Jon Chait writes today about the tacit rules for primary attacks on front-runners: always attack from the flank, since that doesn’t play into the strategy of the opposing party during the general election (Obama, for example, won’t be attacking Mitt Romney as “not a true conservative”); and lighten up when it starts to look like the front-runner is a sure thing.
But Newt Gingrich is famous for his willingness to toss all the usual rules overboard and light the world on fire if that’s what he thinks it takes for him to win, and now he looks set to do it again:
With the benefit of a $5 million infusion from right-wing casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich is planning an assault in South Carolina that centers on Romney’s career at Bain Capital….The political effect of these ads is to turn Romney’s chief selling point into a liability – his private-sector experience becomes an indicator not that he will fix the economy but that he will help the already-rich. It’s a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue.
True enough. Here’s a snippet from the “King of Bain” website:
Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn’t seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical.
….He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney’s ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.
Yes, that’s a site affiliated with Newt Gingrich arguing that there are boundaries to “real” capitalism. What’s more, those boundaries are largely ones that liberals have been talking about for years. There’s are also attacks on Romney’s 11,000 square-foot house and his “corporations are people too” quote. Romney even took “foreign seed money from Latin America”!
This is brutal stuff, and as Chait points out, it plays directly into Obama’s hands. If you didn’t know better, in fact, you might think this video was created by the DNC.
In other words, Newt Gingrich is now doing exactly what everyone in the Republican Party was afraid he was going to do: destroy them utterly if they decline to nominate him. It’s no surprise really, since this has been Newt’s MO for decades, but it sure is a helluva spectacle.
