Newt Blingrich (lynnrockets.wordpress.com)
It's an old saying that the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair—though to be fair and completely honest, in my case it's more like the seat of the pants to the surface of the couch. Chairs, after all, are for serious pundits and journalists, while we bloggers are supposed to feel an almost-mystical gravitational attraction to couches, maternal basements, and the floor of the convention hall that happens to be holding Netroots Nation this year. And don't even get me started on pants. (Sorry, Right Online: it's our floor this time. You can't have it.)
But when one applies the seat of said pants (or whatever) to one's chosen seating, reclining or sleeping surface, a myriad of questions can follow. What should I write about? Should I be sarcastic or serious? Should I keep it simple or explore all the minutia? And how do these choices apply when one's chosen topic is a prediction that Newt Gingrich—the disgraced former speaker of the House with a respect for Tiffany's and none for the sanctity of his own marriages—will win the Republican nomination and earn the right to face President Obama in November? It's a difficult question, and can leave any essay based thereupon looking like the literary equivalent of shaving your face on only one side.
Newt Gingrich, after all, was left for dead a long time ago. In May, Charles Krauthammer declared him "done" after he took several hits in the span of a few days:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who entered the 2012 presidential race just last Wednesday, is having an epically bad week. And it's only Tuesday.
On Sunday, Gingrich angered conservatives by criticizing Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan and semi-supporting an individual mandate for health care. Now he is being stung by a report that he carried up to $500,000 in debt to the Tiffany jewelry company - and may still be carrying it.
Gingrich's response will live on forever in political lore. And in case you have been living under a rock and/or you are not a fan of John Lithgow, here it is in all its glory:
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
His top donors had a different response: abandon the campaign. His staff quit en masse to sign up with the nascent campaign of then-frontrunner du jour, Gov. Rick Perry. But Gingrich stayed, supposedly an afterthought who would disappear into oblivion while Gov. Mitt Romney and other "serious candidates" battled it out for supremacy in Iowa, New Hampshire, and the rest of the Republican primary calendar.
Things are a little different now. The Spirit of Not Mitt Romney possessed several candidates who surged to popularity and frontrunner status among Republicans looking for an alternative. Michele Bachmann was first, but couldn't keep her eyes on the prize. Perry was next, but he forgot exactly what it was he was campaigning for. Herman Cain was next, but nein, nein, nein—it was not to be. Eventually, it was theorized, the Republican base would stop dating and accept Romney's ring, but current polling paints a completely different picture.
As the latest Not Romney fades away, Gingrich has now claimed a solid lead in Iowa, despite having had no staff there. He received the endorsement of the Union-Leader in New Hampshire, and is within striking distance in current polling, with room to grow as Cain has collapsed. And he is currently dominating in Florida polling. But unlike the other "Not Romneys" who have come and gone in this cycle's Republican primary field, there's no real reason to suppose that Gingrich will be self-destructing any time soon, for several different reasons:
- He's the last remotely conceivable and serious Not Romney remaining. Besides Rick Santorum, of course. (You can stop laughing now.)
- Gingrich has been around for so long that his personal foibles are part of his known political persona, and those who are voting for Gingrich are voting for him while fully aware of his flaws.
- The worst negative attack that Romney has against him is that he's a flip-flopper without a true commitment to conservative principles, seeing as how he has been ambiguous on climate change and the individual health insurance mandate. Yes, that's perfect attack ad territory for the formerly ardently pro-choice and pro-mandate governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
- There is absolutely no reason to believe that Romney's ceiling will all of a sudden lift for absolutely no reason when it has not risen during the entire rest of the campaign.
- The primary calendar favors Gingrich significantly, as he appears poised for large wins in three of the first four states.
Romney, by contrast, is finally realizing that in order to win this primary, he will actively have to win them, as opposed to hide from the media and assume that the seemingly rare combination of name recognition and a rare respect for sanity would win the day for him while the second-tier clown parade that surrounded him on the primary debate stages would fade into oblivion. And Romney's media efforts have been successful—provided, of course, that by "successful" you mean "having Jonah Goldberg of the National Review call you an East German perfectly designed android politician."
Gingrich is rising. Romney is flailing when confronted about what will become the defining issue of his campaign. In short, the tables are turning. But ultimately, this primary race will be about what the seething-through-their-teeth Republican base wants. In an op-ed piece in The Daily Caller published during Gingrich's May collapse, Republican strategist Alex Castellanos called for him to step aside and let the future take over:
Longtime Republican ad-maker and political consultant Alex Castellanos also called on the GOP to discard Gingrich in order to "release the past and inherit the future," in an op-ed published by The Daily Caller, a conservative news site.
"The opponent Obama needs to run against, the only one he can beat, is the old, uncaring Republican," Castellanos wrote. "It is not a caricature he needs to create. It lives, it walks, it breathes. It’s the Gingrich."
What Alex Castellanos didn't take into account, however, is the nature of the 2012 Republican primary voter: the very caricature of the old, uncaring Republican. John Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, accurately summarized today's Republican electorate:
What have been the big applause lines in these debates? Well, a statement that the governor of Texas is responsible for killing 234 people on death row. Or that we favor torture. Or that we’re creating a fence on the Mexican border that electrocutes people when they try to cross it. Or when people show up at the emergency room at hospitals and they’re not insured don’t treat them. And that, I mean these are the big applause lines, people just hoop and holler when they hear all that.
Danforth is right, and Castellanos has a problem. In order to win, the Republican Party will need to move beyond the old, uncaring, "let them die" caricature. Unfortunately for them, a political party can't exactly move past its largest constituency. And after migrating from one crazy second-tier extremist to another in the hopes of a permanent landing perch, the Republican base has finally settled upon the ultimate old, uncaring Republican: Newt Gingrich. After all, he may think that we need to return to the days of child factory labor, but he'll put on a strong debate performance in the process.