Personally, I think it was because of Rush Limbaugh throwing a nutty where his mouth was in motion before his mind was in gear.
Just before Florida, the PAC ad came out where Gingrich attacked Romney (who had been personally attacking him for months) on his misleading depiction of his business career. Romney tried to make it seem like he was in a productive business, but he was in the financial biz and in a very dubious area of it. There’s nothing wrong with that, in essence, but Romney was being dishonest and should have had to tell people what Bain Capital actually did that made him filthy rich and how powerful Bain Capital still is in the financial world... and how tied in with the US government.
But Rush shot off his mouth and announced that this was “anti-capitalist” and this became the meme and it totally destroyed Gingrich.
Actually, Gingrich is the only one of the candidates who has treated Rush with courtesy after his recent foot-in-mouth episode, so I’d say Gingrich gets major gentleman points for that!
Rush has his head buried in the sand. His lack of support for Newt will cost American and his rant he cannot support any candidate is being a pure coward. If he cannot see that Newt and Newt only have the ideas and the inside knowledge to get the conversion back to a conservative Constitutional America. This is not the time to joke around.
“But Rush shot off his mouth and announced that this was “anti-capitalist” and this became the meme and it totally destroyed Gingrich.
“Actually, Gingrich is the only one of the candidates who has treated Rush with courtesy after his recent foot-in-mouth episode, so I’d say Gingrich gets major gentleman points for that!”
I completely agree on both points.
I don’t agree. The chronology involved is wrong. The anti-capitalist events happened after all the attack ads against Newt in Iowa and before the South Carolina primary. If Newt was going to be hurt by that, it would have been in South Carolina. But he won that primary. So I don’t think that statement from Rush had anything to do with Newt’s problems.
After losing South Carolina, Romney killed Newt in Florida. He spent 17 million dollars in ads lying about Newt day and night. Those lies, plus people’s memory of Newt’s past behavior, have caused his problems. Newt talking about humanely helping illegals also did not help here in our state.
So I don’t believe you can blame Newt’s problems on Rush. Can Newt come back? I hope so. I hope both he and Santorum can take votes away from Romney. I hope they both can come to an agreement on a strategy that can defeat Romney.