Newt Gingrich scored a pretty big endorsement over the weekend.  The editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed Newt.  What kind of weight does this endorsement carry?  Well we’ll talk to Jamie Dupree about it at 10:35AM and 12PM today to find out. 

By the way … the New Hampshire Union Leader is a newspaper, not the boss of the New Hampshire Union.  (And for our younger listeners:  Like the New Hampshire Union Leader is, like, a, like, newspaper.  Know what I’m sayin’?  It’s not the, like, boss of some, like, union in, like, New Hampshire.”)

Their track record for picking the next president may be hit or miss, but it is good boost in a state where Mitt Romney is currently dominating in the polls.  When asked about Mitt Romney, the editorial page editor for the Union Leader, Drew Cline, explains, "Romney's a guy who wants to be liked, a politician who wants to be liked. Gingrich is a politician who wants to be respected."  I rather like that difference, but at the same time if the voters don’t like the GOP nominee Obama is going to get four more years to “fundamentally transform” the United States. 

I guess it seems like brains and respect are winning out over likability.  Hey, Barack Obama was likeable, and look where that got us.  Moving right along …

There’s no doubt that Newt’s debate performances have shown him to be the “brainest” guy in the room.  After an election based on “coolness” and charisma (2008), Newt’s surge in the polls has resurrected the concept of knowledge being an important part of a president’s work.  Here’s a look at Amity Shlaes latest column in Bloomberg: Gingrich Bounce Shows Geek Love Can Still Blossom.

Gingrich doesn’t project electability or character in the sense we usually mean. “Character” is what you want your daughter to marry. You don’t want your daughter to marry Newt. Nor does he have the purity of inexperience -- Gingrich isn’t like Palin or Herman Cain. He’s an insider’s insider, with all the dirt and baggage that connotes.

But Gingrich does project a terrifying authority of policy knowledge. Voters have been warming to Gingrich because he’s right -- about the budget, about Social Security reform, about plenty of other substantive themes he’s elaborated on since the debates began.

Voters have also been warming up to the fact that Newt is not afraid to take on the ObamaMedia establishment or Obama himself.  The latest example is this appearance at a town hall meeting in Naples where Newt explains how he would challenge Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglas style debates.  Newt says that Obama would ever be offered the opportunity to use a teleprompter, “because it has to be fair.”