Is Newt Gingrich Winning Because He’s Not Mitt Romney?
Are Republicans forgetful or just forgiving?
Looking at the Republican polls, many are shocked to see a name now on top that had been on bottom and nearly forgotten when it came to Republican candidates: Newt Gingrich.
It’s odd how Republicans view former speaker of the House Gingrich as a Washington outsider. This is a guy who was a career politician for over four decades before he fled to the wilderness. This is a man who burned more bridges than most Republicans in my lifetime within his own party; a guy who was asked to step down as speaker and some believe pushed out of the House of Representatives entirely. This is also a man who, against the wishes of many in his party, pushed for the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton for carrying on a sexual tryst in the Oval Office, while he, Newt was committing adultery himself. A man responsible for not one, but two government shutdowns, a man who lost his party seats in Congress. And let us not forget the image of Mr. Gingrich handing his wife divorce papers while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. He’s on marriage number three, divorced two times, and is a born-again Catholic—his words, not mine.
Despite all of this, Newt’s biggest critics in his party are now silent. Those who would not back him have their checkbooks out, because, after all, he is not former Gov. Mitt Romney. Even the evangelicals are buying the fallen man speech Newt’s been giving with respect to his numerous marriages, two of which failed. And how about him being Catholic instead of an evangelical Christian, a Protestant? Well it would seem the evangelicals prefer Catholics to Mormons–again, anyone but Romney.
Some say Newt has changed, that he is a new and improved and more humblefigure. I disagree. I might have bought that when his poll numbers were down; but now that he is ranking in the top two depending on the poll you read and the time of day it is, the old Newt is back and just as bold as before.
Here are a couple of examples:
- Gingrich saying Rep. Michele Bachmann was like a student, he being the teacher, who was “factually challenged”
- He also stated that kids “in poor neighborhoods have no habit of working” (Odd, I don’t consider busting my butt at work a habit! It’s a necessity!)
And I believe as Newt’s numbers grow, so will his ego. As a GOP member stated: “His hand is never that far from the self-destruct button.”
So I’m not sure if Republicans are very forgiving or just forgetful. Did they forget the ethics violations, which resulted in a six digit fine?! Did they forget that Newt encouraged voters to contact their congressional members regarding climate change in a televised ad seated next to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2008 and now he has changed his mind? Come on, this guy taught environmental studies! He knows climate change is real and humans have contributed to it!
The bottom line is, the Republicans have to decide if they want the best candidate, the candidate that represents their people and their party, or anyone but Romney. If the Republicans want Newt, I guess they’re appealing to their non-ethical, adulterating, divorced segment of the population.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, December 7, 2011
“Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011”: Republicans Color The Abortion Debate
Rep. Trent Franks established his credentials as a civil rights leader last year when the Arizona Republican argued that, because of high abortion rates in black communities, African Americans were better off under slavery.
But the congressman doesn’t just talk the talk. On Tuesday, he chaired a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on legislation he is introducing that would protect African American women from themselves — by making it harder for them to have abortions.
“In 1847, Frederick Douglass said, ‘Right is of no sex, truth is of no color, God is the father of us all and all are brethren,’ ” Franks proclaimed as he announced what he calls the “Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act of 2011.”
Drawing a line from the Civil War to the suffragist movement to defeating Hitler to the civil rights era, Franks determined that “there is one glaring exception” in the march toward equality. “Forty to 50 percent of all African American babies, virtually one in two, are killed before they are born,” he said. “This is the greatest cause of death for the African Americans.” Franks called the anti-abortion fight “the civil rights struggle that will define our generation.”
Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who, unlike Franks, is African American and a veteran of the civil rights movement, took a different historical view. “I’ve studied Frederick Douglass more than you,” said Conyers. “I’ve never heard or read him say anything about prenatal nondiscrimination.”
Orwellian naming aside, the House Republicans’ civil rights gambit (which follows passage of a similar bill in Franks’s Arizona and marks an attempt to get an abortion bill to the House floor before year’s end) points to an interesting tactic among conservatives: They have taken on a new, and somewhat suspect, interest in the poor and in the non-white. To justify their social policies, they have stolen the language of victimization from the left. In other words, they are practicing the same identity politics they have long decried.
Newt Gingrich, now threatening Mitt Romney for the Republican presidential nomination, tried a similar argument when he argued for the elimination of “truly stupid” child labor laws and suggested that students could replace the janitors in their schools. He further explained that he was trying to help children in poor neighborhoods who have “no habits of working.”
Developer Donald Trump, who owns a Virginia country club that counts Gingrich as a member, announced this week that he would join with Gingrich to help “kids in very, very poor schools” — by extending his “Apprentice” TV reality show concept to all of 10 lucky kids. “We’re going to be picking 10 young wonderful children, and we’re going to make them apprenti,” Trump said. “We’re going to have a little fun with it.”
This “fun” might sound less patronizing if these conservatives displayed a similar concern for the well-being of the poor and the non-white during debates over budget cuts. But, whatever the motives, lawmakers and conservative activists were not bashful when they held a pre-hearing news conference Tuesday, standing beside posters directed at Latinos and African Americans (“black children are an endangered species”).
“It is horrific that in America today, babies are being killed based on their race and based on their sex,” protested Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America. Other participants in the news conference suggested that Planned Parenthood is “excited to take money specifically earmarked to kill a black baby” and linked abortion-rights advocates to eugenics, euthanasia and the Holocaust.
These conservatives raise a good point about the troubling implications of abortion based on gender selection — although the problem exists mostly in places such as China, beyond the reach of the House Judiciary Committee. Harder to follow is the logic behind the argument that African American women are racially discriminating against their own unborn children.
“As John Quincy Adams so eloquently stated,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) said, “how can we expect God to keep blessing America when we’re treating brothers and sisters this way simply because of their race?”
“This morning, you can walk into a clinic and get an abortion if you find out your child is African American,” said Patrick Mahoney, a conservative activist.
If you find out your child is African American? So a black woman would have an abortion because she discovers — surprise! — that her fetus is also black?
Before the audience had a chance to digest that, Mahoney began shouting about how abortion is “lynching” — frightening a child in the front row, who cried out and hugged his mother.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, 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
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.
Where Oh Where Are Gingrich’s Enemies?
For many members of Congress, it must seem truly strange to observe the current Newt Gingrich boomlet. This is, after all, the same Gingrich who was run out of Washington 13 years ago after his party suffered a rare midterm loss that left Republicans barely hanging on to control of the House. Gingrich not only stepped aside as speaker but resigned his congressional seat. He left the chamber with his tail between his legs and did not exactly endear himself to his fellow members on the way out, calling the other congressional Republicans “hateful” and “cannibals” who blackmailed him out of office during a conference call announcing his departure. With his bombastic style, Gingrich was well set for a life of public speaking and book career far away from any other elected office.
That was the mind-set of the political class when Gingrich entered the presidential field earlier this year (especially after his entire staff fled his campaign over the summer), and yet now Gingrich has—at least for the time being—replaced Mitt Romney as the front-runner for 2012. One would expect those representatives who revolted on Gingrich—many of whom are still in Congress—to rush to the press to divert Republican voters from making the same mistake they made in 1994 when they elevated Gingrich to speaker.
Instead, they’re keeping their thoughts largely to themselves, according to Politico. The group of Republicans who ousted Gingrich in ’98 are hesitant to disparage the new Tea Party favorite, and some have even switched sides and are supporting Gingrich. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey corralled support to replace Gingrich back in the day but demurred from offering comment for Politico‘s article. That’s a strikingly different tone than earlier in the year. “It’s typical of Newt to be whimsical,” Armey told Politico in May. “We always say: Newt always has so many great ideas. Well yeah, but then he shifts between them at such a rate it’s pretty hard to track it let alone keep up with it.” Or take former Representative Bob Livingston, the Louisiana congressman whose challenge to then-Speaker Gingrich incited that harsh resignation conference call. Now Livingston has endorsed Gingrich and is raising money for his former foe.
Not all of Gingrich’s former colleagues have held back. On Sunday, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn—a member of the House during Gingrich’s reign—ripped into the presidential candidate on Fox News. “I’m not inclined to be a supporter of Newt Gingrich,” Coburn said,
“having served under him for four years and experienced personally his leadership…I just found his leadership lacking and I’m not going to go into greater detail in that. And I think if you were poll the gang—the group of people that came in Congress in 1994, in which he did a wonderful job in organizing that, he’s brilliant, he has a lot of positives. But I still—it would be—I will have difficulty supporting him as president of the United States.”
Coburn isn’t alone in that view; if it becomes clear that Gingrich’s surge is not the short-lived bubble of Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann, his former colleagues will likely start bringing those attacks out in droves to block his accession back to the top of the party.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, December 6, 2011
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