Yes, (as expressed in) this preceding paragraph I will indeed give him credit.
Both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum bring things to the table, and Gingrich does deserve credit for what he did to win back the House of Representatives and become the first Republican speaker in decades. While both candidates have baggage, I sincerely hope their supporters don't bite and devour each other so badly that Romney ends up being the main beneficiary.
I'm sitting here at my computer tonight, and when I should be writing articles on local government and reviewing the resume of a potential new employee, I'm instead reading Free Republic and listening to election reports which say Rick Santorum won both Mississippi and Alabama. Newt Gingrich is being quoted saying the two conservative candidates got 70-plus percent of the votes in those two states.
Let's all be grateful, regardless of which candidate we supported, that despite our own internal disputes, at least Romney didn't win tonight. In the long run that's more important than my local city council's decisions on things virtually nobody outside my county cares about, but I'm going to be up very late tonight dealing with the consequences of my time management decisions today.
I'm not a professional mediator; pouring oil on troubled waters is close to the opposite of how reporters are trained. We're paid to analyze and explain conflicts, not solve them. As we saw earlier this afternoon, I deserve no credit for any agreement; on the contrary, I put my foot in it and made things worse by linking to Newsweek's article on Karen Santorum.
What counts in the long run is not whether I'm a mediator or whether the three of us can talk politely to each other on the internet, but whether the backers of Santorum and Gingrich can repair our frayed relationships enough to defeat Romney in the primary and Obama in the general election. I have a feeling that Gingrich and Santorum get along considerably better than a lot of their supporters.
Now speaking not just to AmericanInTokyo and C. Edmund Wright but all the rest of the people reading this thread: Let's go out and try to convince our Republican friends and neighbors that Mitt Romney is running in the wrong political party's primary election, and then after that, let's explain why we think our candidate is the best of the two real Republicans on the Republican ballot.
If we do that, maybe we still have a chance of winning this thing.
BTW, sooner or later someone is going to ask why I'm getting involved in explicit political advocacy for a candidate. I almost never take formal public positions backing candidates for political office beyond backing the Republican in nearly all cases, but this election is serious enough that I've made an exception locally for only the fourth time in eight years. Fortunately, it seems to be a pretty popular decision in my area, though I didn't know that when I decided to support Santorum and had actually expected some pretty stiff opposition.
DTM wrote: “On the other hand, those of us who support Rick Santorum need to stop acting as if everything Gingrich has done has been a disaster. He deserves credit, as C. Edmund Wright correctly said, for the 1994 election takeover of the House of Representatives. Virtually **NOBODY** thought there was the remotest possibility of that happening. We're so used to the idea now that Republicans don't have to be a permanent minority working out coalitions with conservative Democrats to get to 50 percent margins that we've forgotten that Gingrich **DOES** deserve credit for a massive victory that upended virtually all of modern House of Representatives history. Gingrich opened the door to an ideologically based two-party system in the House rather than the older de-facto three-party system of coalition “go along to get along” politics we had for many years in the House of Representatives. Greatly reducing the old Southern Democrats as a political force is something for which Gingrich deserves great credit.”
117 posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 7:29:15 PM by AmericanInTokyo: “Yes, (as expressed in) this preceding paragraph I will indeed give him credit.”
107 posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2012 2:14:57 PM by C. Edmund Wright: (Responding to my post above): “That sir, is the most reasonable post to me from any Santorum supporter during this entire process. In fact, if so many of the Santorum supporters, including RS himself, didn't walk around acting like that never happened, there would be a helluva lot less venom between the two sides. RS has criticized Newt about 100 fold that Newt has criticized RS - and that has indeed burnt the rear ends of many Newt supporters over the course of the campaign. On that common ground you stated above however, you and I will get along great even in disagreement.”