Major Garret On Gingrich Playing Nice With Romney

I have liked Major Garret since his days at Fox. His latest is an article at National Journal entitled Romney's 1994 Problem. He notes that, during the Iowa debate, when Gingrich pointed out that Romney would have been a career politician, but that he lost to Teddy Kennedy in a 1994 Mass. senatorial race, Gingrich was making nice. Gingrich pulled his punch, because there was much more he could have said about Romney's senate race that year. This from Major Garret:

. . . The deeper issue for Romney is that Gingrich, who has managerial and temperamental issues of his own, is just about the worst Republican challenger he could face at a time when undecided Republicans are trying to decide if Romney is an ideological cipher.

In this regard, 1994 is very tough on Romney. The contrast between Romney and Gingrich in this year of GOP ascendancy and congressional clout unrealized since the days of Eisenhower and Truman that many conservatives may find it disqualifying. Whatever Republicans come to think of Gingrich's leadership style as speaker, they know Gingrich helped lead the GOP to its first House majority in 40 years and didn't tinker around the edges with his newly won power. An agenda that achieved spending cuts, sought and over time won a balanced budget, welfare reform, tax cuts, telecommunications reform and congressional reform is not and was not timid.

Gingrich led this effort, he said, on behalf of the legacy of President Ronald Reagan. Gingrich said at the time the "Contract With America" was the second stage of the Reagan revolution, an attempt to translate his unfinished policies by means of a GOP-led Congress.

At the same time, Romney was running against Kennedy in Massachusetts, a liberal state where a successful Republican had to soften some of the harder edges of the GOP's anti-Clinton, anti-Democratic rhetoric. Romney softened them past the state of sponginess and came out on the hardened side of opposition. . . .

Major Garret posts several videos of Romney from 1994, doing everything from criticizing the Contract With America to denying association with Ronald Reagan to embracing Roe v. Wade. Do visit his site to watch Romney the 94 Rinocrat.