Newt: As soon as the campaign turns to substance, Hillary's toast

It seems beyond dispute that Newt's basic premise here is correct. Yes, a campaign focused on policy substance would sink Hillary so fast and so far she might be looking up at Michael Dukakis, if not Walter Mondale. There's more substance to a morning mist than there is to Hillary Clinton.

Trying to embed the video is proving to be a nightmare, but you can see it here. Newt's quote is as follows:

First lady, Senator, Secretary Clinton is very famous for being famous and as long as she can continue to be famous, she will be famous. Now, you're in the middle of a mess in Russia, her reset, which by the way was mistranslated and actually said in Russian overcharge and had apparently been taken from a jacuzzi or a swimming pool from a Geneva hotel. The reset -- the point is this, I know, you start laughing, the fact is as Secretary of State, she reset our relationship with Russia so well that you currently have the occupation of Crimea and the potential occupation of Ukraine. So, Secretary Clinton on substance, the morning this race becomes about substance, she will start losing support literally overnight.

Absoultely true, in theory, but here's the problem: Since it's pretty much understood by everyone that the argument for Hillary is based on a) anatomy; b) who her husband is; c) entitlement; d) presumed inevitability; and e) money - specifically her ability to prevent anyone else from raising any; then surely no one understands better than her campaign that a race focused on policy substance means instant death. That is why they will do anything they need to to prevent that from happening, and there's a lot they can do.

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Obama's 2012 campaign was pretty good at this. We spent the latter days of the campaign talking about Big Bird and binders full of women instead of unemployment, ObamaCare and four dead Americans in Benghazi. Axelrod and company were determined to make these things the focus and the media were only too happy to comply. Hillary's campaign will surely do everything in its power to achieve the same. If the focus isn't on some supposedly sexist thing the Republican nominee (or veep nominee) says, it will be on some slip of the tongue or campaign strategy or ad or campaign finance matter or convention speech . . . they will find something. Why does Newt talk about the campaigns inevitable turn toward substance as if it's inevitable at all? The whole challenge for any Republican nominee is to make that happen, and every force in the political world fights against it. If he knows a way to make it happen, I hope he's in contact with whoever is running the GOP nominee's campaign. But I don't know . . . it seems to me that one of Newt's weaknesses as a politician is that he always thinks at a very high level from a policy perspective and he simply assumes that if he expresses those ideas brilliantly enough, he'll break through all the nonsense that otherwise dominates the campaign. The nonsense is Hillary's lifeblood, and she won't see it banished without a fight.