DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it's very difficult to prove something like that, just like it's difficult for the president to prove the economy would've been weaker if not for his particular policies. How could it have been stronger had a Republican been in president, in your judgment? Been in the White House, I should say.

DANIELS: Well, for one thing, for one thing, national policy wouldn't have been so relentlessly anti-enterprise as it's been. If you'd assembled a team of Nobel economists and said design us a policy to stifle and strangle investments and small business growth and innovation in this economy, you couldn't have done better than what's happened the last three years. The mindless piling on of new regulations, every one of them very expensive, and in the aggregate extraordinarily so, that's all drained away dollars that could've been used to hire someone. New taxes and the threat of more, all the uncertainty that's come with that. What we know is this, David, I don't have--no one can prove what might have happened, but this is the weakest recovery, by far, from a deep recession that we have in--since the records have been kept, and I don't think that's an accident.

Wow--anti-enterprise tax-hiking regulatory excess!

Instead of the reporter in the room quizzing his guest on what he's talking about, let's get another guest to weigh in.

Like, say, a billionaire mayor:

GREGORY: Mayor Bloomberg, as an independent voice in all of this, is that your judgment as well, that that's a fair criticism?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I think I agree with most of what Mitch said. I think if you want to have growth, number one, you have to have the financial industry be strong and willing to take risks. And this relentless criticism and investigation of them, whether--regardless of the facts in the past, if we want to have a future, we have to have people have confidence.

Newt Gingrich Florida Primary Results 2012: The Candidate Who Refuses to Operate Within Reality

...From the beginning to the end of Gingrich's election night party, the campaign and its supporters seemed to be operating outside of realities, denying the importance of this large state's primary contest and insisting that victory was going to be theirs as soon as voters opened their eyes and truly saw Florida winner Mitt Romney as a "Massachusetts moderate." Gingrich, in fact, never even congratulated Romney on his win.

I'm a fan of Terkel's work, but this genre of punditry is unfortunate. At the moment (Real Clear Politics, 2/1/12), Gingrich is the top choice of Republican voters nationwide, according to surveys by Gallup, NBC/Wall Street Journal and Rassmussen. True, Romney has major advantages in terms of fundraising, organization and party support.  But if Gingrich chooses to believe that being the candidate more Republican voters want makes him the candidate most likely to be nominated, that hardly makes him delusional.

Even if he were well behind in the polls, but still wanted to give voters a chance to hear his message and decide whether or not he deserved their support--is that really a reason to ridicule him? More than 90 percent of the nation's voters have yet to have a chance to take part in the nominating process; it's a little early to mock anyone for not having the same foresight as the political pundits who know the results are already a foregone conclusion.

Out of nowhere, he has exhumed Saul Alinsky, whose fame is limited to university sociology departments, and yet whose name is so perfectly evocative of old-style radicalism, vaguely European in sound, that it fits Gingrich’s recent formulation, "people who don’t like the classical America." Who dat, Newt?

The reference, although a tad obscure, is nevertheless intriguing. It shows that Gingrich is familiar with the late father of community organizing who died in 1972, and who by occupation and residence (Chicago) is suggestive of Barack Obama. Alinsky was no communist but he was a radical, and to have his name mentioned by a presidential candidate is just plain thrilling--also chilling. This is the bright and the dark side of Gingrich. He knows his stuff and often can't stop from showing off.

Out of nowhere? Using Alinsky to bash Obama has been a staple of right-wing media for at least the past four years. Alinsky was regularly included in Glenn Beck's shrill conspiracy theories. Linking Obama to Alinsky doesn't prove Gingrich knows his stuff--it means he listens to a bit of radio, or perhaps watched some Fox News Channel over the past several years.

Doubly unhelpful to Cohen's argument is the presence of this Post news article today:

If it's a Republican debate night, it's time for a Saul Alinsky reference.

Alinsky, as anyone who has paid close attention to community organizing, Fox News or presidential politics in the past four years knows, is a liberal hero and conservative villain, best remembered for his theory of empowering the disenfranchised.

I guess Richard Cohen hasn't been paying attention to politics.

But still, why does Cohen go so far to praise someone whose views he largely finds repellent? Because he hopes Gingrich will move Obama to the right:

He's an unscrupulous man, a one-car demolition derby, but if he goads Obama to unaccustomed bravery and other Democrats to rethink outdated liberal dogma (affirmative action, etc.), then he will have done his nation a great service.

Gingrich is going to get so much free media attention over the next few days. It is going to be wall to wall Gingrich, and I think it is fair to say that, in some ways,  the "liberal media," as Gingrich would put it, is kind of rooting for Gingrich right now. They want this--they/we, want this race to go on, so he is gonna have, he is gonna get more attention and in some ways more favorable coverage, at least for the next couple days, than he would ordinarily from people who would normally give him tougher scrutiny…

So the guy who's been running against the "liberal media" might actually see his campaign boosted by that very same media? Yes. Heilemann thinks it's about the press wanting to see a competitive race, which is certainly part of it.

But it's worth pointing out that Gingrich's attacks on the media from the debate podium don't tell us much about how he really feels about the media. As  Ginger Gibson of Politico reported (1/20/12), Gingrich can be quite the charmer when the cameras are off:

The same candidate who on Thursday decried "the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media" shows another face to the cadre of reporters who follow his campaign day-to-day. He jokes with them, publicly celebrates their birthdays, teases them about the early hour they are often forced out of bed to cover his events.

Gibson added that "Gingrich also appears to make a distinction between individual reporters and the media as a whole and comprehends the insatiable nature of the modern news hole."

Or to get at it more succinctly,  read this post by Daily Mail reporter Toby Harnden. Or just read the headline: "Newt Gingrich's Big, Slobbering Mutual Love Affair With the Elite Media."

Harnden even posted a photo of the press pass reporters were given for Gingrich's post-election event: