Newt Gingrich Gets a Little Bit Whiny About Super PAC Attack Ads

Newt Gingrich, 1978, in a speech to College Republicans:

The great strength of the Democratic party in my lifetime has been that it has always produced young, nasty people who had no respect for their elders. Jimmy Carter, who, at 51 thought that Hubert Humphreys at 66 was over the hill. Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan, who at 29 and 30 thought they could beat the pros. And I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the camp fire, but are lousy in politics.

So, Republicans need to learn to be nasty? Noted.

Newt Gingrich, today, reacting to those attack ads in Iowa that are deflating his campaign’s bubble.

During the Q&A session of his event at a T-shirt factory in Hiawatha, Iowa, a man asked Newt Gingrich a question to which he surely knew the answer: Who is this Restore Our Future — the Romney-boosting super PAC — that is flooding Iowa’s TV and radio airwaves with ads slamming the former House speaker?
“I don’t know,” Gingrich soft-shoed. “It’s somebody’s superPAC but I don’t know which one is which.”

He then used his phone-a-friend, calling out to spokesman R.C. Hammond.

“I think that’s Romney,” Hammond called from the back of the room.

“Well, that makes my point,” Gingrich said. “If you see Romney, ask him to take them off the air. I mean, you know, it would be nice if candidates were responsible for the things being done by the people who know them personally who are trying to help them get elected.”

He later closed his 37-minute session with this: “Ask (your friends) if they run into one of these candidates, to tell them they ought to be ashamed of themselves, to take this junk off the air. And don’t hide behind some baloney about the superPAC that I actually have no control over that happens to be run by five of my former staff. That’s just baloney.”

Back to that 1978 Gingrich speech: