Newt is our best chance against Romney according to the poll numbers, Santorum isn't even close.
“Newt would be wise to offer a vp spot to Santorum, and Santorum, being a young guy, would be wise to accept it.”
Totally agree! That would be a GREAT ticket!
I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you're right.
A Gingrich-Santorum ticket may be the best we social conservatives can hope for, under the circumstances.
We conservatives never ... and I mean **NEVER** ... should have been in this situation. We should have been building on the momentum of 2010 and destroying President Obama politically in Congress to the point that Democrats were threatening to get rid of him in the primary to avoid losing the White House, as happened in 1979 and early 1980 with Teddy Kennedy versus Jimmy Carter.
Instead, we're dealing with a whole stable full of horses that have major faults which are showing up as they run the race; many of them never should have gotten to the starting line in the first place, let alone the finish line. We Republicans have numerous conservative governors who could have gotten into the race. They didn't run for a variety of reasons. Now we're down to deciding whether to support a “Massachusetts moderate” former governor who didn't run for re-election because he knew he would lose, a former senator from a left-of-center state who is a solid conservative on social issues but (legitimately) had to do what his constituents wanted and lost his last race for re-election, and a former Speaker of the House who is probably best described as a brilliant but somewhat absent-minded professor who has major moral problems in his past and will be branded as a hypocrite by the Democrats.
Don't get me wrong — I like Gingrich's fire. It's hard for me to remember that he's actually in his seventies, and I'm old enough to have been one of his huge fans during the Contract with America days. He acts and sounds like a young radical Tea Partier and I think that's a lot of his attractiveness to people much younger than himself in the modern conservative movement who see a lot of parallels with what Gingrich did as a successful backbencher in the days of he Reagan Revolution and then taking back the House during the days of Bill Clinton.
One of Gingrich's biggest positives is that he has many years of real experience in government, while at the same time, nobody can accuse him of “going along to get along.” He's a bomb-thrower in many ways, and he really did change the culture of the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich share one thing in common besides a stupid photo on a couch — they both believe in a powerful Speaker and they both ran the Speakership from an ideological base, trampling on moderate members of their own party in the process. I have direct knowledge of how Pelosi treated people she might have called “Democrats in Name Only,” and Pelosi’s radical leftist practices as Speaker would have been inconceivable without Gingrich's precedent of using ideology as a cudgel to force moderates into submission by threatening to take away the power of committee chairmen.
Nevertheless, Gingrich's age and appearance are both factors in modern television politics. I was shocked when I saw the FR picture of him with Ronald Reagan; Gingrich looked much older than Reagan even then, with a head full of white hair. His weight won't help, either, unfortunately — it gives ammunition to those who say he can't control his appetites, whether for food or women, and reminds some of us of the way we used to attack Bill Clinton for the same problem.
Gingrich needs a substantially younger running mate, and maybe Santorum is the right one.
At this point, as I said, I'm afraid that may be the best solution we social conservatives can hope for.