Maddow: Newt's best weapon against Romney is... Romney

According to Rachel Maddow, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry are both under tremendous pressure from the "Republican establishment" not to attack Mitt Romney on his "vulture capitalist" business background at the investment group Bain Capital.

If Gingrich and Perry "cave like spineless twerps," she asks, and agree to those terms, what, then, will be their strategy? A leaked web ad from the Gingrich campaign may hold the answer.

It is a common practice, Maddow says, for campaigns to leak TV ads on to the web as a way of gaging public reaction to a campaign tactic without having to put forth the tremendous amounts of money necessary to buy ad time. If this is what the Gingrich campaign is doing, then the non-Bain attack strategy will be to use the most powerful weapon of all against Mitt Romney, his own awkwardness and insincerity.

The ad is a gaffe reel, essentially. It begins with the former Massachusetts governor's declaration that he loves to fire people, then takes a greatest hits tour including the $10,000 bet he attempted to make on stage with Rick Perry, his fumbling answer to charges of hiring illegal immigrant labor, and more, including his unnervingly cold-hearted justification for the notorious "Let's tie the dog to the roof of the car" story.

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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