I’m now hearing that Newt’s implosion was even bigger than has been reported elsewhere. He didn’t lose 16 staff; he lost 24. Many of them were working in Iowa to build his ground game there. So, if there’s a candidate out there thinking about getting in the race, there’s an early state primary infrastructure more or less in place.
Update: Newt’s now citing “strategic differences” as they reason that his own staff fired him.
“There is a fundamental strategic difference between the traditional consulting community and the kind of campaign I want to run. Now we’ll find out over the next year who’s right,” Gingrich told reporters in a video recorded by ABC News.
“I’m prepared to go out and to campaign very intensely but I want a campaign on ideas and on solutions and I want to do it in a way that brings Americans together,” he added.
The “traditional consulting community” Gingrich assails here really doesn’t describe the people who walked out on him. Dave Carney, for one, just finished running a very unorthodox campaign for, ahem, Rick Perry, that was built almost entirely of social media and which went out of its way to overrun the mainstream media. Several of the “traditional consultants” who left Gingrich were part of that same campaign. Gingrich’s excuse is a transparent defense for his own failure. If he couldn’t make a viable campaign of the talent he had hired, then he’s not a viable candidate.
As for the “strategic difference,” it’s probably something along these lines: The team wanted the candidate to commit himself to win, but the candidate had a different opinion. The team couldn’t do much with that level of strategic difference, so they left.
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