After a gaffe-prone start, the fledgling presidential campaign of firebrand Republican Newt Gingrich was dealt a major blow Thursday when his senior staff resigned en masse.
"The professional team came to the realization that the direction of the campaign they sought and Newt\'s vision for the campaign were incompatible," Dave Carney, a key Gingrich strategist who resigned, told NBC television.
Gingrich dismissed the resignations with a two-line statement on his Facebook page, saying he was still tilting for the White House in the 2012 race in a bid to challenge Democrat President Barack Obama.
"I am committed to running the solutions-oriented campaign I set out to run earlier this spring," he wrote. "The campaign begins anew Sunday in Los Angeles."
Among the key staff who resigned were Rick Tyler, the campaign\'s press secretary and national campaign manager Rob Johnson.
The top consultants in both South Carolina and Iowa, two key battleground states, have also left the campaign, according to media reports.
Gingrich, who ushered in the Republican revolution while he was the leader of the US House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, announced on May 11 that he would seek the Republican nomination for US president.
But the candidate found himself in hot water almost from the start as he joined a crowded field of Republican hopefuls vying for the party\'s nomination.
Speaking just days later on NBC\'s Meet the Press, Gingrich broke with conservative orthodoxy by criticizing the Republican\'s plan to privatize medicare, the federally-financed health care system for the elderly, calling it "right-wing social engineering."
The comment caused a furor, and Gingrich took several days to apologize to the plan\'s author, Republican Representative Paul Ryan.
The thrice-married former history professor also drew withering comments when a Congressional newspaper revealed that he once owed the fashionable jewelry story Tiffany\'s $500,000.
Most recently, with the campaign trying to build all-important momentum in its first month, Gingrich disappeared for a week to take a cruise with his wife, Callista, to the Greek Islands, another apparent bone of contention among campaign staff.
As speaker of the House, Gingrich was best known for helping draft the "Contract with America," ten socially-conservative items the new Republican-dominated House put to a vote within the first 100 days in office.
But his tenure is equally remembered for the infamous four-week government shutdown in 1995 and 1996, when all but essential government personnel were furloughed after a budget fight led by Gingrich and then president Bill Clinton.
Gingrich has long been a polarizing figure in US politics, in part for his candor and in part for his ideas, which emphasize a sharply reduced role for government.
He acknowledged as much last month in an interview with NBC, when he commented that his "great weakness" is a lack of personal and political discipline.
"One of the painful lessons I\'ve had to learn -- and I haven\'t fully learned it honestly -- is that if you seek to be president of the United States, you are never an analyst, you\'re never a college teacher," he said.
"Because those folks can say what they want to say. And someone who offers to lead America has to be much more disciplined and much more thoughtful."
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