The end of the road for Newt Gingrich?

By Dana Milbank,
WashPost
Monday, January 30, 7:17 PM

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — It was approaching 11 p.m. at the Hyatt hotel bar here on Sunday, and reporters covering Newt Gingrich’s campaign were enjoying a few drinks when a familiar figure approached.

Gingrich put a hand on the shoulders of two women at the table and imparted a big scoop. “There’s a new poll coming out,” he announced. “I’m within five points of Romney. . . . I’ve got all the momentum.”

It’s hard to know what the most pitiful part was: That a presidential candidate was whiling away the night at a hotel bar (it was his second visit to the journalists’ table that evening)? That he felt the need to do his own spinning? That the survey he was spinning was a “robo-poll” done by machines? Or that the pollster who did it used to work for Gingrich?

In fact, real polls were showing the opposite — a new Quinnipiac poll had Mitt Romney with a 14-point lead over Gingrich in Florida. If such a drubbing occurs in the state’s primary on Tuesday, that would, for all intents and purposes, end Gingrich’s campaign. But Gingrich is going down in his own style, leaving fabrications, insults and scorched earth all the way from Miami to Pensacola.

(More here.)