POLITICS MAY 10, 2011
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The Republican presidential race is fast resembling World War II baseball, when 4-Fs roamed the outfield, the ball lost its bounce because of the rubber shortage, and sportswriters found it hard to imagine that any team could win the World Series. But as heretical as it seems today, someone is going to be bathed in lights and drenched in confetti as the victorious GOP nominee at the Tampa convention.
All this brings us to Newt Gingrich, who is going to declare his candidacy Wednesday in clichéd 21st century disembodied fashion—with announcements on Twitter and Facebook and a follow-up interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. Yet, for all of the missteps leading up to this moment—including a mangled rollout of his exploratory campaign in March—Gingrich remains a curiously undervalued stock in the Republican presidential portfolio.
Newt undervalued? I can hear the snickers and the stunned gasps. Yes, Gingrich has more defects than a 1971 Chevy Vega and his liabilities may seem more daunting than the final Lehman Brothers balance sheet. The affairs, the three marriages, and the ethics charges that helped end his congressional career after the 1998 elections are not the sort of things a candidate boasts about on his Facebook page. Moreover, the 67-year-old former House speaker will be a senior citizen among the GOP contenders (granted, Ron Paul is 75) and Jimmy Carter was president when Gingrich was first elected to Congress in 1978.
All this helps explain why Gingrich—despite sometimes polling in double digits during trial heats among GOP contenders—has become a plaything of the conventional wisdom. Intrade, an online stock market for political predictions that is a good gauge of elite opinion, gives Gingrich a paltry 3.6 percent chance of winning the Republican nomination. That puts Newt behind Donald Trump (4.8 percent) and Michele Bachmann (4.2 percent) and (yikes!) just ahead of Ron Paul (2.8 percent).
In politics, new and shiny objects have the same allure that they do in nursery school. This week, Jon Huntsman (running at 11.1 percent on Intrade) is being portrayed as the most dynamic returnee from China since Marco Polo. Even though Huntsman, a former Utah governor, probably has better name recognition in Beijing than in Bettendorf, Iowa, he is lionized as a top-tier presidential possibility. Somehow it does not matter that in a national CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll released last week, 64 percent of Republicans had never heard of Huntsman.
What Gingrich has going for him is that presidential elections are about something beyond gauzy biographical ads and rehearsed debate one-liners. “We’re in the personality phase of the campaign,” says Republican pollster David Winston, who worked for Gingrich when he was House speaker. “But eventually it’s going to move from personality to policy. GOP voters are going to ask, ‘What are your solutions to fix the nation’s problems?’ And that is the moment that plays to Newt’s greatest strength.”
Almost nine months before the scheduled date for the Iowa caucuses, it is difficult to predict what issues will frame the GOP conversation. Hint: Real issues involve more than predictably denouncing ObamaCare and demagoging the deficit. Not only can the external political environment change in an instant (yes, this is the obligatory Osama bin Laden reference), but odd issues can galvanize primary voters. At this point in 1995, no one imagined that the 1996 GOP campaign dialogue would be dominated by Steve Forbes’s advocacy of the flat tax.
Running for president involves more than running your resume up a flagpole and seeing who salutes. That future-oriented part of the conversation is what baffled candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Wesley Clark in 2004 for the Democrats. But from the days that he was over-enthusiastically touting what-comes-next thinkers like Alvin Toffler, Newt Gingrich has always been about the future. The former House speaker’s ideas may not always parse and sometimes have an amnesiac’s lack of consistency, but more than any Republican running (especially cautious candidates like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty) Gingrich is likely to ride the intellectual wave of the primaries.
Gingrich also boasts unusual financial and institutional advantages that his rivals lack. As The Wall Street Journal detailed in a front-page article Monday, Gingrich has constructed a daisy chain of think tanks and advocacy organizations to promote his pet causes and his political future. One number stands out in the article: the 1.7 million email addresses that Newt-created organizations have collected.
Almost all the GOP contenders have to airbrush away an embarrassing blemish on their ideological records. Whether it is raising taxes as governor (Mike Huckabee), pioneering Obama’s health plan (guess who?), once supporting cap-and-trade energy legislation (Pawlenty and Huntsman), or fueling the deficit as OMB director (Mitch Daniels), the entire Republican presidential all-star team has something to answer for.
Gingrich, in the run-up to his presidential candidacy, has had his low-road moments such as his inflammatory comments about the proposed mosque in a former Burlington Coat Factory near Ground Zero. But Gingrich also does not have to prove his right-from-the-start bona fides at every moment in the campaign. Back in the days when Mitt Romney was running against Teddy Kennedy as a Massachusetts moderate Republican, Gingrich not only personified conservatism but was the field marshal responsible for its greatest congressional victory.
2012 may not be Newt Gingrich’s year—and please understand that I am only calling him a plausible possibility in an uninspiring GOP field. But remember that the last time the political railbirds sold Gingrich short, he gave the Republicans their first House majority in 40 years.
Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic.
21 comments
Mr. Shapiro is right, Gingrich has always been inconsistent on his policy positions but unlike someone like Romney largely seems to get away with it. Unfortunately his main problem is that he's rightly seen as a utterly scummy.
- Pnaut
May 10, 2011 at 12:17am
Hey, remember when there was a campaign to draft a presumably inspiring candidate among a field of uninspiring candidates in the Democratic primary? It seems so long ago... 2006... I don't think she ended up running. Anyway, when a field of candidates for a party's nomination is uninspiring (and I'm thinking back to 1988, 1980, etc. etc.) I'm pretty sure the incumbent is safe. I like these Primary thought experiments, but no one will beat the incumbent in 2012.
- RJSampson1
May 10, 2011 at 2:12am
"Why Newt could win" This sub-headline was just a wee bit cheap insomuch as it's ambiguous as to whether it is referring to the nomination fight or the general election. The contention that Gingrich could win the GOP nomination isn't really all that interesting. Of course he could. As you suggest, the nomination race is wide open, and like it or not Gingrich is well credentialled. OTOH, the suggestion--which this essay does not make--that Gingrich could win both the nomination and the general election, well, that would be explosive. I suppose I can allow TNR a bit of poetic license in composing headlines; you want to get readers to click through to the articles, after all, but I always feel a little let down when I'm led to believe that a writer is going to take a contentious position then read the article and figure out that it isn't that contentious at all.
- AaronW
May 10, 2011 at 2:24am
As long as unemployment at least keeps moving down, RJ.
- roidubouloi
May 10, 2011 at 5:05am
As long as hypocrisy is the official legal tender of the Republican Party, Gingrich has to be considered a "leading" candidate. And don't foget that, as the nation's most embellished hyopcrit, he's become a darling of the torture loving, women hating, pedophile excusing, evangelical claiming, right wing side of the Roman Catholic Church. Hypocrits and RCs, that's a formidable slice of the electorate, especially if the leading RC on the Court helps with the vote count.
- rayward
May 10, 2011 at 7:18am
This is admittedly a non-scientific panorama of Republican sentiment, but if you scan the reader comment pages on conservative periodicals, no Republican, including Donald Trump, gets more withering criticism than Gingrich. The criticism is both personal -- two ill wives dumped -- and substantive -- $300,000 a year paid escort of the ethanol industry. After pulling us in with teasing sub-headline, Shapiro whimpers to a close with "2012 may not be Newt Gingrich's year." Indeed. Dan
- dbuck1
May 10, 2011 at 8:05am
This is a well-written piece, Mr. Shapiro but I think that your less-than-firm conviction in your own notion will prove to be the case. No Newt in 2012, or ever.
- liberalref
May 10, 2011 at 8:47am
No, I don't hate RCs; my grilfriend and Godchild are RCs and I'm a "middle way" C. It's the EWTN version that I find objectionable, what I call the Protestant wing of the RC Church that is becoming the dominant wing, where redemption, or claimed redemption, rules, a place where a serial adulterer like Gingrich can be welcomed, celebrated even, as long as he claims to accept Jesus as his savior and the Church. It's hypocrisy of the highest order, and debases the Church. TNR recently included a review of a Dietrich Bonhoeffer biography, an excellent review, though it inexplicably omitted any discussion of Bonhoeffer's greatest contribution to Christian thought, the distinction between cheap grace and costly grace. It's the cheap grace practiced by Gingrich and so many others that I deplore.
- rayward
May 10, 2011 at 8:53am
Newt is as relevant today as a Beta VCR. He left public life 3 presidential election cycles ago. "Newt Gingrich, the bridge to the 20th century". He has policy ideas - really? Beyond tax cuts - what are they? Colonizing Mars? He is the most overrated and least relevant politician in the 2012 election. You want someone who can act tough with Boris Yeltsin or deal with the problems of budget surpluses (the overcharge!) , Newt's your man.
- dubyadoubte
May 10, 2011 at 10:20am
Hm...for some reason, this article reminds me of Newsweek's recent column about why Haley Barbour could win. Oops.
- polcereal
May 10, 2011 at 10:28am
....What an odd turn of phrase it is of the author to say of N.R. that "he gave...a Republican Majority". Who, exactly did "the giving" of that, and what did Gingrich do with it and how much political creds has he earned in the decades since that long-ago time ?
- herbr
May 10, 2011 at 11:06am
Months are light years in the political world and how the world looks six months from now will have a great effect on who ends up being the Republican nominee, but as it stands now, I have to agree with Mr. Shapiro. If this is an election you are likely to lose, why not lose with someone who is going to rattle off a mantra that sets the stage for the next Republican? I'm not saying that's the best strategy or that Gingrich's mantra would be successful in rallying younger conservatives, but the point that he's always been "about the future" is relevant here. The down side in all of this is that for all his claims that Obama doesn't "get" Americans, I don't think Gingrich "gets" them either. He does talk down to people in the way that some conservatives do, implying that the guy on the street is too stupid to know what's in his best interests.
- Lundell
May 10, 2011 at 11:14am
The announcement that he is in the race for President indicates that some fight is left in Newt Gingrich. The candidate has fought uphill for as long as I can remember and many people like an aggressive, assertive candidate regardless of the changes in the candidate's positions.
- Doug12
May 10, 2011 at 11:22am
For Newt Gingrich to be called a man of intellectual depth is beyond laughable. In his 1995 memoir of the Republican Revolution, To Renew America, there is a gap of four paragraphs between where he speaks of his great admiration for Martin Luther King and where he states that, by definition, it can under no circumstances ever be moral to disobey the law. Fifteen years later, his latest, To Save America, centers on the claim that the moderate Christian Democrat in the White House runs a "secular-socialist machine" based on his "Kenyan anticolonialist" mode of thought. Then and now, you can easily find kindergartners of more intellectual depth and sincere interest in the future of this country.
- janus
May 10, 2011 at 11:25am
I'm looking forward to the moment, late in the GOP race, when it's narrowed down to Mitt v. Newt: Mitt refers to Gingrich's "unelectability" due to unspecified "baggage"...........and Newt fires back, "Hey, I never drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car! And what were you doing in Canada anyway - getting ideas for your Massachusetts socialist health care plan?!" Shapiro is right, Newt could actually get the nomination, even if it would be largely by process of elimination. Don't underestimate him; I remember when he ran for Congress unsuccessfully several times before winning - nobody took him seriously back then. Who would Newt choose as his running mate? I say Haley Barbour. The Grinch & Boss Hawg. Nail down the electoral votes of Georgia and Mississippi.
- bjones
May 10, 2011 at 12:28pm
Bush ran on not having sex in the oval office and we know how that turned out, so naturally I can understand Republicans thinking they can outlech Clinton.
- blackton
May 10, 2011 at 2:07pm
Whoever wrote the deceptive title needs a remedial lesson in "truth in advertising".
- JackR
May 10, 2011 at 3:50pm
You're joking right? He and Guiliani are only doing it to stay remotely relevant in their consulting business. I mean, why else would you pay these buffoons perfectly good lobbying money if they aren't connected anymore? Get serious, this guy is not relevant - as dubyadoubt said.
- WandreyCer
May 10, 2011 at 5:01pm
blackton, Republicans DO out-lech Clinton; it's just that back in those days they had control of Congress. I think half the reason they impeached Clinton was so there was a bigger story for the Lame Stream Media to cover than their own infidelities and unlawful doings.
- GSpinks
May 10, 2011 at 5:59pm
There are 3 -5 guys who have a chance to be the GOP nominee. Newt is not one of them.
- butchie b
May 11, 2011 at 5:12pm
I have no brief for Newt Gingrich. That said, I was amazed to see that one of the worst knocks against him -- that he told his dying first wife that he was going to divorce her because no one would want a president with a woman as hold as her -- is a complete fabrication. Gingrich's daughter stated that (1) the first Mrs. Gingrich is still alive; she was divorcing Mr. Gingrich at the time she was hospitalized with cancer; and (3) she was present in the hospital with her parents, and Newt never said any such thing.
- JohnEMack
May 13, 2011 at 3:23pm