Gingrich has been a jerk for years. (Chris Keane/Reuters)
Reason number something-or-other why the Vietnam-war-era multiple-deferment-getting chickenhawk
Newt Gingrich is a pompous ass:
Ultimately, though, it wasn't an issue of eligibility—Gingrich could have tried to enlist, draft or no—but of will. "Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over," Gingrich told Jane Mayer in 1985. "Part of the question I had to ask myself was what difference I would have made," adding that "there was a bigger battle in Congress than Vietnam." As Gingrich put it, "no one felt this was the battle-line on which freedom would live or die."
This seems a common refrain among conservative political figures of a certain age. The premise is that they are better than the average person; more gifted, more connected, more "elite" in some way, and so while they of course could go shoot at people from a muddy ditch in some miserable, bloody war, they knew that it would be far better for society if they instead were elected to office and could use their enormous, gigantic intellects to help the rest of us peons out of our mess. Fighting is for little people who would otherwise just go off and become doctors or mechanics or concert violinists or something; Newt has the gift of knowing how to preserve our freedomz, which is a far more important position and duty than all the rest of them.
So you go die, and let your conservative intellectual superiors get on with the governing part.
This sense of personal exceptionalism is nothing new, of course, but the current crop of candidates has it in spades. Newt is smarter than anyone else, by his own estimation; Rick Santorum is more moral than anyone else, and isn't afraid to let you know it; Ron Paul has magical economic powers that allow him to see visions of a dystopian future that the rest of us cannot; Mitt Romney is just plain richer than anyone else, and always has been, and on a daily basis makes it clear that he has no earthly concept of how the little people might go about their daily lives.
Getting preached at by any of them gets very tedious, very fast. I suppose we can take a little comfort in reminding ourselves that Gingrich, in particular, has been an asshole for his entire adult life—so there's no hint of flip-flopping from him: He's always known he was better than you. That's the whole chickenhawk argument in a nutshell.