Your Daily Newt: Curling Into a Ball and Playing Dead

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GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.Robin Nelson/ZumaPress

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As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.

Is this “a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich”? Perhaps not. But this lede, from Karen Tumulty and Nancy Gibbs at Time, is worth making an exception for:

Newt Gingrich had a favorite game when he was growing up in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. His pal Dennis Yantz would pretend to beat him up and leave him crumpled on the curb. “When a car would pull up to see what was wrong,” Yantz recalls, “Newt would jump up and scream ‘SURPRISE!’ We would do this over and over again.” For some reason, Yantz says, Newt always wanted to be the one who played dead.

And that, in a nutshell, is the 2012 Republican presidential primary.