Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner report explores questionable campaigning from two potential Republican presidential nominees:

[A]lready two of the best-known candidates seem bent on ruling themselves out of contention.

One is Newt Gingrich. He’s being denounced for his comments on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Charles Krauthammer on Fox News.

Ryan’s Medicare plan was part of the budget resolution that all Republicans but four voted for in the House. It is for all practical purposes the platform of the Republican Party. And Gingrich seemed to trash it. …

… If Gingrich has put himself out of line with Republican policy more or less purposefully, Mitt Romney had no way of knowing that he would be aligned with President Obama when he formulated his Massachusetts health care plan back in 2006.

Congressional Republicans have almost unanimously supported repeal of the Obamacare bill jammed through Congress in March 2010 with a mandate, modeled on the one in Massachusetts, requiring everyone to buy health insurance. Twenty-seven state attorneys general or governors, almost all Republicans, are bringing lawsuits arguing that the Obamacare mandate violates the Constitution.

Romney delivered a health care speech last week in Michigan defending his Massachusetts plan and insisting that a state mandate is a different kind of duck from a federal mandate. But the response of the large mass of Republicans seems something like the old New Yorker cartoon in which the little girl confronted with a green vegetable says, “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.”