AI
Sunday, January 22, 2012 4:31:24 AM
Newt’s Southern Strategy
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: January 20, 2012
Up with Newt. Down with dignity. That’s the way it goes.
Newt Gingrich is surging in South Carolina and has a good chance to win that state’s primary on Saturday. But, as he rises, so grows the dark shadow that he casts over his party and the grievous damage he does to its chances of unseating President Obama.
For Gingrich’s part, he’s a shrewd politician executing a well-honed strategy to exploit an obvious opening.
Aside from Ron Paul’s Libertarian views, which some Republicans find extreme, there is little daylight between the views of the remaining Republican presidential candidates on the major issues. They all want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government and no marriage among gay men and lesbians.
The debate now is about who best carries the mantra into the general election and has the best chance of defeating President Obama. The answer among the establishment remains Mitt Romney. But Romney goes down sour for many rank-and-file Republicans. Some don’t connect with him. Others don’t trust him. Others outright detest him. Poor Mitt.
Furthermore, his last two debate performances have vacillated between lackluster and disastrous — stammering and stuttering, hemming and hawing, looking out of wits.
In steps Gingrich, with more baggage than Prince Akeem in “Coming to America.” But many Republicans are willing to forgive his flaws and his past because he connects with a silent slice of their core convictions — their deep-seated, long-simmering issues with an “elite” media bias, minority “privilege” and Obama’s “otherness.”
Romney dares not go there. Not Newt. He’s the street fighter with a history of poisonous politics who not only goes there but dwells there. He makes his nest among the thorns of open animus and coded language.
Take the issue of media bias for instance: according to a September Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/22/press-widely-criticized-but-trusted-more-than-other-institutions/ ], more than three-quarters of Republicans said that news organizations are politically biased. That was appreciably higher than both independents and Democrats. And that same month a Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Republicans believe that the news media are too liberal. This, too, was appreciably higher than independents and Democrats.
Gingrich is using this distrust as a weapon. At a campaign stop this week, a man in the audience asked, “What I’ve been looking for in my candidate is fire in the belly. We’ve got to bloody Obama’s nose. You mentioned challenging him to seven three-hour debates. He has this armor of media surrounding him. If he doesn’t agree to that, how do you plan to aggressively take the gloves off and go after him?”
Gingrich responded [ http://townhall.com/tipsheet/greghengler/2012/01/17/gingrich_on_obama_i_dont_want_to_bloody_his_nose_i_want_to_knock_him_out ], “I don’t want to bloody his nose. I want to knock him out.”
At Thursday’s debate, Gingrich upped the ante by laying into CNN’s John King, the debate moderator, for opening the debate with a question about an interview his ex-wife had given to ABC News alleging that Gingrich had asked for an “open marriage.” He slammed the news media’s “destructive, vicious, negative nature,” said that he was “appalled” that King had asked the question and said that asking it was “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” (I can think of something closer.)
Gingrich went on to say, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Points scored. The crowd ate it up.
In a previous debate on Monday, Gingrich rebuffed a suggestion by Fox News’s Juan Williams, a debate panelist, that blacks might be offended by his notion that they should demand jobs not food stamps, or that poor children lacked a strong work ethic, or that calling Obama the “food stamp president” might be “intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.”
Gingrich scoffed: “I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.” More points. That crowd went crazy.
On Friday, Gingrich doubled down and told a campaign crowd that “the idea of work” seemed to Williams “to be a strange, distant concept [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_QXncmmufk ].”
This conjures the historical fiction that blacks are lazy and plays to the belief among many Republican voters that race is inconsequential to one’s ability to succeed in this country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, Republican voters, particularly those in the South, were more likely than all voters to say that blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead in today’s society.
As for the president, Gingrich this week at a campaign stop called the president’s decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline “stunningly stupid [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re2RJHCi098 ].” Even more points. The crowd jumped to its feet and pumped fists.
But that’s a mild statement for Gingrich. His hostility, distrust and disrespect of the president has deep roots.
In September 2010, he told the National Review Online [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa ] that President Obama followed a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich continued, “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true.”
Gingrich was commenting on a Forbes article [ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html ( http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem_print.html )] by Dinesh D’Souza, the president of the King’s College [ http://www.tkc.edu/abouttkc/president.html ] in New York City. In the article, D’Souza said of President Obama:
“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
Gingrich called the article the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” Bonus points. Ding, ding, ding, ding.
Gingrich is appealing to (and exposing) an ugly, gut-level anger and animosity among a sizable portion of the Republican electorate. This may work for him in the primaries, but it doesn’t bode well for his party in November.
*
Related News
Disdainful of Strategists, Gingrich Acts as His Own (January 21, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/us/politics/a-test-for-gingrich-as-political-strategist.html
Gingrich Jousts With Rivals on Matters Professional and Personal (January 20, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/us/politics/republican-debate-south-carolina.html
Related in Opinion
Gail Collins: Opening Newt’s Marriage (Jan. 21, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/opinion/collins-opening-newts-marriage.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/opinion/blow-newts-southern-strategy.html [with comments]
===
The power of conservative victimhood
It took Newt about five minutes to dominate the final pre-South Carolina debate by playing the conservative victim
By Steve Kornacki
Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 10:08 PM 01:48:35 CST
If Newt Gingrich does pull off a victory in South Carolina on Saturday, he’ll owe it to the skill with which he has tapped into the right’s persecution complex this past week — and to some helpful debate moderators.
The final pre-South Carolina debate Thursday night ran for two hours and featured several sharp attacks on Gingrich. Mitt Romney, for instance, ridiculed Gingrich’s frequent claims that he worked closely with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, noting that Reagan’s published diary offered just one dismissive mention of the Georgian. Rick Santorum, meanwhile, depicted Gingrich as an erratic and unreliable leader. “Grandiosity,” he declared, “has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich.” (In a response that we’ll probably see a few more times on cable news shows Friday, Gingrich admitted that “I think grandiose thoughts.”)
But it seems doubtful any of this will really matter for much , because Gingrich may very well have won the debate before it was five minutes old.
The question hanging in the air when the candidates took the stage was whether and how the interview that Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, just gave to ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/exclusive-gingrich-lacks-moral-character-president-wife/story?id=15392899 ] would be addressed. The interview had hijacked Thursday’s political conversation, with ABC teasing salacious details — like Marianne Gingrich repeating on-camera for the first time her claim that Newt had asked her for an open marriage after revealing his affair with Callista — throughout the day and promising to run the full version on “Nightline” after the debate. Would moderator John King bring it up? Would one of Gingrich’s rivals? Or an audience member? Or maybe the former speaker himself? Or maybe somehow it wouldn’t come up at all.
The suspense evaporated when King used the first question of the night to ask Gingrich if he’d like to respond to his ex-wife’s words.
“No,” Gingrich replied. “But I will.”
The live audience applauded loudly. It was obvious right away they had his back. Clearly, Gingrich was ready for King’s question, but he did his best to feign shock and outrage.
“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that,” he thundered.
At this there was a standing ovation. “Is that all you want to say, sir?” King asked. It was not. Gingrich went on to say that raising the subject was “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine” and to pronounce himself “frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.” When King protested that the interview had originated at another network and that it had become a major subject on the campaign trail, Gingrich cut him off and roared: “I am tired of the elite media protecting Obama by attacking Republicans.” The crowd was roaring now. It was the strongest reaction they’d have all night.
It’s no mystery why the audience of Republicans so instinctively and passionately rallied to Gingrich’s defense. His final line was the key: That the liberal media is out to get Republicans and will stop at nothing to destroy them is an absolute article of faith on the right. It’s why so many conservative leaders claimed that Herman Cain was the victim [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/sean_hannity_will_make_herman_cain_the_victim_of_a_liberal_smear_no_matter_what/singleton/ ] of a liberal smear when he was confronted with sexual harassment charges in November. Never mind that the conspiracy theory made no sense (why would liberals take down a candidate they’d love to face in the general election?); logic has little to do with this. Likewise, the left would be thrilled to face Gingrich next fall, but that didn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from arguing on Thursday afternoon [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/01/19/drudge_screwed_up_abc_s_plans_for_the_marianne_gingrich_interview (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71084800 )] that the Marianne Gingrich interview was part of a media plot to take out the former speaker.
What Gingrich did brilliantly on Thursday night is to articulate this paranoid victimhood in a clear and compelling (for his audience, at least) way. It’s the same basic trick he pulled in this week’s other debate, when he connected with another strain of the persecution complex: that honest, taxpaying Republicans are the victims of a dependency class of poor people and minorities that Democrats intentionally enable. Thus did Monday’s crowd rejoice when Gingrich insisted to Fox News’ Juan Williams [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/17/juan_williams_stands_in_for_obama_at_fox_debate/singleton/ ] that there was nothing remotely insulting about his statement that the NAACP should be asking for paychecks instead of food stamps, or his suggestion that children in poor neighborhoods don’t understand the value of work.
Gingrich seems within striking distance of a South Carolina victory. A poll from PPP [ http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/01/gingrich-maintains-6-point-lead.html ] released just after Thursday’s debate showed him holding a 6-point lead over Romney for the second straight night. Channeling conservative victimhood on Monday was a smash hit for Newt, and his Thursday night sequel may be remembered the same way.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/20/the_power_of_conservative_victimhood/singleton/ [with comments]
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The past Newt can’t outrun
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, speaks at the Personhood USA forum in Greenville, S.C., Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012.
(AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Credit: AP)
Personal and political ugliness from the 1990s haunts him on the eve of South Carolina
By Steve Kornacki
Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 6:28 AM 01:47:20 CST
The epitaph on Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign tombstone may end up reading, “No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t outrun his past.”
Think back to early December, when months of well-received debate performances (coupled with Herman Cain’s demise) finally turned into real polling traction for the former House speaker. He surged to lopsided leads in national and key early state polls, and with Iowa less than a month away his timing seemed almost perfect. Gingrich grew so cocky that he declared [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/gingrich-tells-abc-news-im-going-to-be-the-nominee/ ], “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”
But the sudden, previously unimaginable possibility that Gingrich might win the Republican nomination spooked a very specific group of elite Republicans: those who remembered what an epic political disaster his four-year run as speaker was for the party. Together they used their influential perches [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/21/the_clinton_era_ghosts_that_haunt_newt/singleton/ ] to undermine his standing with the many Republican voters who don’t really remember the 1990s and who’d come to know Gingrich through his Fox-enabled rehabilitation as an “ideas man” and GOP elder statesman. Any tool they could find to puncture the Gingrich bubble they used, and their efforts (combined with those of a free-spending pro-Mitt Romney super PAC) quickly paid off.
Still, Gingrich managed to finish respectably enough in Iowa and New Hampshire that he now finds himself with the best shot of knocking off Romney in South Carolina — an outcome that would prevent Romney from wrapping up the nomination on the spot, extend the GOP race at least through Florida, and give Gingrich one final chance at making a real run at the nomination. He remains an underdog in South Carolina, but the strong response to his resentment-intense Monday debate performance [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/17/the_way_to_south_carolinas_heart/singleton/ ] from conservative leaders and a semi-endorsement from Sarah Palin [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/can_sarah_palin_stop_the_romney_train/singleton/ ] have made a late Gingrich surge to victory at least plausible.
And so, almost on cue, here come the ghosts from Newt’s past once again.
First up was a Romney campaign conference call on Thursday afternoon featuring two former House members who served during Gingrich’s speakership. Missouri’s Jim Talent and New York’s Susan Molinari both testified to his erratic leadership style, his penchant for inflammatory, divisive and self-contradictory public pronouncements, and the profound electoral damage [ http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2011/12/4478897/what-northeast-republicans-have-fear-candidate-gingrich?page=all ] he did to the GOP while in office.
“Each one of us has personal stories we can tell about going home and having to clean up after our speaker,” Talent said. “It had an impact on the 1996 presidential election, and if he’s the nominee it’ll have an impact on the 2012 election — and the impact’s not going to be good for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.”
The Romney campaign is following that up this morning with another conference call, this one featuring John Sununu, who served as Bush 41's White House chief of staff. Sununu was on the job in the fall of 1990 when Gingrich, after initially signaling to Bush and other GOP leaders that he’d go along with the anti-deficit tax package they’d agreed to with Democrats, launched a surprise rebellion [ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/12/the_first_gop_establishment_war_on_newt/singleton/ ] that divided the House GOP ranks, sank the deal, fomented grass-roots conservative rage with the president, and cemented Gingrich’s status as the activist right’s top national leader. Sununu is known as a man who enjoys payback; in a way, his conference call has been 22 years in the making.
But the most ominous development for Newt came last night, with word that ABC News had obtained an on-camera interview with his second wife, Marianne, the woman he left in the late ’90s for his current, much younger wife, Callista. The interview will apparently air on “Nightline” [ https://twitter.com/#!/DylanByers/status/159824456175456256 ] late Thursday night, after the final pre-South Carolina GOP debate, with excerpts expected to leak out during the day.
Marianne Gingrich did speak publicly once before during this campaign, providing several juicy quotes and anecdotes to Esquire over the summer [ http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910 (two posts back at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69828311 )]. For instance, she said that her ex-husband “believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected” and provided this account of how he broke the news to her of his relationship with Callista:
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ ”
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.
He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.
The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
That interview generated its share of attention when it ran, but at the time Gingrich barely seemed relevant to the GOP race. So even if, as the Gingrich campaign apparently believes is the case [ http://blogs.thedailybeast.com/spin-cycle/2012/1/18/newt-gingrich-braces-for-abc-interview-with-ex-wif ], Marianne Gingrich didn’t say anything new to ABC, the sight and sound of her recalling Newt’s wild mood swings and cruel treatment of her in the ’90s could be the kind of sensational development that nullifies whatever progress he’s made this week. And even if he does somehow pull out a win Saturday, the ghosts won’t just go away. It’s the story of his campaign: Whenever something goes right, the people who know him best are there to spoil the fun.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/the_past_newt_cant_outrun/singleton/ [with comments]
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By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: January 20, 2012
Up with Newt. Down with dignity. That’s the way it goes.
Newt Gingrich is surging in South Carolina and has a good chance to win that state’s primary on Saturday. But, as he rises, so grows the dark shadow that he casts over his party and the grievous damage he does to its chances of unseating President Obama.
For Gingrich’s part, he’s a shrewd politician executing a well-honed strategy to exploit an obvious opening.
Aside from Ron Paul’s Libertarian views, which some Republicans find extreme, there is little daylight between the views of the remaining Republican presidential candidates on the major issues. They all want lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government and no marriage among gay men and lesbians.
The debate now is about who best carries the mantra into the general election and has the best chance of defeating President Obama. The answer among the establishment remains Mitt Romney. But Romney goes down sour for many rank-and-file Republicans. Some don’t connect with him. Others don’t trust him. Others outright detest him. Poor Mitt.
Furthermore, his last two debate performances have vacillated between lackluster and disastrous — stammering and stuttering, hemming and hawing, looking out of wits.
In steps Gingrich, with more baggage than Prince Akeem in “Coming to America.” But many Republicans are willing to forgive his flaws and his past because he connects with a silent slice of their core convictions — their deep-seated, long-simmering issues with an “elite” media bias, minority “privilege” and Obama’s “otherness.”
Romney dares not go there. Not Newt. He’s the street fighter with a history of poisonous politics who not only goes there but dwells there. He makes his nest among the thorns of open animus and coded language.
Take the issue of media bias for instance: according to a September Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/09/22/press-widely-criticized-but-trusted-more-than-other-institutions/ ], more than three-quarters of Republicans said that news organizations are politically biased. That was appreciably higher than both independents and Democrats. And that same month a Gallup poll found that three-quarters of Republicans believe that the news media are too liberal. This, too, was appreciably higher than independents and Democrats.
Gingrich is using this distrust as a weapon. At a campaign stop this week, a man in the audience asked, “What I’ve been looking for in my candidate is fire in the belly. We’ve got to bloody Obama’s nose. You mentioned challenging him to seven three-hour debates. He has this armor of media surrounding him. If he doesn’t agree to that, how do you plan to aggressively take the gloves off and go after him?”
Gingrich responded [ http://townhall.com/tipsheet/greghengler/2012/01/17/gingrich_on_obama_i_dont_want_to_bloody_his_nose_i_want_to_knock_him_out ], “I don’t want to bloody his nose. I want to knock him out.”
At Thursday’s debate, Gingrich upped the ante by laying into CNN’s John King, the debate moderator, for opening the debate with a question about an interview his ex-wife had given to ABC News alleging that Gingrich had asked for an “open marriage.” He slammed the news media’s “destructive, vicious, negative nature,” said that he was “appalled” that King had asked the question and said that asking it was “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.” (I can think of something closer.)
Gingrich went on to say, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Points scored. The crowd ate it up.
In a previous debate on Monday, Gingrich rebuffed a suggestion by Fox News’s Juan Williams, a debate panelist, that blacks might be offended by his notion that they should demand jobs not food stamps, or that poor children lacked a strong work ethic, or that calling Obama the “food stamp president” might be “intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities.”
Gingrich scoffed: “I know among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.” More points. That crowd went crazy.
On Friday, Gingrich doubled down and told a campaign crowd that “the idea of work” seemed to Williams “to be a strange, distant concept [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_QXncmmufk ].”
This conjures the historical fiction that blacks are lazy and plays to the belief among many Republican voters that race is inconsequential to one’s ability to succeed in this country. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this week, Republican voters, particularly those in the South, were more likely than all voters to say that blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead in today’s society.
As for the president, Gingrich this week at a campaign stop called the president’s decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline “stunningly stupid [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re2RJHCi098 ].” Even more points. The crowd jumped to its feet and pumped fists.
But that’s a mild statement for Gingrich. His hostility, distrust and disrespect of the president has deep roots.
In September 2010, he told the National Review Online [ http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246302/gingrich-obama-s-kenyan-anti-colonial-worldview-robert-costa ] that President Obama followed a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. Gingrich continued, “I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true.”
Gingrich was commenting on a Forbes article [ http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem.html ( http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0927/politics-socialism-capitalism-private-enterprises-obama-business-problem_print.html )] by Dinesh D’Souza, the president of the King’s College [ http://www.tkc.edu/abouttkc/president.html ] in New York City. In the article, D’Souza said of President Obama:
“Our president is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
Gingrich called the article the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.” Bonus points. Ding, ding, ding, ding.
Gingrich is appealing to (and exposing) an ugly, gut-level anger and animosity among a sizable portion of the Republican electorate. This may work for him in the primaries, but it doesn’t bode well for his party in November.
*
Related News
Disdainful of Strategists, Gingrich Acts as His Own (January 21, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/us/politics/a-test-for-gingrich-as-political-strategist.html
Gingrich Jousts With Rivals on Matters Professional and Personal (January 20, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/us/politics/republican-debate-south-carolina.html
Related in Opinion
Gail Collins: Opening Newt’s Marriage (Jan. 21, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/opinion/collins-opening-newts-marriage.html
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/21/opinion/blow-newts-southern-strategy.html [with comments]
===
The power of conservative victimhood
It took Newt about five minutes to dominate the final pre-South Carolina debate by playing the conservative victim
By Steve Kornacki
Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 10:08 PM 01:48:35 CST
If Newt Gingrich does pull off a victory in South Carolina on Saturday, he’ll owe it to the skill with which he has tapped into the right’s persecution complex this past week — and to some helpful debate moderators.
The final pre-South Carolina debate Thursday night ran for two hours and featured several sharp attacks on Gingrich. Mitt Romney, for instance, ridiculed Gingrich’s frequent claims that he worked closely with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, noting that Reagan’s published diary offered just one dismissive mention of the Georgian. Rick Santorum, meanwhile, depicted Gingrich as an erratic and unreliable leader. “Grandiosity,” he declared, “has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich.” (In a response that we’ll probably see a few more times on cable news shows Friday, Gingrich admitted that “I think grandiose thoughts.”)
But it seems doubtful any of this will really matter for much , because Gingrich may very well have won the debate before it was five minutes old.
The question hanging in the air when the candidates took the stage was whether and how the interview that Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, just gave to ABC News [ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/exclusive-gingrich-lacks-moral-character-president-wife/story?id=15392899 ] would be addressed. The interview had hijacked Thursday’s political conversation, with ABC teasing salacious details — like Marianne Gingrich repeating on-camera for the first time her claim that Newt had asked her for an open marriage after revealing his affair with Callista — throughout the day and promising to run the full version on “Nightline” after the debate. Would moderator John King bring it up? Would one of Gingrich’s rivals? Or an audience member? Or maybe the former speaker himself? Or maybe somehow it wouldn’t come up at all.
The suspense evaporated when King used the first question of the night to ask Gingrich if he’d like to respond to his ex-wife’s words.
“No,” Gingrich replied. “But I will.”
The live audience applauded loudly. It was obvious right away they had his back. Clearly, Gingrich was ready for King’s question, but he did his best to feign shock and outrage.
“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for office, and I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that,” he thundered.
At this there was a standing ovation. “Is that all you want to say, sir?” King asked. It was not. Gingrich went on to say that raising the subject was “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine” and to pronounce himself “frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate.” When King protested that the interview had originated at another network and that it had become a major subject on the campaign trail, Gingrich cut him off and roared: “I am tired of the elite media protecting Obama by attacking Republicans.” The crowd was roaring now. It was the strongest reaction they’d have all night.
It’s no mystery why the audience of Republicans so instinctively and passionately rallied to Gingrich’s defense. His final line was the key: That the liberal media is out to get Republicans and will stop at nothing to destroy them is an absolute article of faith on the right. It’s why so many conservative leaders claimed that Herman Cain was the victim [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/01/sean_hannity_will_make_herman_cain_the_victim_of_a_liberal_smear_no_matter_what/singleton/ ] of a liberal smear when he was confronted with sexual harassment charges in November. Never mind that the conspiracy theory made no sense (why would liberals take down a candidate they’d love to face in the general election?); logic has little to do with this. Likewise, the left would be thrilled to face Gingrich next fall, but that didn’t stop Rush Limbaugh from arguing on Thursday afternoon [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/01/19/drudge_screwed_up_abc_s_plans_for_the_marianne_gingrich_interview (at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71084800 )] that the Marianne Gingrich interview was part of a media plot to take out the former speaker.
What Gingrich did brilliantly on Thursday night is to articulate this paranoid victimhood in a clear and compelling (for his audience, at least) way. It’s the same basic trick he pulled in this week’s other debate, when he connected with another strain of the persecution complex: that honest, taxpaying Republicans are the victims of a dependency class of poor people and minorities that Democrats intentionally enable. Thus did Monday’s crowd rejoice when Gingrich insisted to Fox News’ Juan Williams [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/17/juan_williams_stands_in_for_obama_at_fox_debate/singleton/ ] that there was nothing remotely insulting about his statement that the NAACP should be asking for paychecks instead of food stamps, or his suggestion that children in poor neighborhoods don’t understand the value of work.
Gingrich seems within striking distance of a South Carolina victory. A poll from PPP [ http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2012/01/gingrich-maintains-6-point-lead.html ] released just after Thursday’s debate showed him holding a 6-point lead over Romney for the second straight night. Channeling conservative victimhood on Monday was a smash hit for Newt, and his Thursday night sequel may be remembered the same way.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/20/the_power_of_conservative_victimhood/singleton/ [with comments]
===
The past Newt can’t outrun
Republican presidential candidate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, speaks at the Personhood USA forum in Greenville, S.C., Wednesday, Jan. 18, 2012.
(AP Photo/Paul Sancya) (Credit: AP)
Personal and political ugliness from the 1990s haunts him on the eve of South Carolina
By Steve Kornacki
Thursday, Jan 19, 2012 6:28 AM 01:47:20 CST
The epitaph on Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign tombstone may end up reading, “No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t outrun his past.”
Think back to early December, when months of well-received debate performances (coupled with Herman Cain’s demise) finally turned into real polling traction for the former House speaker. He surged to lopsided leads in national and key early state polls, and with Iowa less than a month away his timing seemed almost perfect. Gingrich grew so cocky that he declared [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/gingrich-tells-abc-news-im-going-to-be-the-nominee/ ], “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”
But the sudden, previously unimaginable possibility that Gingrich might win the Republican nomination spooked a very specific group of elite Republicans: those who remembered what an epic political disaster his four-year run as speaker was for the party. Together they used their influential perches [ http://www.salon.com/2011/11/21/the_clinton_era_ghosts_that_haunt_newt/singleton/ ] to undermine his standing with the many Republican voters who don’t really remember the 1990s and who’d come to know Gingrich through his Fox-enabled rehabilitation as an “ideas man” and GOP elder statesman. Any tool they could find to puncture the Gingrich bubble they used, and their efforts (combined with those of a free-spending pro-Mitt Romney super PAC) quickly paid off.
Still, Gingrich managed to finish respectably enough in Iowa and New Hampshire that he now finds himself with the best shot of knocking off Romney in South Carolina — an outcome that would prevent Romney from wrapping up the nomination on the spot, extend the GOP race at least through Florida, and give Gingrich one final chance at making a real run at the nomination. He remains an underdog in South Carolina, but the strong response to his resentment-intense Monday debate performance [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/17/the_way_to_south_carolinas_heart/singleton/ ] from conservative leaders and a semi-endorsement from Sarah Palin [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/can_sarah_palin_stop_the_romney_train/singleton/ ] have made a late Gingrich surge to victory at least plausible.
And so, almost on cue, here come the ghosts from Newt’s past once again.
First up was a Romney campaign conference call on Thursday afternoon featuring two former House members who served during Gingrich’s speakership. Missouri’s Jim Talent and New York’s Susan Molinari both testified to his erratic leadership style, his penchant for inflammatory, divisive and self-contradictory public pronouncements, and the profound electoral damage [ http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2011/12/4478897/what-northeast-republicans-have-fear-candidate-gingrich?page=all ] he did to the GOP while in office.
“Each one of us has personal stories we can tell about going home and having to clean up after our speaker,” Talent said. “It had an impact on the 1996 presidential election, and if he’s the nominee it’ll have an impact on the 2012 election — and the impact’s not going to be good for the conservative movement and the Republican Party.”
The Romney campaign is following that up this morning with another conference call, this one featuring John Sununu, who served as Bush 41's White House chief of staff. Sununu was on the job in the fall of 1990 when Gingrich, after initially signaling to Bush and other GOP leaders that he’d go along with the anti-deficit tax package they’d agreed to with Democrats, launched a surprise rebellion [ http://www.salon.com/2011/12/12/the_first_gop_establishment_war_on_newt/singleton/ ] that divided the House GOP ranks, sank the deal, fomented grass-roots conservative rage with the president, and cemented Gingrich’s status as the activist right’s top national leader. Sununu is known as a man who enjoys payback; in a way, his conference call has been 22 years in the making.
But the most ominous development for Newt came last night, with word that ABC News had obtained an on-camera interview with his second wife, Marianne, the woman he left in the late ’90s for his current, much younger wife, Callista. The interview will apparently air on “Nightline” [ https://twitter.com/#!/DylanByers/status/159824456175456256 ] late Thursday night, after the final pre-South Carolina GOP debate, with excerpts expected to leak out during the day.
Marianne Gingrich did speak publicly once before during this campaign, providing several juicy quotes and anecdotes to Esquire over the summer [ http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910 (two posts back at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69828311 )]. For instance, she said that her ex-husband “believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected” and provided this account of how he broke the news to her of his relationship with Callista:
She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ ”
He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.
He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.
The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, “How do you give that speech and do what you’re doing?”
“It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
That interview generated its share of attention when it ran, but at the time Gingrich barely seemed relevant to the GOP race. So even if, as the Gingrich campaign apparently believes is the case [ http://blogs.thedailybeast.com/spin-cycle/2012/1/18/newt-gingrich-braces-for-abc-interview-with-ex-wif ], Marianne Gingrich didn’t say anything new to ABC, the sight and sound of her recalling Newt’s wild mood swings and cruel treatment of her in the ’90s could be the kind of sensational development that nullifies whatever progress he’s made this week. And even if he does somehow pull out a win Saturday, the ghosts won’t just go away. It’s the story of his campaign: Whenever something goes right, the people who know him best are there to spoil the fun.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/19/the_past_newt_cant_outrun/singleton/ [with comments]
===
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"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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