Newt Gingrich favors a health insurance mandate and regards Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal as “right wing social engineering.”  Support for a mandate endorses a central plank of Obamacare.  The Ryan proposal is the central alternative to top-down, bureaucratic controls on spending and access to care as a means to reduce Medicare cost growth.

The Speaker’s intelligence and erudition make it hard to believe that his statements were gaffes.  One might like to think that he succumbed to excessive exposure to ethanol fumes while visiting Iowa.  (He’s a big fan of ethanol, too.) Whatever the cause, his Presidential candidacy almost certainly has gone from long shot to no shot.  He’s toast.