung as well, but I don’t think they would have gotten as much traction if Gingrich was still “above the fray”. Since Gingrich had declared war, I think the average voter figured “all’s fair in war”.
Of course, that is just my uninformed opinion. I’m not connected enough to suggest to people what to do, much less to think they might listen to my suggestions. ON the positive side, that means I don’t feel regret like you do.
I should think that Perry endorsing Newt would have gotten most Perry supporters on his side, and Palin’s “vote for Newt” messages in SC and Florida should have gotten most of the diehard Palin folks. And it seems clear most Cain folks were on board with Newt from the day Cain left.
I don’t think there were enough Bachmann supporters left to matter.
DAMN I wish they had taken my advice. Had they done that in SC and Florida, I think the race would be totally totally different.
Okay, I can only imagine how bad you feel, but there's nothing that can be done to change things, and it's over and done. NOW, what is your cutting-edge take on where Newt is now, right this minute, and what is the solution to that, in your estimation? How would you proceed? Not to be demanding, but I really would like to know. :)