As tough as I’ve been on Newt Gingrich, the man has a point.  Mediaite captures Gingrich’s appearance on Fox with Greta van Susteren last night in which the presidential candidate blasts NBC for its report that lays the blame for the massive staff exodus on Gingrich’s wife Callista.  Gingrich calls the coverage “reprehensible,” and points out that their sourcing comes from people who won’t go on camera to corroborate it.  The two work as a team, Gingrich tells van Susteren, just as Ronald and Nancy Reagan once did, and the staff they hired apparently couldn’t deal with it:

Asked by Greta van Susteren to comment on the rumors that his wife had made the campaign impossible to run, the former House Speaker thanked van Susteren for the opportunity and gave an abridged version of her biography– her writings, filmmaking, and the various projects they have worked on together. “I say that as background,” he explained, “because I saw on NBC this morning in a program that had no one on camera.” He went on to condemn the “cowardly people that lied about my wife” and demand an apology from the network, adding that the report was “personally reprehensible” and “the kind of thing that makes it hard to make decent people run for office.”

Gingrich then went on to compare his relationship to Nancy and Ronald Reagan and argue that some of his former staff “had no idea how to deal with a couple who work together.” What’s more, he called the anonymous sources “backstabbers” and noted that those that had disagreements with him on how to run the campaign wanted to run a “1952 campaign that I thought was hopeless and couldn’t possibly win.”

The blame-Callista meme has no real merit. Gingrich is the candidate, and Gingrich ultimately makes the decisions. If he’s taking Callista’s advice and it doesn’t work out (hypothetically speaking), that’s not Callista’s fault but his own. That’s true no matter who Gingrich has as an adviser. That is part of the executive talent that gets tested in a campaign — building a team, developing strategy and tactics, and executing them effectively. The team contributes to all of that, but it’s the candidate who is held responsible for it, not one adviser.

However, with that in mind, Gingrich is falling into the same trap by blasting the staffers he hired as out of touch. Who hired these “professionals” that wanted to run “a 1952 campaign”? That’s not the fault of the advisers; it’s the fault of the man who hired them without discovering their approach to campaigning. A bad hire at this level reflects much more on the person doing the hiring than the people who got the jobs. Claiming that they were total failures who were on the way out doesn’t say much about the boss who let them stick around long enough to quit, especially since the campaign was only a few weeks old — and Gingrich took two weeks off in the middle of the supposed total failure to go on a vacation cruise to Europe.

Gingrich is right in that the problem with the Gingrich campaign isn’t his wife, but he’s not doing himself any favors with this counterattack.