Frank Luntz Always Makes Newt Gingrich Cry
At an Iowa campaign stop Friday morning, Newt Gingrich got all choked upremembering his late mother. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise: The event was emceed by GOP opinion-researcher-cum-stand-up-comedian Frank Luntz, and tearjerking is his M.O.
The event, at a downtown Des Moines coffeehouse, was styled as a focus group of moms, so Luntz asked Gingrich to recall his own mother, who died in 2003.
Gingrich recounted his mother’s final days in a long-term care facility, where she battled bipolar disorder, depression and physical ailments. It was that experience, he said, that prompted his interest in long-term care and Alzheimer’s disease. As he spoke, a baby in the audience wailed, suggestively perhaps, in the background.
“My whole emphasis on brain science comes indirectly from dealing –” Gingrich paused, winced and waved a hand, pleading, “you’ve got me all emotional!”, then continued — “dealing with the real problems of real people in my family. And so it’s not a theory. It’s, in fact, my mother.”
Parallels were instantly being drawn to the campaign-trail tears of Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 welling-up was thought to humanize her to voters, and Ed Muskie, whose emotionalism in 1972 helped kill his campaign. But it’s worth remembering that Gingrich has hardly been the picture of stoicism up to this point.
At a Thanksgiving forum in Des Moines in November, also moderated by Luntz, Gingrich was one of several candidates who broke down in tears. That time, the trigger was thinking about a friend’s baby who was born with a heart defect. Also shedding tears at that event were Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain; Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul managed not to crack.
“I feel like Dr. Phil!” Luntz joked at that earlier event, and it’s clear his manipulative lines of questioning — probing the candidates for the emotional pressure-points of family and faith — were responsible for the orgy of tears.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, Gingrich doesn’t suffer from a too-tough public persona. If anything, it’s the opposite — he’s seen as a loose cannon. The momentary front-runner, now fallen to a lowly fifth in Iowa polling, isn’t tanking because voters worry he’s too buttoned-up. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The candidate who could most use a tearful moment to soften his image as overly controlled and cerebral isn’t Gingrich. It’s Mitt Romney.
By: Molly Ball, The Atlantic, December 30, 2011
Feel Free To Ignore Iowa: The Iowa Caucuses Are Really Ridiculous
Only days until the Iowa caucuses! Can you believe it? Less than 8,000 minutes to go!
Perhaps this would be a good time to point out that the Iowa caucuses are really ridiculous.
Not Iowa itself, which is a lovely place despite being the only state besides Mississippi to never have elected a woman as governor or a member of Congress. (See if you can get to work on that, Iowa.) It has many things to recommend, including the Iowa State Fair, which, in my opinion, really sets the planetary pace when it comes to butter sculptures.
And Iowans are extremely nice people. I still have fond memories of the hot dog salesman at an aluminum-siding factory in Grinnell who rescued me from the Steve Forbes for President bus during a snowstorm.
Iowa does have terrible winters. Which limits participation in the caucuses, where attendance is already restricted to registered voters who are prepared to show up for a neighborhood meeting at 7 p.m. on Jan. 3.
The Republicans, who are really the only game in town this year, hope to get more than 100,000 participants. That is approximately the number of people who go to Michigan Stadium to watch the Wolverines play football. However, the Wolverines’ fans do not get free cookies.
Maybe the Republicans will hit 150,000! That is about the same number of people in Pomona, Calif. Imagine your reaction to seeing a story saying that a plurality of people in Pomona, Calif., thought Newt Gingrich would be the best G.O.P. presidential candidate. Would you say, “Wow! I guess Newt is now the de facto front-runner?” Possibly not.
Iowa caucusgoers are supposed to be particularly committed citizens who can make informed choices because they’ve had an opportunity to personally meet and interact with the candidates. Some of that does happen. In 2008, at the Democratic caucus I attended in Des Moines, there was unusually high support for Bill Richardson, mostly from people who said he had been to their house.
“Caucuses tend to foster more grass-roots participation,” said Caroline Tolbert, a professor at the University of Iowa and author of “Why Iowa?” — a question we should all be asking ourselves.
But, this year, the major candidates haven’t even spent all that much time in Iowa. Until recently, Gingrich only showed up for book signings and the occasional brain science lecture. And Iowa is actually not very good at picking the ultimate winner. The theory is that its caucuses winnow the field, that if you can’t manage to come in at least fourth, you are presidential toast. (John McCain came in fourth in 2008, with the support of 15,500 Iowans. This is approximately the number of people who live on my block.)
It’s that fourth-place goal that has Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Rick Perry staggering around the state trying to visit all 99 counties and eat at least one meal a day at a Pizza Ranch outlet. (Pizza Ranch is a Christian-based, Iowa-based chain that has found success in the conviction that pizza tastes best in a cowboy-themed setting.)
“We have a good plan, and people like us,” Santorum told The Des Moines Register this week. “I hear this all the time. They say, ‘We really like you. You are on my list. You are No. 2 or No. 3 or No. 1,’ and that is a good place to be.”
People, if you had spent the last year doing virtually nothing but visiting with small clumps of voters across the state of Iowa, would you be energized when somebody told you he had you No. 3 on the list? At this point, polls suggest that Santorum could come in anywhere from first to fifth. But he’s still like a kid who so desperately lusts after the most popular girl in the class that he is thrilled by being told he will be permitted to drive said girl and her date to the prom.
On Tuesday, our Iowa voters will go off to 1,774 local caucuses, most of which will be held somewhere other than the normal neighborhood polling place. Those who figure out where to go will have to sit and listen to speeches on behalf of all the candidates. Scratch anybody who was hoping to dash out of work during a coffee break.
History suggests that in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl. History also suggests that the majority of the caucusgoers will be social conservatives, which is perhaps a clue as to why Rick Perry discovered this week that he was actually against abortion even in the case of rape or incest.
To summarize: On Tuesday, there will be a contest to select the preferred candidate of a small group of people who are older, wealthier and whiter than American voters in general, and more politically extreme than the average Iowa Republican. The whole world will be watching. The cookies will be excellent.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, December 28, 2011
How Social Conservatives Blew It In Iowa
The 2012 “invisible primary” is looking likely to end just how and where it began: with Republican ideologues anxiously looking to Iowa for signs of an electable “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney. Depending on whom you ask, they have found no such candidate, or have found too many of them. In either case, despite their fevered hopes the First-in-the-Nation Caucus is not likely to play its intended role as an all-important arbiter where ideological squishes are disciplined or destroyed and the faithful find their champion. Indeed, from the perspective of a conservative movement hoping to consolidate its control over the GOP once and for all and make 2012 the beginning of the end for the New Deal, Iowa has been a big failure.
The sad spectacle of the FAMiLY Leader organization—whose board, after administering a controversial pledge document and then holding a candidate forum, could not reach agreement on an endorsement—is something of a microcosm of the Right’s failure to separate the sheep from the goats throughout the invisible primary. While FAMiLY Leader chieftains Bob Vander Plaats and Chuck Hurley eventually supplied “personal” endorsements for Rick Santorum, Vander Plaats has been subsequently begging Santorum supporters to contribute money to enable him to actually campaign for his candidate—a sign of the gesture’s probable futility. Given the fact that they are appealing to largely the same constituencies and are hardly flush with cash, neither Santorum nor Michele Bachmann seem very likely to win a big “ticket out of Iowa.” And Rick Perry, once the favorite of the Christian Right, is still holding onto an impressive war chest that will likely sustain him, but he’s got precious little else going for him other than the hope that he, rather than Gingrich, will survive through New Hampshire to make a late appeal to southerners. For his part, Newt has not been haunting the highways and byways of Iowa all that obsessively either; the big news for his campaign this week has been its opening of an all-volunteer headquarters in Sioux City, just his second outpost in the entire state.
Meanwhile, neither Mitt Romney nor Ron Paul seems likely to be influenced by the results in Iowa at all. While it’s true that Romney has moved decisively to the right in order to make himself minimally acceptable to today’s conservatives, he’s done so out of deference to the primary process as a whole—not the glare of publicity and pressure on the Iowa campaign trail, which he has largely ignored until very, very recently. Indeed, the main Romney footprint in the state has been via the nasty attack ads on Newt Gingrich launched by the “Restore the Future” super-PAC backing Romney. And while Ron Paul has done well in the target-rich Iowa environment of a low-turnout caucus (lots of home-schoolers and lots of eager college students), it’s not as though he’s doing much of anything he hasn’t been doing for many years. Moreover, it is certain that Paul’s campaign will continue right up until the convention no matter how he does in Iowa.
So the caucuses themselves will probably only cull one candidate from the field, no more than the Iowa Straw Poll back in August that ended Tim Pawlenty’s campaign. As Jonathan Bernstein has recently explained, barring a real upset Iowa’s influence over the nominating contest may well be reduced to spin: Did this or that candidate beat expectations, or set the table for success down the road? That is not a meaningless role to play, but after absorbing so many months of candidate and media attention, it’s hardly ideal from the point of view of Iowa triumphalists who consider their strange contest the epitome of deliberative democracy.
And for the high-riding right wing of the Republican Party—be they denoted as Tea Partiers, the Christian Right, or “constitutional conservatives”—it’s been a long and arguably pointless trip. Unable to use the unique leverage of Iowa to elevate Tim or Michele or Rick or Herman or Newt or the other Rick, they are now looking at genuinely long odds for denying the nomination to the man they do not want, Mitt Romney, who is more and more looking like the Richard Nixon of the early twenty-first century: the lowest common denominator of a political party in which leadership is in painfully short supply.
By: Ed Kilgore, The New Republic, December 23, 2011
“Yes Virginia, You Have A Problem”: Virginia’s Ballot-Access Debacle
Virginia will hold its Republican presidential primary on Super Tuesday (March 6), it would appear to be one of the more important contests. But the state’s unwise ballot-access laws have ensured that Virginia will be largely ignored.
By late Thursday, it looked as if Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry had collected the necessary signatures and would join Mitt Romney and Ron Paul on the Virginia GOP ballot. On Saturday morning, we learned otherwise.
Newt Gingrich will not appear on the Virginia presidential primary ballot, state Republican Party officials announced Saturday, after he failed to submit the required number of valid signatures to qualify.
The announcement was made on the Virginia Republican Party’s Twitter account. On Friday evening, the Republican Party of Virginia made a similar announcement for Governor Rick Perry of Texas.
Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman, and Rick Santorum also came up short, which leaves Paul and Romney as the only GOP candidates whose names will appear on the primary ballot.
For Gingrich, this is a rather awkward setback. He expected to do very well in Virginia — Gingrich has, after all, lived in the state for many years — and assured supporters on Thursday that his name would be on the ballot. Complicating matters, the Gingrich campaign responded to the news by saying it would “pursue an aggressive write-in campaign,” not realizing that this is forbidden under Virginia election law.
Oops.
Making matters slightly worse, Gingrich’s campaign director posted an item to Facebook that said, “Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941: We have experienced an unexpected set-back, but we will re-group and re-focus with increased determination, commitment and positive action.”
Yes, after having been denied a ballot slot, Gingrich’s thoughts turned to Pearl Harbor. There’s a good reason I describe the disgraced former House Speaker as a lousy historian.
But this story is about more than just Gingrich’s failure. The larger point is that Virginia has ridiculous ballot-access laws, which will exclude five of the seven Republican presidential candidates from even appearing on the state’s ballot. If all seven had qualified, Virginia would have been home to a spirited contest — with candidates making many appearances, buying plenty of ads, and making lots of state-focused promises.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 26, 2011
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