Newt Gingrich’s sudden popularity gives Republicans a case of nerves
U.S. Republicans may need a grief counsellor soon, if their effort to find a viable candidate to challenge President Barack Obama gets any more miserable.
The party is desperate to find someone to put up against Obama besides Mitt Romney, who isn’t viewed as conservative enough or reliable enough. After eliminating a series of short-term challengers, it appeared last week that newt Gingrich had finally emerged as the consensus non-Romney candidate. Polls showed he had passed Romney as the favoured candidate, even before Tea Party favourite Herman Cain dropped out and endorsed Gingrich.
The problem is that many Republicans don’t like Gingrich just as much as they don’t like Romney. Even more, in fact. George F. Will, the eminent columnist, issued a special weekend column condemning Gingrich as the “least conservative” of the choices and lambasting his character.
Gingrich … embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. And there is his anti-conservative confidence that he has a comprehensive explanation of, and plan to perfect, everything.
… His temperament — intellectual hubris distilled — makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to “Lean Six Sigma” today. On election eve 1994, he said a disturbed South Carolina mother drowning her children “vividly reminds” Americans “how sick the society is getting, and how much we need to change things. … The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Compare this grotesque opportunism — tarted up as sociology — with his devious recasting of it in a letter to the Nov. 18, 1994, Wall Street Journal. And remember his recent swoon over the theory that “Kenyan, anti-colonial” thinking explains Barack Obama.
Earlier, fellow conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer held Gingrich up next to Romney and decided that neither was satisfactory as a representative of the party.
Gingrich has his own vulnerabilities. The first is often overlooked because it is characterological rather than ideological: his own unreliability. Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
… The second, more obvious, Gingrich vulnerability is electability. Given his considerable service to the movement, many conservatives seem quite prepared to overlook his baggage, ideological and otherwise. This is understandable. But the independents and disaffected Democrats upon whom the general election will hinge will not be so forgiving.
The lack of enthusiasm Gingrich inspires in other conservatives makes him easy pickings for others. Vanity Fair, ever of the trendy left, headlined an article on Cain’s endorsement of Gingrich “From one happily married man to another,” underlining both candidates’ apparently serial infidelities. Romney has already started attacking Gingrich for portraying himself as a Washington outsider, telling a rally: