“Lazarus” Newt Set for Victory After K.O.’ing John King

For Gingrich, blasting away at the media is his standard routine when facing scrutiny. Anybody who has covered him knows that this is how he behaves. He did it during previous debates, although not with this kind of venom, and he did it throughout the nineteen-nineties. But King and his producers seemed stunned by Newt’s fusillade. Rather than standing up to Gingrich and pressing him about his ex-wife’s allegations, which included the affirmation that he doesn’t have the moral character to be President, King allowed him to dismiss them as unfounded (“Every personal friend in this period knows it was false”) and get in a few more shots at CNN and the rest of the “élite media” for “defending Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”

- John Cassidy writes about “one of the most bizarre twenty-four hour periods in American politics [he] can remember”: http://nyr.kr/ypBIJc

Bidding adieu to Rick Perry with this Danny Shanahan cartoon from September. For more political coverage, visit our new Political Scene website: http://politics.newyorker.com

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Comment: The Truth in “King of Bain”

The reviews for “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” a twenty-seven-minute campaign documentary distributed online by a Super PAC that supports Newt Gingrich, have not been kind. “Highly misleading” and “manipulative,” declared the Washington Post. “Misleading and exaggerated,” said the Times. On Monday, in South Carolina, the film’s subject, Romney, called it “probably the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.”

The criticisms are grounded in the belief that political advertising should be factually accurate and presented in a balanced context. That would surely be desirable, and it is useful for journalists to try to hold politicians accountable for their lies. Yet to dismiss “King of Bain” because it selects facts, distorts history, and tugs unrelentingly on the viewer’s emotions would be to overlook other interesting aspects of the film. “King of Bain” is to the Super PAC era of political distortion what “Apocalypse Now” was to Hollywood’s era of the auteur director: an apotheosis of inspired excess, and a marker of the times we inhabit.

Daily Comment: Shouting Toward South Carolina

Is what’s keeping at least some of the candidates in the race—or “the hunt,” as Huntsman called it—not the illusion of victory but the sheer joy of knocking things down? Grown men don’t have as many opportunities as they might to act like toddlers. This isn’t a train going to South Carolina or to anywhere in particular. It’s a set of careening bumper cars. The question, and not just for the Republican Party, is when it becomes a demolition derby. Also, one of the few points to emerge clearly in the debates this past weekend was that the candidates really don’t like each other. (Santorum, who ended up with nine per cent of the vote, would have done well to hide that a little better.) Grudges are great motivators.