In the early summer of 2007, an over-the-hill John McCain, his
campaign in shambles, was given up for dead in his race for the
Republican presidential nomination. He wouldn’t give up, though,
and by sheer force of will managed to grab his party’s spot on the
ticket — and lead it to a crushing defeat.
In the early summer of 2011, an over-the-hill Newt
Gingrich, his campaign in shambles, was given up for dead in his
race for the Republican presidential nomination. He wouldn’t give
up, though, and by sheer force of will has
managed to talk himself back into contention for his party’s
spot on the ticket. But do Republican voters really want to be led
to another crushing defeat?
That, alas, is almost sure to happen if Gingrich is the
Republican standard bearer. Like McCain, he’s quite old by any
non-Reagan presidential standards (indeed, if inaugurated he would
be just four months younger than Reagan was on his Inauguration
Day). Like McCain, he has a nasty temper (although, to be fair,
it’s nowhere near as nasty as McCain’s). Like McCain, he has a
sordid history with, uh, relationships, although his is more well
known than McCain’s and does not enjoy the excuse of a “pass” to
re-sow wild oats due to brutal years in captivity.
Like McCain, Gingrich seems to erupt most viscerally when
he is criticizing conservatives. There’s a special edge to his
occasional anti-conservative rumblings, as if his inner Rockefeller
keeps yearning to be free. (Gingrich was Rocky’s southern regional
director against Nixon and Reagan in 1968.) When he endorsed Dede
Scozzafava over conservative Doug Hoffman in a special election for
Congress in New York, Gingrich wasn’t content merely to boost the
liberal; instead, he repeatedly and emphatically lectured
conservatives, indeed insulted conservatives for being stupid and
childish and unrealistically “purist.” When he trashed Paul Ryan’s
budget plan this past spring, he not only played into the left’s
hands by calling conservatism’s centerpiece proposal “radical
change” and “right-wing social engineering,” but he again lashed
out in harsh terms at conservatives who objected to his statements
— and then he tried to deny having said what he actually said and
claimed to be speaking in a context that didn’t exist.
Conservatives who served in Congress with him were
familiar with this habit: If he disagreed with moderates, he
cajoled them and tried to mollify them; but when he disagreed with
conservatives, he went ballistic. Now-Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma
tells the story in his book
Breach of Trust (2003) about how Gingrich wanted
conservatives to renege on a unified party pledge to cut internal
committee spending by a third. (If they couldn’t discipline their
own internal spending, how could they ask for discipline from
anybody else?) When a bloc of conservatives nevertheless torpedoed
Gingrich’s plans (in other words, held to their pledge despite his
pressure), the Speaker went ape. He called a “mandatory” meeting
for all GOP congressmen, even threatening to send the
sergeant-at-arms to track members down. Once there, he blasted the
bloc, demanding that “you conservatives” (note the phraseology)
shape up. “Gingrich’s tactic backfired,” wrote Coburn. “He thought
he could embarrass and intimidate us, but not one person was
intimidated.” And: “Gingrich’s vitriolic response to us bringing
down the rule for the bill confirmed to us that he was willing to
trade our principles for a short term political advantage over the
Democrats.”
Humorously, Coburn noted that Gingrich kept repeating that
his motto was “listen, learn, help, and lead,” but that the
freshman class of Republicans elected in 1994 soon joked that the
Speaker’s actual behavior was more like “fire, ready,
aim.”
He did that as Speaker, in spades. He said he wouldn’t
politicize the Lewinsky investigation, but later he said he
wouldn’t make a single speech without bringing up Lewinsky, then
insisted on releasing the entire Clinton deposition to the public,
then insisted on unduly punitive rules for the impeachment inquiry
while giving moderates a pass to start a spending binge, and then
orchestrated a last-minute ad putting Lewinsky front and center
when the public needed no reminder about the already
all-encompassing case. Result: Not only did he botch the Lewinsky
case by making it look like a partisan witch-hunt, but he also
botched the 1998 elections.
He botched the 1995 “government shutdown” battle in
similar ways, combining the petty and personal (complaining that
Clinton made him sit in the back of Air Force One) with the petty
in terms of policy (insisting that the otherwise clean
Appropriations fight, which the GOP was
winning, suddenly include a technical fix to a tiny Medicare
problem, which allowed Clinton to begin his successful Mediscare
tactics).
He had a habit of pushing junior members to take a stand
one day, only to change his own mind several days later, thus
leaving them exposed and alone. He belittled those who didn’t agree
with him, while exhibiting the self-absorption (to put it nicely)
necessary to refer to himself as a “world-historical figure.” And,
he might have added, world-historical figures are susceptible to
having affairs because of “how passionately [they] felt about this
country.”
Gingrich is the only Republican in the field aside from
Mitt Romney who can’t make a coherent case against an individual
health care mandate, because he supported one himself. He can’t
make a coherent case against cap and trade, because he supported it
himself. He can’t make a great case against Nancy Pelosi, because
he played political footsie with her on TV. He can’t criticize
race-baiters at the Justice Department because he has hobnobbed
with and even semi-praised the nation’s single most prominent and
deadly race-baiter, Al Sharpton.
Sure, Gingrich has sounded good in debates, while playing
the role of everybody’s favorite uncle. What’s remarkable is that
four months of acting avuncular can make a public with a short
attention span forget 35 years of alternating as attack-mongoose
and rabid porcupine.
Sure, the man is smart. Sure, he knows his stuff. Sure, he
is a practiced speaker. And sure, he deserves great credit for
leading (with lots of superb lieutenants) the Republican takeover
of the House in 1994 and its subsequent successes with the budget,
welfare, missile defense and — here’s something he rarely gets
credit for — the re-invigoration of Washington, D.C. from an
almost Detroit-like hopelessness to a workable, and in some cases
shining, nation’s capital. Despite this column, a listing of his
achievements would more than match a listing of his
flaws.
Yet those flaws are so numerous, so publicly accessible,
so well documented, that conservatives have every reason to recoil
in despair at the prospect of him in the Oval Office and
anti-Obamites have every reason to fear that a Gingrich-led ticket
next year would suffer a massive defeat.
All of which is why, from an entirely neutral standpoint,
the rehabilitation of Gingrich’s polling numbers in the past few
months has been such an astonishing thing to witness. Could Newt
Gingrich, despite his faults, make a good, effective president?
Maybe. As a risk-reward proposition, though, hitching one’s
presidential hopes to this Newt is more like riding a
crocodile.
