Former House speaker Newt Gingrich ripped into his party’s consulting class yet again on Wednesday in a scathing column for the conservative magazine Human Events and in a morning interview with CBS News.
Gingrich told CBS that Republicans are at risk of being non-competitive at the presidential level thanks to shifting demographics and that the party’s consultants are “kidding themselves about how big the gap is.”
Gingrich, whose dislike of political strategists is all-but legendary, singled out Karl Rove and Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, writing in Human Events “it is appalling how little some Republican consultants have learned from the 2012 defeat. It is even more disturbing how arrogant their plans for the future are.”
Gingrich slammed Rove’s plan to support more moderate Republicans with Super PACs. “I am unalterably opposed to a bunch of billionaires financing a boss to pick candidates in 50 states. This is the opposite of the Republican tradition of freedom and grassroots small town conservatism,” Gingrich wrote.
The former Speaker also labeled Stevens “indifferent to the facts” and said Romney’s top strategist “has no sense of responsibility for a presidential campaign that he dominated.”
Romney’s dismal numbers with Latino voters, said Gingrich, were a direct result of the rightward strategy on immigration that the former Massachusetts governor pursued during the GOP primary.
Gingrich’s advice: “Republicans need to drop the consultant-centric model and go back to a system in which candidates have to think and consultants are advisers and implementers but understand that the elected official is the one who has to represent the voters and make the key decisions.”