Newt Gingrich has no idea how other people see him:

This is a campaign about the future of America and the future of the Republican party. Do you want an insider who’s part of the city which has been accepting huge amounts of taxpayer money to prop up giant institutions [bold mine-DL] or do you want somebody who’s prepared to challenge our system head on and insist on very dramatic change in Washington? I think that’s worth a serious debate and I think that debate will go all the way to the convention.

He must think that he is the outside challenger of the system. I can’t imagine why he would choose to frame the contest this way, since the opposition Gingrich sets up here obviously works to the benefit of every candidate not named Newt Gingrich. To everyone not already on the Gingrich bandwagon (and perhaps even to more than a few of them), Gingrich is undeniably a Washington insider. He has been one for most of his adult life. He started serving in Congress thirty-three years ago, and he stayed in the D.C. area in the twelve years since he left Congress. There could hardly be more of an “insider” figure in this race than Gingrich. The only thing more pathetic than Gingrich’s pretense that he isn’t is the apparent willingness of tens and hundreds of thousands of Republicans across the country to buy into his rhetoric.