WASHINGTON — Ah, yes, Newt Gingrich did in the last days of the
Florida primary precisely what I predicted he would do. He hurled
wild charges at Mitt Romney that suggested Newt was losing his
grip. He charged Romney with lying and falling into the hands of
George Soros and Goldman Sachs, and he did this while seeking the
Republican presidential nomination!
Newt quoted Soros as saying, “We think either Obama or
Romney’s fine, but Gingrich, he would change things.” Citing
Goldman Sachs’ profiting from the bailout, he linked the Wall
Street firm to anti-Gingrich ads, filling in the dots: “Those ads,”
he averred, “are your money recycled to attack me.” On Sunday, he
suggested that Rick Santorum drop out of the race and support him.
Santorum had left the campaign trail to be with his desperately ill
daughter. That is the kind of grace we have come to expect from
Gingrich, who, by the way, supplied no evidence of Goldman Sachs’
or of Soros’s aiding Romney.
Newt lost support in his last week in Florida because
conservatives gave him a closer look. Sure we loved his one-liners
singeing the tail feathers of the Liberal media and politicians.
Yet, we have to put someone up against President Barack Obama who
can win. Moreover, we have to put someone in the White House who
can govern. With Newt we would be explaining his gyrations every
few days during the campaign. And in the unlikely event that he
should win we would be spending the next four years apologizing for
his extravagance. I did it once before in the 1990s, and I can tell
you it was a thankless task.
As I wrote last week, Newt is a 1960s generation kid.
Allow me to elaborate. That generation — my generation — was the
most ballyhooed generation raised in the 20th century, and it was
— at least in politics — a failed generation. Gingrich, the
Clintons, Al Gore, and the rest of the 1960s hustlers began their
political careers in college when they were the first generation to
actually believe that student government was on campus to govern.
The weak Liberal administrators went along with them and gave them
a say in the running of their universities. The universities have
yet to recover. Yet, beyond the damage they did to the universities
was the damage they did to themselves. They became the most
self-absorbed generation of narcissists ever heard of. From their
student government days to their days in national politics they all
lived out a fantasy. Now it is over. It would be eminently fitting
if Romney won the presidency and set the country on course in 2012.
He is from the normal half of that generation, a man who was a
student in the 1960s and afterwards a businessman, until he had
secured his fortune and entered public life in middle age. By then
the Clintons and Newt had been supping at the public trough for
years.
The unreported aspect of last week’s story of the
conservative writers and politicos turning on Gingrich was the role
played by the Episodic Apologists. They are the media types who
have been covering for the Clintons for years. They have high hopes
for the Clintons’ talents. Then they are crestfallen by one of the
Clintons’ scandals: the pilfering of the White House, the
last-minute pardons, Monica Lewinsky. Then their high hopes
rekindle anew. They were loath to report my attack on Newt as being
the Republican’s Bill Clinton, but they jumped at the “conservative
Establishment’s” attacks on his veracity and his other wayward
traits.
Yet, Newt’s failure is part of a larger failure, the
infantilism of the 1960s generation. In his narcissism,
impulsiveness, and deviancy he is at one with the Clintons. Mitt,
and for that matter Santorum, are just the opposite. They are
straight arrows and duty-bound. They would not be a riot of
scandals in the White House, but is it not about time that we leave
the scandals to Hollywood?
This country is facing its worst financial crisis since
the Great Depression. President Obama offers us what Romney calls
Crony Capitalism. Romney is right and Crony Capitalism means more
Solyndras. Congressman Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget
Committee, has served up a budget to cure the nation’s ills and
head us on a course that will not end like Greece has ended. Romney
is not far from the Ryan budget and he can move even closer. Newt
can be forgotten.
