“several people who were close to Ronald Reagan say he hardly knew Newt Gingrich.”
That’s NONSENSE
Ed Rollins, who was Reagan’s national campaignes organizer, said that’s bulls..t, coming right from Romney’s headquarters:
“I’m going to straighten it out once and for all: Gingrich was a very important congressional ally. Congressmen aren’t in the White House all day long, and they’re not basically giving advice. But he and Jack Kemp and Trent Lott and others were among 10 or 12 most important players and most loyal to Ronald Reagan. At the same time, Mitt Romney was an independent and he was not on the political scene at all. It’s stupid argument. They ought to be talk about this future, not the past.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjOMMweAJ_s
I guess we could trade competing quotes, but I’m sure you would say that you don’t believe any of the people at the links I would cite, and I don’t really care one way or another.
My point was that of course Santorum wouldn’t be known by Reagan, because Santorum didn’t become a congressman until 1991, well after Reagan was gone from the scene. And I’m not insisting that Nancy Reagan was personally passing the torch to anybody, much less Rick Santorum.
You are the one who is claiming with no evidence that Gingrich was the new Torch-bearer. So as I said to lonevoice — show me a quote from Nancy Reagan (she’s still alive, so she could confirm if she wanted) that she actually meant to just give the torch to Gingrich.
Right now all you have is a quote from 1995 where she passed the torch to the entire Republican congress. Since you are claiming that she didn’t mean that, it’s really up to you to provide some evidence.
Of course, this entire argument is stupid. We should be discussing what Gingrich has been up to the last 5 years, not what someone said about him before he started his job as Majority Leader over 15 years ago, in another century.