Here's your daily update on the catastrophic Newt Gingrich campaign for president! The Take: He's still faring poorly. Armies of cocktail-swilling literati sheep are still emptying their "clips" on him and everything he's said or done in the past week.

But the problem, as Gingrich put it to Iowa voters today, is the media's inability to comprehend the vastness of his existence and his intellectual prowess as a Great Man. Since things like the New Gingrich 2012 campaign only come along once in a century — which is technically true — the scribes have been slow to cap their poison pens and think. This is all new territory for the media. Forgive them as they work to expand their mental capacities to a more Gingrichian level.

No but really, this is what he said:

"My reaction is if you're the candidate of very dramatic change, it you're the candidate of really new ideas, you have to assume there's a certain amount of clutter and confusion and it takes a while to sort it all out, because you are doing something different," Gingrich told reporters after he opened an intense three-day campaign swing in Iowa. [...]

He said reporters covering his campaign must adjust their thinking.

"It's going to take a while for the news media to realize that you're covering something that happens once or twice in a century, a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas," said Gingrich. "I expect it to take a while for it to sink in."

"It happens if you're the candidate of ideas," he added.

His strategy for digging out of the miles-deep hole he's dug himself is right there. He'll keep giving comically over-the-top statements that he knows will only prolong the political media's trashing of him, and eventually some Republican primary voters will side with him as the latest victim of the liberal media's aggressive smear campaign against conservatives. We're all for playing this game as long as he wants to play it, but he shouldn't count on too many Republicans rushing to his defense. He's not exactly a fresh, unknown entity, suddenly bursting onto the scene with an array of capital ideas. He's just shooting firecrackers out of his ass and telling us they'll bend the health care cost curve.

[Image via AP]