Help Wanted: Need Campaign Manager, Senior Advisor, Political Strategist…

The Newt Gingrich presidential campaign has suffered more mishaps than you are likely to see in a marathon of The Three Stoogesepisodes. Almost a dozen campaign staffers have pulled a Mutiny On The Bounty because it seems his wife Callista has too much say so in the direction of his campaign. And yet Gingrich insists that the show must go on. But who is watching this wretched production? What campaign donors are still willing to pay the price of admission so the Gingrich Express can run a little longer?

No one.

Almost all of the Republican candidates, including Gingrich, are in the process of dumbing down their platforms so they don’t offend their base, but in this election cycle, that shouldn’t be a penalty. Whoever ends up as the GOP nominee for president ultimately should be able to run their entire presidential campaign on one simple catchphrase. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

But the problem is, none of the candidates who have declared or hinted they will be declaring shortly have the ability to stick to the script.

Internet scuttlebutt says Governor Rick Perry of Texas will absorb as many as seven politicos from the Gingrich Express into his own nascent bid for the Republican nomination. Will Perry, whose own Lone Star state’s finances are collapsing around him, fare any better? Maybe all these candidates need to invest in their very own teleprompters, a tool demonized by the right wing as a crutch for President Obama, since they all seem to succumb to the urge to pontificate on “values” whenever a crowd and a TV camera are in the same room.

Stick to the economic script, gentlemen, and you will give yourselves a fighting chance.