Even those of us who couldn’t quite bring ourselves to back Newt Gingrich in the primaries hoped that he would play a big role in the general election as a surrogate. This video demonstrates why. Gingrich reacts to Piers Morgan’s suggestion that the “big flaw” in Ryan’s budget was that the rich would do well, and in two minutes teaches Economics 101, accuses Morgan of media bias, and rips the Obama economy as the “worst recovery in 75 years.” And that’s just Newt getting warmed up, as Newsbusters highlights:

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: I suppose the fundamental debate that’s going to be had, though, will come down to whether the Republicans can sell to the American people that they are really concerned about jobs, about people’s livelihoods, and all the rest of it. If they’re also scratching the backs of their rich and wealthy members, which is clearly I think the flaw in the Ryan plan is that it just does. I mean, if you’re very wealthy, you’re going to be doing a lot better out of Paul Ryan than you would out of Barack Obama who believes fundamentally the rich should pay more tax.

NEWT GINGRICH: You know, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I do wonder sometimes if you guys all get off in a little club and learn a brand new mantra and then all repeat it mindlessly. The fact is, these kinds of things were said about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut – which was developed by Jack Kemp who Paul Ryan worked for – Ronald Reagan’s tax cut raised more people to middle class status, took more people out of poverty, created more jobs.

You know, this is the core thing that liberals don’t get. If you want to have jobs, you have to encourage job creators. If you discourage job creators, if you engage in class warfare, if you do what Barack Obama’s been doing, you have what we currently have. This is the worst recovery in 75 years.

Now, nobody in the media seems to want to come to grips with the fact that the Obama economic policy is a disaster for the poor. Look at the unemployment rate for black teenagers. Look at the unemployment rate for Latino teenagers. At what point do we hold the president accountable for a policy which is crippling the poor in America by crushing the economy under big government?

Ryan and Romney represent a different approach. And I think there’s this mantra you guys almost sound like you’re an extension of the Obama campaign. The Ryan/Romney plan empowers middle class Americans to get a job. When they get a job, their income goes up. They pay more taxes. They are independent. They’re able to live their own lives.

Obama worries about student loans. None of those students are going to get any jobs under Obama. Ryan and Romney are worried about getting jobs for those students so they can pay off the Obama loans.

I think this is a fundamentally different model, and I know everybody in the media wants to rush down and narrow it down to one point. So I’m going to rush down and narrow it down to one point: how long are we going to tolerate a president who makes the poorest Americans more unemployed, who pushes more poor Americans on to food stamps, and who eliminates hope for minorities? And that’s the Barack Obama record after four years.

Barack Obama loves the poor. That’s why he’s making so many more Americans poorer through his policies.

The basic argument comes down to this: Do you believe private enterprise or government creates jobs? Obama thinks it’s the latter, and his policies have followed that principle since the beginning of February 2009 and his stimulus bill. Has that worked? We have had the weakest post-WWII recovery (that’s a fact, not an opinion) and the worst job-creation environment in decades. The truth is that government doesn’t drive job creation, but it sure can strangle it — and that’s precisely what we’ve seen. If we want to put people back to work, we need to get capital engaged in private-sector growth, not seize it for more public-sector social engineering.

The Mantra Club — that sounds like a pretty good description for the national media regarding Paul Ryan and his budget, although with a few notable exceptions. Didn’t the Mantra Club have a hit back in the 80s?

My bad — that was the Escape Club, a one-hit wonder.  The Mantra Club is a one-note wonder.