You are missing the bus-sized point. Graham led the coup against Gingrich, regardless of who he is now or was back then, he LED the coup against Gingrich, he said it was hatched in his office. And now, forget his politics, his policies, his whatever, he is saying I led that coup and I shouldn’t have... and looking back I understand how hard Newt’s job was... that is an admission, and if he led the coup back then, and is saying this now, that carries some weight. He sure isn’t thinking Newt will offer him VP.
First, I am not convinced that in the heat of this campaign, we are getting a good, unbiased history of things; I lived through the 1990s, so I have some first-hand knowledge of events, and much of what I read now doesn’t really match, and when it doesn’t, it “surprisingly” is always in ways that advance the cause of whatever candidate is telling me the history.
Is Lindsay Graham making an “admission”? It is an equally consistent interpretaion that Lindsay sees Newt as a lot less conservative than he was in the 1990s, and therefore he likes Newt as a candidate more, and so he is just saying things that help Newt. Lindsay Graham was once respected as a conservative, and he changed, and as I said, his pronouncements now are seen with some degree of skepticism.
Of course, the argument about whether Newt should have been “forced out” or not in the 1990s isn’t high on my list of things I care about in this election. I’d rather judge Newt on the things he actually did, than on things that others were trying to do to him.