Read the speech here, it’s peppered with Newt calling Reagan a failure. Specific excerpts:

“My second special order will outline a proposed transnational strategy for freedom and the institutional and doctrinal changes it will require. The central difficulties in proposition two are essentially intellectual, managerial, and political. That is, once we accept the reality in proposition 1 of the Soviet empire, the Communist Cuban colonial army, and a transnational strategy for tyranny, our problems in dealing with that, in responding to it are essentially problems of intellect, problems of management, and problems of policies. Proposition 3, measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic fundamental change in strategy will continue to fail.

President Reagan knows all this. He ranks with Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon in trying to focus attention on the Soviet empire and in trying to protect freedom. Yet President Reagan is clearly failing.

Sincere, decent, committed anti-Communist Members of the House and Senate who question $100 million in aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters and ask in vain for a strategy are fundamentally right. The Reagan administration has a huge gap between its President’s correct visionary warnings of the transnational Soviet empire and the rest of the executive branch’s incorrect, ineffective fumblings and inadequacies. The burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan; he is the President.

Second, the burden must be on his White House staff, which has systematically failed again and again for 5 years now to understand that the real problems of developing a transnational strategy for freedom of confronting the Soviet empire and the Cuban colonial army are problems much more fundamental than a Reagan speech, much more difficult than a Pat Buchanan editorial, much more difficult than once again using the CIA to ineffectively manage to do the best it can when the best it can is simply not good enough. I say this not as in any way a comment on any personality but on an institutional crisis of the first order about American Government and the American Government’s inability as an institution to meet the challenge of the Soviet empire.

I’ve bolded it for even the most blind among his supporters. Elliott Abrams was right what the wrote about Newt and didn’t distort the record a bit.