Team Obama Cheers on Newt

By Glenn Thrush, Politico

Another Democratic president in distress seems to be getting a boost from Newt Gingrich.

Fifteen years after Gingrich’s bombastic overreach as House Speaker helped Bill Clinton bounce back to win re-election in 1996, a mellower Gingrich is providing President Barack Obama with something the incumbent sorely needed: A credible top-tier Republican to join him in lambasting Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper.

Just a few weeks ago, Obama 2012 senior adviser David Axelrod, architect of the party’s “Mitt-has-no-core” strategy, was practically shouting at the TV while watching yet another debate in which the GOP field attacked Obama instead of their nominal - and vulnerable - frontrunner.

But that was before Gingrich abruptly joined Team Obama this week in a tag-team attack of sorts on Romney. Gingrich mocked the former Massachusetts governor on CNN for running “to the left” of Ted Kennedy in the 1990s and didn’t take issue with Democratic National Committee ads pointing out Romney position shifts on abortion, immigration and health care reform, as “legitimate.”