More Damaged Than All Other Candidates Combined, Newt Is A Risky Bet
Despite frenzied prognostications from the political commentariat about Newt Gingrich’s inadequate war chest, lack of an actual campaign operation in the early voting states, potential absence from key ballots and even burdensome debt, they matter little as long as the former House Speaker continues to snooker GOP voters into thinking he can beat President Obama.
New polls showing Gingrich at the top of the field in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida explain why his sudden vault to front-runner status is genuine and durable; how (at least for now) Gingrich has surmounted the insurmountable and convinced voters who know him well that he is viable in a general election.
In focus groups Democratic pollster Peter Hart conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center last week, respondents characterized Gingrich as “grandfatherly.” In some polls voters have called him “authentic,” and a new New York Times/CBS News poll found that Iowa voters think Gingrich has the best chance of defeating President Obama, is most empathetic, the strongest commander in chief and best prepared for the job of president. Evangelical Christians, who don’t trust Mormons like Mitt Romney, are throwing their support by 3-to-1 behind the twice-divorced Gingrich, also an admitted adulterer.
Although Gingrich would conclude that his new popularity is a testament to his brilliance or at least to his powers of persuasion, it actually reflects an unrelenting resistance to Romney that has caused GOP voters to swerve chaotically from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to Herman Cain. Gingrich was always a choice, but never a palatable one until the circus had finally folded tents and left town. Unlike the favorites before him, in Gingrich voters have someone steeped in critical policy matters, deeply interested in the problems the nation faces and effective at debating. But as a general-election candidate he is far more damaged than all of the other candidates combined.
Most who know him expect Gingrich to soon perform a campaign-ending act of self-destruction, with his trademark recklessness. No one will be surprised by new reports in The Washington Post that Gingrich has spent $3 for every $2 he raised in his campaign and that he paid himself back $42,000 for a mailing list his business gave the campaign, before paying back other vendors.
He sure doesn’t plan to stop running his mouth — just capturing the lead in polling last week led him to boast he would be the nominee, take credit for defeating communism in Congress and then suggest that poor people don’t work and are raising their children to be criminals. Indeed, Gingrich is just getting warmed up, and feels free to say almost anything at this point. After all, he practically embraced amnesty for illegal immigrants and didn’t see even a slight dent in his support. The voters have decided to overlook his personal failings, policy flip-flops, questionable ethics and even his attempts to explain that making more than $100 million representing interests like Freddie Mac in Washington wasn’t lobbying because he never needed the money because he makes $60,000 every time he gives a speech.
Unless they change their minds, Tea-infused Republican voters are opting for everything they have criticized: Gingrich is a controversial insider their party already turned away once because of his failed leadership and who has enriched himself with his access ever since. He isn’t a pure conservative, he isn’t fresh and he has no credibility as someone prepared to cut off the stranglehold of special interests.
Republican primary voters might be comfortable gambling on Gingrich, but it’s not a gamble independent voters are likely to feel comfortable with next year.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, December 7, 2011
“We” Mitt and “Fundamentally” Newt: Romney And Gingrich’s Words Reveal Their True Selves
Politicians reveal themselves by the language they use. Not simply the intricacies of their policy positions or even the quality of their intellects, but something closer to the human core. Today’s lesson in the laws of political grammar involves the indiscriminate employment of adverbs (Newt Gingrich) and the smarmy use of the first-person plural (Mitt Romney).
“In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing,” George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language.” The same is true of political rhetoric.
Indeed, as Orwell noted, “when one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases . . . one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy. . . . The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.”
Has Orwell been watching the Republican debates?
But, to switch from Orwell to Tolstoy, all bad political rhetoric is bad in its own, telling way.
Let’s take Romney and the first-person plural first, shall we?
The most telling part of Romney’s disastrous interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier involved his bristling response to Baier’s entirely predictable — and entirely fair — questions about the former Massachusetts governor’s shifting policy positions.
“One,” Romney began, in the bulleted manner of a man who loves his PowerPoint — although he never actually made it to two. “We’re going to have to be better informed about my views on issues,” he continued, his face fixed in a tight smile.
We’re going to have to be better informed?
There is, in politics, an appropriate, energizing, even uplifting use of the first-person plural. This is the “we” as in “we Americans,” pulling together, part of a greater whole. That is not Romney’s “we.” Romney’s is not even the royal we, as in “we are not amused,” which would be bad enough.
It is the patronizing, faux “we” of the middle school principal who has just found the boys scribbling graffiti on the wall and wants to know what we are going to do about it — before he calls our parents.
At that moment of the Baier interview, you — is that we? — could see the father, church leader, investment banker, politician unaccustomed to being challenged and none too pleased with it. Indeed, according to Baier, after Romney returned to his holding room, he came back to tell Baier that the questioning was “uncalled for.”
Sorry, Principal Romney. Bret will write on the chalkboard, 100 times, “I will not ask difficult questions.”
If Romney’s “we” illuminates his attitude of unchallengeable authority, Gingrich’s profligacy with adverbs exposes his grandiosity.
The former speaker is the “Truly, Madly, Deeply” of political candidates, except his movie would be titled, “Fundamentally, Profoundly, Deeply.” Dan Amira of New York magazine conducted a heroic Nexis search of Gingrich transcripts back to 2007 and found 418 separate uses of “fundamentally” or its adjective cousin “fundamental,” including 18 in a single 2008 speech to the American Enterprise Institute.
“Most adverbs are unnecessary,” William Zinsser advised in “On Writing Well,” but adverbs are essential to the grand Gingrichian enterprise.
“We need somebody with very substantial big ideas,” Gingrich told Fox News’s Sean Hannity the other day, and you know who that somebody is.
He wants to “fundamentally rethink the federal government,” “fundamentally change unemployment compensation,” “fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America.”
Conversely, in Gingrich’s view, his opponents are equally, fundamentally wrong. President Obama “is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works,” Gingrich said in September 2010, in the course of suggesting that only a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview could explain the president’s behavior.
If the president “gets reelected with this economy, this deficit, these problems,” Gingrich warned Saturday at a candidate forum, “he’s going to think it vindicates his Saul Alinsky radicalism and his commitment to fundamentally change America.”
This adverbial outpouring represents both the allure of Gingrich and his downside. Gingrich is bursting with ideas. Yet his self-regard is similarly immense, and his inclination to rhetorical extremes presents a constant danger of overstepping.
Romney’s language suggests his distaste for being challenged and his barely concealed sense of superiority. Gingrich’s language illustrates his egotism and indiscipline. As Romney and Gingrich might say, we’re going to have to work to fundamentally transform that.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 6, 2011
Human Weather Vane Mitt Romney Shifts On Payroll Tax Cut
The idea of extending the payroll tax cut polls very well. How do I know? Because human weather vane Mitt Romney suddenly vocally supports it.
When he was asked about President Obama’s jobs plan during a GOP presidential debate in October, Romney was dismissive of the idea of extending the payroll tax cut on the grounds that it would do nothing to create jobs. Here’s his answer, in full (emphases mine):
MR. ROMNEY: No one likes to see tax increases, but look, the–the stimulus bills the president comes out with that are supposedly going to create jobs, we’ve now seen this played in the theater several times. And what we’re seeing hasn’t worked. The American people know that when he–when he went into office and borrowed $800 billion for a massive jobs stimulus program, that they didn’t see the jobs. Some of those green jobs we were supposed to get, that’s money down the drain. The right course for America is not to keep spending money on stimulus bills, but instead to make permanent changes to the tax code.
Look, when you give–as the president’s bill does, if you give a temporary change to the payroll tax and you say, we’re going to extend this for a year or two, employers don’t hire people for a year or two. They make an investment in a person that goes over a long period of time. And so if you want to get this economy going again, you have to have people who understand how employers think, what it takes to create jobs. And what it takes to create jobs is more than just a temporary shift in a tax stimulus. It needs instead fundamental restructuring of our economy to make sure that we are the most attractive place in the world for investment, for innovation, for growth and for hiring, and we can do that again.
MS. GOLDMAN: So you would be OK with seeing the payroll tax cuts–
MR. ROMNEY: Look, I don’t like–(inaudible)–little Band- Aids. I want to fundamentally restructure America’s foundation economically.
Romney gives no indication whatsoever of favoring an extension of the payroll tax. If anything he indicates a willingness to see it rise, saying, “No one likes to see tax increase, but …” to start and giving his much ballyhooed “Band-Aids” answer when questioner Julianna Goldman asserts that he’d be OK with the payroll tax cuts expiring.
That was October. Since then the political winds have started blowing strongly in favor of extending the tax cut—so strongly in fact that, Romney told conservative radio show host Michael Medved, “I would like to see the payroll tax cut extended just because I know that working families are really feeling the pinch right now—middle-class Americans are having a hard time.”
Of course Romney’s camp is outraged at the notion that badmouthing an extension in October and supporting it in December constitutes either a flip or a flop from the famously flexible former Massachusetts governor. “Governor Romney has never met a tax cut he didn’t like,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement E-mailed to reporters Monday night. “He has made it clear that he does not believe that by itself the payroll tax cut will create the type of permanent long term change that is needed to turn the economy around.”
Let’s give Romney the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that in October he liked the idea of a payroll tax cut extension. The characterization of him as a human weather vane still holds: He kept his support secret in October because he apparently didn’t think a GOP debate audience would cotton to that view; now he’s trumpeting it because the winds have shifted.
Who needs polls when we have Mitt Romney?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, December 6, 2011
Holy Crap, Newt Gingrich Might Actually Be The Republican Nominee
When an election is some time away, pollsters typically ask people, “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” It often seems like a silly question, because of course the election isn’t today. But eventually, today comes. We imagine that up until the election, people’s beliefs about the candidates are unformed and not held with much conviction. But as Election Day approaches, those beliefs harden, to finally come to fruition in the vote.
And for some people that’s true. But for many others, even the decision they finally make on Election Day could be different if the election were moved back a couple of weeks. Which is why it’s now entirely possible that Newt Gingrich, possibly the most repellent, unelectable political figure America has seen in the last couple of decades, could actually be the Republican nominee for president.
Think of a Republican-base voter—let’s call her Gladys. At first, Gladys had no idea whom she supported. Then Donald Trump played with getting into the race, and though it seemed a little crazy, Gladys thought Trump was a compelling figure. But then Michele Bachmann came along, saying things that just tickled Gladys to death. She was all set to support her. But then Rick Perry got into the race, and now it really seemed like he was Gladys’s choice. He seemed like a true-blue conservative, and someone with a real record of accomplishment. But then he turned out to be kind of a nincompoop, and Herman Cain looked like such a straight-talking breath of fresh air. But then he had his issues, and now Gladys has been convinced that Newt Gingrich is her guy.
The point is that though she never had to, Gladys was willing to vote for each of these candidates at one time or another. It isn’t as though she had a stated preference for Perry, but if you shoved her into a voting booth she’d say, “Oh, if it’s an actual vote, well in that case I’ll pick Romney.”
So in this primary, timing is everything. We’ve all assumed that Newt Gingrich, who is now clearly leading in the polls, would self-destruct before anyone actually had to vote for him. But now all he has to do is hold out for 28 more days, which is when the Iowa caucuses take place. If he wins there, he’ll get a wave of positive news coverage (look for Time and Newsweek covers with headlines like “The Return of Newt”), and he could actually pull out a win in New Hampshire, where like everywhere else, few people feel that strongly about Romney, even when they support him.
Of course, between now and then, Romney will have to unleash some vicious assaults on Gingrich, and there is plenty of material with which to construct them. Gingrich could plummet next week. But Newt becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for president—an utterly absurd notion for every minute since it was first floated back in 1994—could actually happen. Dear god.
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