Gingrich meltdown just the latest chapter in bizarre GOP presidential contest

The increasingly bizarre shakeout in the Republican presidential field may be one that historians will spend years analyzing.

Donald Trump, as most expected, was just using the media and GOP stalwarts to massage his ego. Mike Huckabee’s exit, combined with Sarah Palin’s sudden aloofness, reinforces the idea that some tier-one GOP leaders are more interested in cashing in on political fame than going through the hard slog of a presidential campaign.

Then there is the strikingly swift meltdown of the Newt Gingrich campaign coming on the heels of a Mitt Romney power-point presentation on health care that some consider the beginning and the end of his 2012 campaign.

All the while, President Obama is still considered — even post-Osama — vulnerable to defeat and hamstrung by a sluggish economy. Just a few months after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that his number one goal for 2011-12 was to make Obama a one-term president, the GOP is not even close to producing a standardbearer that could make that wish come true.

Gingrich, who some thought was a darkhorse to be reckoned with, has shown himself to be a Romneyesque flip-flopper. The Republicans’ ideas man suggested the other day that Washington require that the uninsured either obtain health care coverage or secure some type of bond that would pay for their future spending on medical care.

Of course, that idea was so close to Obama’s individual mandate that when the former House speaker tried to patch things up by putting out a YouTube video to pledge his allegiance to the repeal-Obamacare crowd, it sounded shallow and desperate.

Gingrich quickly fell even deeper into a hole when he said that the House GOP’s Medicare overhaul proposal was an example of “right-wing social engineering” and a foolish, radical plan.

Right-wing talk radio was apoplectic. Rep. Paul Ryan, author of the Medicare plan responded: “With allies like that, who needs the left?”

National Review Online’s Rich Lowry skewered the former history professor and self-proclaimed conservative intellect by stating in his column: “Gingrich prefers extravagant lambasting when a mere distancing would do, and the over-arching theoretical construct to a mundane pander. He is drawn irresistibly to operatic overstatement — sometimes brilliant, always interesting, and occasionally downright absurd.”

Even before his erratic comments, one conservative anti-green group put out a sarcastic press release congratulating Gingrich for declaring his candidacy as a Democrat for president. They pointed out about two dozen references in Gingrich’s books in which the Georgia Republican expressed support for cap and trade, recognition of climate change, and the need to change human behavior to save the planet.

Then, on Monday, sometime after he was told by an Iowa voter in a televised news report to drop out “before you make a bigger fool of yourself,” we learned that Gingrich and his most recent wife had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at Tiffany’s.