Salon breaks the sad news to Newt...You're not Saint Ronnie reborn, you're just an effin' SLOB.

Newt Gingrich
No, Newt, your campaign's not just like Reagan's
The most epically disastrous presidential campaign rollout in history continues
Steve Kornacki



http://www.salon.com/news/newt_gingrich/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/05/17/newt_gingrich_reagan

Sometime after he was told to drop out "before you make a bigger fool of yourself" and before we learned that he and his wife had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at Tiffany's, Newt Gingrich convened a conference call Tuesday afternoon in an effort to put a good face on what has been an epically disastrous presidential campaign rollout.

In particular, conservative activists and opinion-shapers are still fuming over the surprise criticism he leveled against Rep. Paul Ryan's Medicare plan on Sunday's "Meet the Press," but according to the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein, Gingrich insisted that his rocky start as a candidate is nothing remarkable, likening his campaign to ... Ronald Reagan's:

"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."

This is one of Newt's favorite devices -- the "fatuous historical analogy," as Jonathan Bernstein has labeled it. Here, we are supposed to believe that Gingrich is in roughly the same political situation that the patron saint of modern conservatism was when he embarked on his history-changing campaign three decades ago.