The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Baghdad Newt
“Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Thursday he’ll use ‘cheerful persistence’ to overcome the bumps that marked the first formal week of his campaign,” the Associated Press reports.
Gingrich said he isn’t surprised by the rough start to his campaign. . . . “My reaction is if you’re the candidate of very dramatic change, it you’re the candidate of really new ideas, you have to assume there’s a certain amount of clutter and confusion and it takes a while to sort it all out, because you are doing something different,” Gingrich told reporters after he opened an intense three-day campaign swing in Iowa. . . .
“This campaign is very alive and very well with lots of grass-roots support,” Gingrich told the crowd.
It gets better:
He said reporters covering his campaign must adjust their thinking.
“It’s going to take a while for the news media to realize that you’re covering something that happens once or twice in a century, a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas,” said Gingrich. “I expect it to take a while for it to sink in.”
How bad is Gingrich as a candidate? He doesn’t even have John Kerry’s comic timing. The stuff he says is so crazy and outrageous that one quickly becomes desensitized to it.
The stuff he’s saying now is objectively hilarious, but that’s a perilous oxymoron, because it’s not nearly as funny as yesterday’s material about sheep and the liar’s paradox. Even someone who is as much of a genius as Newt can’t possibly outdo that.
By contrast, Kerry, the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way served in Vietnam, never stops being funny. He has the hat to this day! Kerry’s secret is that he has just enough self-restraint to maintain an illusion of dignity among those who sympathize with him politically. That they take him seriously only adds to the humor.
Gingrich would be funnier if he could find other people to say with a straight face things like, “This is something that happens once or twice a century.” But good luck with that.
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