Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and current presidential hopeful, is having a press conference tonight after the Nevada primary results are in.
Many think Newt will announce that he’s pulling out and conceding the nomination. I don’t think so.
I think it’s going to be Newt’s announcing that he’s going to be hiring a guy that Mitt Romney just spurned because Mitt’s ego is getting too big for its britches:
A GOP operative who won plaudits for bolstering Mitt Romney’s recent debate performances is not being retained by the front-runner’s campaign, an apparent victim of internal tensions over staff receiving too much credit for the candidate’s comeback, POLITICO has learned.
Brett O’Donnell, a former top aide to Michele Bachmann, has been paid for his work assisting Romney in the crucial Florida debates but was not offered a formal role with the campaign as he expected, according to Republican sources familiar with the situation.
I think that Romney dumped the guy both because of Romney’s ego, and also because of Romney’s arrogance. He needs 1144 delegates to win the nomination, and he’s got less than a tenth of that even with winning Nevada tonight, yet he’s already acting as if the nomination is his — so he’s preparing to pivot away from the Birchers and Tea Partiers and towards a message he thinks will be more suited to the general election. If he’s already pivoting away from the Tea Partiers, he won’t need an expert in Tea Party talk like O’Donnell, or so I imagine him to be thinking.
I have no inside information, just a weird wild guess that this is what I would do if I were Newt.
We’ll see in a few hours just how wrong — or right — I am.
UPDATE: Well, he didn’t mention O’Donnell by name, but he didn’t concede either. So it’s half-right, or half-wrong, depending on how you score these things.