Newt To Paul Ryan: My Bad Man, I'm Sorry

I put this in the headlines last night but since I've been pounding on Newt pretty good for the last few days, it only seems fair to give this a post too.

Gingrich and Ryan traded emails and spoke on the phone, a call that “went really well,” Gingrich’s spokesman Rick Tyler told Fox News.

The former House speaker also held two conference calls with Tea Party leaders, one on Monday night and one Tuesday morning, to explain what he meant by his comments Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Politico reported. “We’ve tried to correct the record and admit it could have been done better,” Tyler told Politico. “We move on.”

Gingrich went "On the Record" with Greta van Susteren Tuesday night to respond to criticism over his comments.

"I want to set a precedent for new kinds of presidential campaigns," he told van Susteren. "I made a mistake and I called Paul Ryan today, who's a very close personal friend, and I said that."

Before the apology, Gingrich spent a good part of the day doing damage control with bloggers and other pundits. During one of the conference calls Newt tried to make lemonade out of lemons by tying his rough (to be polite) first week in the race with Ronald Reagan.

“Every once and awhile there's going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan's record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn't have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”

And with that candidates comparing themselves to Reagan hasn't only Jumped the Shark, it's been ripped to shreds and eaten by the shark.

Newt also said he was surprised by the adversarial tone of the Meet the Press interview and wasn't ready for it. Mind you, he's been on the show 30 something times over the years,. He should also know that even if they've been nice to him while he was out of office and chilling on the global warming couch with Nancy Pelosi, now that he's even a remote threat to Obama (he's not really but the MFM doesn't take chances), he's going to be destroyed by the press.

Poor Newt, no friends on the left or right any more.

Actually, that' not entirely true. The obnoxious Dana Milbank comes to Newt's defense. However one gets the feeling this new found respect for Gingrich is simply a club with which to beat up on the GOP and conservatives. As Slu notes, Milbank wasn't always such a fan of Newt or the old GOP.

Hackery, thy name is Millbank.

posted by DrewM. at 09:52 AM

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