Robert Costa of National Review on Newt's Comeback

Two excerpts:

“There is plenty of room,” says R. C. Hammond, the campaign spokesman. He bets that by early January, when New Hampshire and Iowa are blanketed by snow, Gingrich’s “tortoise” campaign will inch ahead.

That optimism is backed up by cash, Hammond says. In the past week, the campaign has raised more money — nearly $200,000 — than it collected in July, the month the campaign nearly collapsed. The capital infusion has enabled Gingrich to hire early-state staffers, such as tea-party leader Andrew Hemingway in New Hampshire, and produce a slew of Web videos.

Wait and see -- that is the Gingrich mantra. In coming days, his team does not expect him to go negative against Cain, the latest Republican hotshot, but to poke holes, in a friendly manner, in aspects of the 9-9-9 tax plan. When Perry unveils his flat-tax proposal this week, look for Gingrich to trumpet his own flat-tax plan, which he released earlier this year. He’ll also likely challenge Perry to explain specifics, such as his chosen rate.

Meanwhile, finally, the campaign will spend some coin, opening offices in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. An outpost in Miami will expand, as will the operation in Atlanta, where the campaign’s main call center is housed.

And to the joy of political junkies, Gingrich will join Cain for a one-on-one discussion at a tea-party forum in Texas next month, an event the campaign hopes will spark tea-party voters to reconsider, on a policy basis, their Cain support. The battle for the “non-Romney” slot in the primary, at least in Newt World, has only begun.

That last part -- the one-on-one with Cain next month -- I had not read about before, and it should be a great event.

The article is too long and too packed full of great details for me to quote everything worth quoting, so please read the whole thing.

Great article on Newt's campaign by National Review

Robert Costa of National Review interviewed Newt's communications director, Joe DeSantis, about all the recent events. The entire thing is worth reading, and I recommend you do, but I will pick some of the best parts:

On Thursday morning, June 9, former House speaker Newt Gingrich was informed that more than a dozen of his senior political advisers had resigned. All of them, except for longtime spokesman Rick Tyler, were recent additions to his team, hired guns for his nascent presidential campaign.

Knowing that things could quickly spiral out of control, Gingrich called an emergency meeting at his personal office, a few floors above K Street in downtown Washington. Along with his wife, Callista, Gingrich assembled his remaining loyalists for an important, closed-door discussion about how he would handle the news, and whether he would stay in the race.

“They were calm,” recalls Joe DeSantis, a longtime Gingrich adviser, in an interview with National Review Online. “Newt said that he was not going to get pushed out of this race. He and Callista both said that they felt compelled as citizens to keep fighting, to keep running for president, regardless of the news.

“Immediately, we all felt boosted, we got a wave of energy,” DeSantis says. “For weeks, with the old staff, we all wondered why we weren’t busy, why things were moving so slow. Once we saw that Gingrich was reinvigorated, we felt the same way. Newt World felt like it was kicking back into gear, back into the way it has operated for years. We worked till 9 p.m. that evening, looking at how to reframe the campaign in the days ahead.”

But things turned sour within hours. The advisers not only quit, they criticized Gingrich in numerous stories about the exodus, and some blamed their departure on Callista. This sent Team Gingrich into a fury, and remains an open wound within the inner circle.

...

“Those who left were more mechanical; they did not fit with the constant brainstorming culture within Gingrich’s inner circle,” explains DeSantis, who now serves as communications director for the presidential campaign. “It was more of an operational clash. There is an old saying in Newt World: Either you stay for two months, or you fit in and stay for five years or more. It is a different kind of pace here: Newt works 80 to 90 hours per week. You have to roll with it.”

Others have left Newt Gingrich’s camp before, DeSantis observes. It is not always an easy place to work, since the boss is an unconventional political figure, who operates more as a magnet for ideas than as the chief executive of a political machine.

...

[DeSantis]: "We had press events scheduled at the office, but our former point man there (Scott Rials) nixed them. When we went down to the office this past week, we heard about how badly things were being run. Volunteers were not getting calls back, endorsements were not being lined up the way they could have. Totally inexcusable and unprofessional."

...

DeSantis is less critical when it comes to his former colleague Rick Tyler, who was part of Gingrich’s top team for many years. “I think it was more of a burnout thing with Rick,” he surmises. “We all still respect and like Rick. We have been in contact with him since. He was part of Newt World, whereas the others were outsider advisers who were only here for a bit. It’s a bit different with him.”

Looking ahead, DeSantis emphasizes that Gingrich is in the race to win it, that he never considered dropping out. “Newt is reasonable about things going forward,” he says. “He sees a path to the nomination, but he knows that it will not be easy. He will fight for it. But he is not a masochist. He will not stay in if he sees that there is no way for him to win.”

To help out Gingrich, DeSantis says that the entire campaign team has been reshuffled, with longtime aides playing new roles: Kathy Lubbers, Gingrich’s daughter, is a senior adviser; Michael Krull is the campaign’s political director; R. C. Hammond is the press secretary; Jody Thomas runs fundraising; Karen Olson advises Callista; Brady Cassis is the lead researcher; Bess Kelly is the scheduler.

Perhaps the most important shift, DeSantis says, is Gingrich’s decision to make Vince Haley, his coauthor on books and policy proposals, the campaign’s policy director.

“Making Vince Haley the policy director is important,” he says. “The previous advisers did not organize the team with a policy director, so we had all of these communications and ideas floating out there without organization. Now we are going to keep the campaign ideas- and solutions-oriented, with policy organization and presentation our number-one goal.”

DeSantis:

"Iowa is where we are focused," he says. "Other early states are important, but this is where we need to build a powerful movement. We think we can still be competitive there. It is where face-to-face communication can really help you win. Newt has drawn huge crowds there already. He’ll be back in July, if not sooner, building on that early buzz....this will be a different kind of campaign moving forward, the kind of campaign that Gingrich envisioned from the beginning.

...

It will be based around ideas and solutions, individual outreach, and built around Newt’s strengths, from policy speeches to engagement with voters. It will delve into policy areas that other campaigns won’t touch. It will be an open, grassroots-fueled effort — lots of media, trips to early states, speeches, and talk with supporters on Facebook and Twitter."

More DeSantis:

"Newt is also going to look for more long-form venues, whether it is on television with a reporter or during a policy speech at a college or GOP club, to make his ideas known. Later this month (at the Atlanta Press Club on June 22) he will speak on housing in Georgia, for example, to talk about repealing Dodd-Frank and about his ideas on the Federal Reserve....He will directly talk with thousands of primary voters, not interact with them via press releases and stiff appearances."

Gingrich's 12 steps to replace the Left.

On National Review Online, Robert Costa lists the 12 steps ("at least 12") that Newt has laid out in his goal of replacing the Left (above is the entire speech):

1. Turn the $132 billion spent on unemployment compensation last year into a human capital development fund by requiring every person who can’t find a job to take a training program in return for their compensation. Paying people to do nothing for 99 weeks is as wrong in unemployment compensation as it was in welfare. This is an opportunity to dramatically enhance the working skills of the American people at no new cost.

2. Replace litigation-focused workers compensation with a rehabilitation and capabilities focused program that maximizes the speed of helping people medically, and focuses on retraining and focusing on what they can do rather than on what they can’t do.

3. Review the IBM proposal to take $1 trillion out of the cost of running the federal government over the next decade, and ask IBM and other technology companies to make a similar proposal for state and local government.

4. As a first step toward a tenth amendment project, identify every federal regulation which costs money and minimizes state creativity. Work through the ALEC collectively to have Congress repeal the regulation, abolish the office or agency or defund the activity.

5. As a step toward replacing Obamacare, block grant Medicaid by number of people in poverty per state, and give the states freedom to invent a more effective system of prevention, wellness, and chronic disease management without Washington red tape and bureaucratic dictation.

6. As a step toward more affordable care, eliminate the $70 billion to $120 billion in theft in Medicare and Medicaid created by the administrative incompetence of the federal bureaucracy and the innovative determination of modern criminals.

7. Propose a fifty-state competition to block grant all federal Health Information Technology money and see which state can complete the first paperless health system.

8. As a leader in your state, bring together every innovative entrepreneur and CEO in the state to develop a benchmark for helping businesses and entrepreneurs create high paying jobs in competition with China, India, and Germany and to focus on growing your state’s export success to create local jobs through worldwide sales.

9. Emphasize the right of parents to know how their children are doing, know how their school is doing, and have the right to choose a better school if they believe their child is being inadequately prepared for success.

10. Insist on paying great teachers a lot more and releasing bad teachers before they can cripple the future of the children they serve.

11. Benchmark salaries and benefits in your state and insist that government employees be compensated fairly within the framework of the taxpayers’ capabilities. As Governor-elect Scott Walker has said, we are not going to have bureaucratic have’s and taxpayer have-not’s in America.

12. Insist on reasserting American Exceptionalism by having every student in taxpayer-financed schools, whether K through 12 or in the state college and university systems, have a brief course annually on the Declaration of Independence, its assertion of self-evident truths, and its declaration that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The time has come to reassert that we are Americans, and America is a learned civilization.