Republicans wonder: Has Newt finally gone too far?

Gingrich is used to hearing gasps of outrage from his Democratic targets. But his latest provocations have also brought groans and rolled eyes from Republican quarters, where some prominent figures warn that Gingrich’s instinct for bombast is an obstacle to him being taken seriously as a party leader or a promising presidential contender in 2012…

“Two of the most important commodities in a candidate running for president are focus and discipline – and he’s got neither,” said an adviser to Mitt Romney of Gingrich. “He could be a great help [to the party] if he’d so choose if he’d only help with messaging and ideas and be less of a provocateur. But that’s not what he wants to do.”

Gingrich’s longtime spokesman, Rick Tyler, offered a robust defense of his boss’s rhetoric and said leaders who speak bold truths often cause more timid listeners to recoil.

“They are the same people who were upset when Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union the ‘Evil Empire,’” he said, adding that FDR, too, “said some pretty provocative things in World War II.”