By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 18, 2011
Is The Republican Coalition Against Gingrich Insurmountable?
In his most recent appearance on Hugh Hewitt’s talk radio show, New Yorker staff writer Ryan Lizza talked about the Republican establishment’s disdain for Newt Gingrich — and Hewitt pointed out that the coalition against the former House Speaker’s candidacy goes well beyond them.
Here’s the transcript:
LIZZA: one thing about Gingrich that has just sort of shocked me, and maybe I should have realized this, but the level of hostility towards this guy from frankly the Washington Republican establishment, is off the charts. I’ve been, I don’t get out much. I have two small kids. But I’ve been going to a few holiday parties here in D.C., and all the conversations, of course, are about Gingrich. And I mean, there are Republicans in this town who are saying that they would vote for Obama before they would vote for Newt Gingrich in a general election.
HEWITT: Yeah.
LIZZA: And so this may be something you can help me understand. There’s a major mismatch here between, for lack of better words, the Republican establishment and the people who are telling pollsters that they like Newt better than Romney.
HEWITT: What’s interesting, Ryan, I think there are two camps. They’re, you know, Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn, neither of whom fit the term Washington insider…
LIZZA: Right, right.
HEWITT: Both has lacerated Newt Gingrich on ideas. Then, there is that great silence from everyone who served with him in Congress. I guess John Boehner broke that silence with Mike Allen today. I haven’t read it, yet. I was told by Chris Cillizza that Boehner damned with faint praise today. So there is a Beltway hostility, but there is a public intellectual hostility that I think goes to his ideas, which are not, in the final analysis, conservative.
LIZZA: And a lot of conservative intellectuals don’t respect him, and think he’s been all over the place, and he latches onto whatever the hot, new thing is, and then drops it two seconds later, and doesn’t have an attention span.
It is difficult to imagine Gingrich winning the GOP nomination with a coalition this diverse arrayed against him. And even less so when he’s widely thought to be the weaker general election candidate.
As Lizza put it later in the same conversation:
You can’t find a Democrat in Washington who thinks that Newt Gingrich would be a better candidate, would be more likely to beat Obama than Romney. I mean, it’s just, I’ve searched for these people. I’ve searched for the counter argument here, the sort of person who’s thinking outside the box and says oh, wait a second, actually Gingrich would be tougher to beat.
You can’t find that person.
Also hard to find: prominent champions of the proposition that Gingrich should be president. Absent that, I don’t think he can win.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, December 19, 2011
Newt Gingrich And The Revenge Of The Base
It is one of the true delights of a bizarrely entertaining Republican presidential contest to watch the apoplectic fear and loathing of so many GOP establishmentarians toward Newt Gingrich. They treat him as an alien body whose approach to politics they have always rejected.
In fact, Gingrich’s rise is the revenge of a Republican base that takes seriously the intense hostility to President Obama, the incendiary accusations against liberals and the Manichaean division of the world between an “us” and a “them” that his party has been peddling in the interest of electoral success.
The right-wing faithful knows Gingrich pioneered this style of politics, and they laugh at efforts to cast the former House speaker as something other than a “true conservative.” They know better.
The establishment was happy to use Gingrich’s tactics to win elections, but it never expected to lose control of the party to the voters it rallied with such grandiose negativity. Now, the joke is on those who manipulated the base. The base is striking back, and Newt is their weapon.
It’s not as if the criticisms being leveled at Gingrich are wrong. On the contrary, there is a flamboyant self-importance and an eerie sense of mission about him. “I am a transformational figure,” he has said. He explains the hatred of his enemies as growing from their realization that “I’m so systematically purposeful about changing our world.” He has also declared: “I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.”
But wait a minute: Gingrich offered the first set of thoughts in 1994 and spoke of shifting the planet way back in 1985. Newt, in other words, has been Newt for a long time. Yet many of the same conservatives who now find him so distasteful were cheering him on for the very same qualities when he was their vehicle for seizing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Liberals who criticized these traits in Gingrich back then were tut-tutted for not “getting it,” for failing to understand the man’s genius. It’s only now, when Gingrich threatens the GOP’s chances of defeating Obama, that party elders have decided that what they once saw as visionary self-confidence is, in fact, debilitating hubris.
Gingrich is said to be too tough on his opponents, too quick to issue outlandish charges. He’s actually been quite candid about his take-no-prisoner approach to politics.
“One of the great problems we have had in the Republican Party is that we . . . encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. … You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. … Don’t try to educate. That is not your job. What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority.”
That would be Gingrich in 1978, reported by John M. Barry in his excellent “The Ambition and the Power,” a book about the fall of former House speaker Jim Wright and Gingrich’s role in bringing him down. Again, Gingrich is a thoroughly consistent figure. The guy you see now is the same guy who always preached a scorched-earth approach to politics.
And in truth, the party took his approach to heart. If discrediting John Kerry’s service in Southeast Asia through false attacks in 2004 was what it took to reelect a president who had avoided going to Vietnam, what the heck. Those who believe in Boy Scout virtues don’t belong in politics, right?
Perhaps the establishment will yet manage to block Gingrich. There are certainly enough contradictions in his record, and he carries more baggage than an overburdened hotel porter. When National Review, that keeper of conservative ideological standards, recently criticized Gingrich for “his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas,” its editors were reciting from a catechism that his critics wrote long ago. Meet the new Newt, same as the old Newt.
This quality endows Gingrich with a peculiar integrity, which I realize is a problematic word to apply to such a problematic figure. I use it in a very specific sense: He is who he is and always has been. The base knows this and loves him for it. But for Republican leaders, Gingrich has become inconvenient. He’s the loudmouthed uninvited guest who is trying to rejoin the country club. The effort to blackball Newt Gingrich will be the next drama in this fascinating train wreck of a campaign.
“The Plus-Size One”: Self-Adoration Reaches Newt Heights
Marveling over a presidential candidate’s arrogance is like noting that a hockey player wears skates. It states not just the obvious but the necessary. You can’t zip across the ice in Crocs, and you can’t thrash your way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if your confidence doesn’t bleed into something gaudier. Arrogance is the grist, and arrogance is the given.
But what flavor? And what measure?
That’s where candidates — and the presidents that some of them become — differ, in ways that shape the sorts of messes they’re likely to make. And that’s where Newt Gingrich provokes real concern. You have to take another politician’s ego, double it, and add cheese and a side of fries to get to Gingrich. An especially heaping, unhealthy diet of self-regard slogs through his veins.
His 1990s nemesis Bill Clinton had (and surely still has) no small amount of his own vanity, and it lay largely in his conviction that his charm and cunning enabled him to wriggle out of jams and get away with indulgences that would doom a lesser mortal. He fancied himself an escape artist extraordinaire.
That partly explains the risk he took with Monica Lewinsky, along with his verbal gymnastics upon the discovery of the affair. The scandal’s diminution of his presidency was the price he and we paid for his particular arrogance.
George W. Bush was in love with his own gut instinct, which he valued far above actual erudition. By heeding it, he believed, he could exceed the expectations and even surpass the accomplishments of less visceral leaders, namely his father. It’s not hard to draw a direct line from that brand of arrogance to the Iraq war, which came to an official end last week, after nearly nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and too many lives lost.
Barack Obama’s arrogance resides in his eloquence — as a writer, thinker, symbol and story. He’s in thrall to the lyric poem of himself, and that accounts for his aloofness and disinclination to engage as deeply as some of his predecessors did in the muck of legislative politics.
Yes, we live in a grotesquely partisan moment, the main reason for gridlock, brinkmanship and super-committee ignominy on Capitol Hill. But would Clinton have stood at so far a remove from that committee? Isn’t it possible that a glad-hander more aggressive and warmer than Obama would be making a smidgen of headway?
Gingrich isn’t the answer: he’s hot-headed and truculent. And while Obama sees himself (with justification) as historic, Gingrich sees himself as epic. If Obama is The One, Gingrich is The Plus-Size One.
Lately he has been on less bloated behavior, and by lately I mean the few weeks since he emerged as the Republican frontrunner du jour. If you watched the debate Thursday, you could sense, from the clench of his jaw, that he wasn’t merely biting his tongue but making an unhappy meal of it.
Still, Gingrich the Grandiloquent sneaked through. Asked about his stated resolve to rein in federal courts, he said that “just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and F.D.R., I would be prepared to take on the judiciary.” The company he keeps!
Over the years he has directly or indirectly compared himself to Moses, William Wallace (a k a “Braveheart,” thanks to Mel Gibson), the Duke of Wellington, Charles de Gaulle and, repeatedly, Ronald Reagan, as when he recently said, “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.”
All the way back in 1985, when he was just a foot soldier in the House, he told The Washington Post, “I want to shift the entire planet,” adding, “This is just the beginning of a 20- or 30-year movement. I’ll get credit for it.”
As Maureen Dowd recalled in The Times last year, he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1994, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” In a Vanity Fair profile in 1995, he referred to himself as “a mythical person” and was quoted saying, “I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’ as in ‘Robert the Bruce.’ ” His biological father’s surname was McPherson, and Robert the Bruce was a Scottish warrior of William Wallace’s era and ilk.
Gingrich also considered himself a “definer of civilization” and “teacher of the rules of civilization,” phrases he scribbled in House office notes that came to light in 1997.
He thinks a lot about himself and thinks of himself a lot. In 2007, talking about climate change, which he still believed in then, he singled out polar bears for concern, explaining that his name, Newt, “comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named Knut.’ ”
One of the great spectator sports of this political season has been watching one observer after another strive to trace the full contours of his ego, an arm’s race of arrogance assessments. “Modern-day Narcissus,” wrote Kirsten Powers in The Daily Beast. “Intellectual hubris distilled,” contributed George F. Will in The Washington Post. “A lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg,” said Mark Steyn in The National Review, and while that’s not precisely about arrogance, it’s too funny to pass up.
A grandiose man, Gingrich speaks in grandiose ways, always characterizing situations too broadly and with too much needless heat, then losing chunks of valuable time, along with precious credibility, to the inevitable damage control.
He didn’t simply register disagreement with Paul Ryan’s entitlement reform proposals. He called them radical “right-wing social engineering.” He didn’t simply raise questions about child labor laws. He called them “truly stupid.” He didn’t simply contest the Palestinians’ claim to disputed land. He called the Palestinians an “invented” people.
That’s an intellectually intriguing, attention-commanding expression: Gingrich no doubt loved the nasty music of it tumbling from his lips. But it’s also gratuitously inflammatory. Mitt the Romney was right to call it that and call him out for it.
Romney has utter, exaggerated faith in his managerial know-how, his technocratic mettle. That’s the flavor of his arrogance.
Gingrich’s is sourer — and scarier. People who have worked with him say that he can’t do justice to any one initiative because he can’t hold any one thought. There are too many others rushing along, and he must pay each proper reverence, because no matter how eccentric it is, it’s his.
That self-adoration made him an infuriating House speaker. It would make him a dangerous president.
By: Frank Bruni, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 17, 2011
Mitt Romney’s Healthcare Competence Called Into Question
The conventional wisdom keeps telling me that Mitt Romney, for all his many faults (chronic dishonesty, incessant flip-flopping, cowardice, etc.), is at least a smart guy who cares about policy. Romney may lack integrity, we’re told, but at least he’s a vaguely technocratic wonk.
Except, I’m not at all convinced this guy is any smarter than his hapless Republican rivals. Romney speaks in complete sentences, which makes him look like a genius compared to Rick Perry, but consider some of the things the former governor says about his understanding of public policy. Here’s a gem from Iowa earlier today:
“Medicaid. You wonder what Medicaid is; those who aren’t into all this government stuff. You know, I have to admit, I didn’t know the differences between all these things until I got into government. Then I got into it and I understood that Medicaid is the health care program for the poor, by and large.”
I see. So, Mitt Romney, despite two degrees from Harvard, learned what Medicaid is when he became governor in 2002. He was 55 years old at the time.
Before he “got into government” and discovered what Medicaid is, Romney helped run a health company, which relied heavily on funding from — you guessed it — Medicare and Medicaid. What’s more, in his book, Romney boasts about having been a health care consultant, where he developed an expertise in how to deal with entitlements.
But he didn’t know what Medicaid was until he got into government?
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “Romney didn’t mean what he said this morning,” you’re going to tell me. “He was only saying he didn’t understand Medicaid so that he could pretend to relate to the people in the audience. This wasn’t ignorance; it was pandering.”
Perhaps. I can’t say with certainty what Romney is ignorant of, and what he only pretends to be ignorant of.
But if this is the accurate explanation, let’s appreciate a disconcerting fact: Romney is so desperate to appear folksy, he’s willing to lie about his lack of awareness to get people to relate to him. And that’s just sad.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 16, 2011
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