More Rats Fleeing from the SS Newt

In today's Newt News, his two top campaign fundraisers resigned today. That makes 18 senior staff people who have resigned from Gingrich's floundering campaign over the last three weeks.

The departures of fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman were the latest blow for the former House speaker who watched 16 top advisers abandon his campaign en masse earlier this month, partly because of what people familiar with the campaign spending described as a dire financial situation.

People don't realize it yet, but this presidential campaign is the end of Newt Gingrich as we know him. Newt's whole America Solutions empire is premised on the idea that Newt Gingrich is a creative guy who has real influence in the Republican Party and the American government as a whole. But now that Gingrich is embarrassing himself so thoroughly on the campaign trail, it's gradually coming out that Newt doesn't have any influence and hasn't had any influence since he resigned as speaker in 1998. It turned out that Newt Gingrich was exactly what his worst critics said along--a megalomaniac blowhard who couldn't be trusted with anything.

Sooner or later, Newt's going to get hit with a new reality. After his presidential campaign ends sometime after he gets 5% in the New Hampshire primaries, people are going to stop buying Newt's movies, videos, books and pamphlets, they're no longer going to participate in his projects, and are going to stop coming to his web sites. Sooner or later, America Solutions is going to either be dramatically downsized or go bankrupt.

My bet's on the latter.

That doesn't mean that Newt's going to starve or Callista won't be able to afford more platinum hair die. There's always room for a megalomaniac blowhard to hustle for a hard-earned buck on the right.

It's just that most of us aren't going to hear about it.