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Didn’t see that yesterday, so I’ll just talk about it here.

Thompson did not rise to the top and then get torn down.

If there is a comparison in 2012 to Thompson, it isn’t Gingrich, it’s Perry. Both Thompson and Perry entered the contest late as shining knights to rescue the conservatives. Both entered the contest with great media coverage, and both started with high poll numbers. For a while, both were leading in national polls, and were showing strength in multiple states. They both had a good deal of money, and received good endorsements.

Then both of them turned out to be bad campaigners. They couldn’t generate excitement, sparks, or a sense of excitement. Each of course had their negatives, Thompson was the catalyst for Campaign Finance Reform, and was weak on illegals; Perry had the in-state tuition issue, the border fence being demagauged by his detractors, and other similarly minor but pesky problems.

But what blew them both up was the inability to keep people’s interest. So by the time votes actually started, neither could win a contest. Both worked very hard at Iowa, and both failed miserably at it, (losing in both cases to the SoCon candidate, as TitanAFC does point out).

Both soldiered on, vowing to win South Carolina. Both failed at that, and the only difference is that Thompson waited until that contest was over to drop out, while Perry was quicker to the punch, dropping out ahead of time and throwing his support to Gingrich, which may have helped Newt win a couple of delegates.

Newt Gingrich was actually following the McCain pattern, not to make a philosophical comparison though. He entered the race early, but never caught hold, faltered, ran out of money, and at one point was imploding so badly that his campaign staff went to another candidate — Thompson in 2008 for McCain, Perry in 2012 for Gingrich.

Then, as Iowa rolled around, he got some traction, started coming up in the polls while others failed. He did respectably in Iowa, like Gingrich did. Then McCain won New Hampshire which gave him instant credibility — while Gingrich, being a southern conservative, had to wait for his big win until South Carolina. But if you look at their poll numbers, they track relatively well through that point.

Not only that, but note that Perry and Gingrich were good friends, and Thompson and McCain were good friends. At the end, people said Thompson was just placeholding until McCain could come back. With Perry, he endorsed Gingrich and gave him his organization back.

And in 2008, McCain and Huckabee teamed up to stop Romney. In 2012, Gingrich and Santorum have teamed up to stop Romney.

The only difference between 2008 and 2012? It worked in 2008. It isn’t working in 2012. Probably because McCain was actually an acceptable GOP establishment candidate, while Gingrich was on the outs with that group; meanwhile, in 2008 Romney wasn’t in with the GOP, but he spent 4 years fixing that.

Gingrich wasn’t the conservative frontrunner who got crushed. He was the 2nd-to-last man standing, after every other (and possibly better) candidates failed.

If Gingrich was the true conservative darling, he would have caught fire back in March of 2011. If he had, his debate skills would have been seen as golden for front-runner status, ROmney would have been stopped in his tracks, and we’d have spent months deciding if any of the other conservatives might be a better pick than the “maverick” Gingrich with his Pelosi and other occasional missteps.

But Gingrich was no conservative darling. He was dismissed as a failed, flawed candidate. Even when he did well in debates, conservatives just expressed pleasure that someone was able to make our points, even if he couldn’t be the nominee.

Now, I know some people here supported Gingrich from the beginning. But if everybody had, Perry never would have entered the race, nobody would have been pining all summer for Palin, and the world would look a lot different now.

It turns out that November was way too late to decide to start supporting Gingrich. Too late for him to put a team together. Too late for him to get organized, to get a clear message, to get registered in all the states, to unite the conservatives.

But don’t blame Santorum. Santorum got screwed by a process that failed to recognize his win in Iowa until after he was blown away in New Hampshire. But he wasn’t rabidly attacking Gingrich. In fact, Conservatives were rallying around Gingrich before, during, and after South Carolina. He was riding high in the polls, pulled off a great win in South Carolina, and Santorum had given up on Florida.

What happened to Gingrich in Florida wasn’t Santorum’s fault.