Remember that old story of blind men touching and describing an elephant? Well, that is the phase of the Republican primary we are in when it comes to Newt Gingrich. Folks are touching this or that aspect of his record and statements and using the narrowness of the exploration to describe Newt. Each of these explorations have some truth, but unconnected to each other they lead to a false impression of The Professor–and that is why he is rising in the polls. Folks see in him what they want to see and in South Carolina they saw a Conservative hero, a neo-Confederate and a fighter for the white race. In the coming weeks and months more and more parts of Newt will be touched and explore–and perhaps a complete image of the man will emerge.
Newt Gingrich has been a character of Wingnutopia since the early 1980s and he is a legend. If you pretend that George W. Bush, his administration and the DeLay Congress never existed, then Newt becomes the only Republican after Saint Ronnie to lead his Party to a historic victory: the 1994 takeover of Congress. Sure, he squandered that victory and was run out of office a few years later, but if you can forget the Bush JR. years it will be easy to push Newt’s shadow material down the memory hole as well. If you only selectively remember history–Newt is a Wingnut hero. If all you do is touch that one part of Newt, then you can easily buy into the Scarborough meme of Newt as Conservative hero.
Of course if you were to touch another part of Newt, your impression might be very different. He is a big ass elephant and there are lots of parts to touch–if you dare. Here is one from a Vanity Fair interview with Jack Abramoff shortly after his scandal broke, but before he plead guilty:
There are other people from Abramoff’s more distant past who also never knew him, such as former Republican House Speaker (and rumored 2008 presidential candidate [and current 2012 candidate with the big ‘mo’]) Newt Gingrich, who first never met Abramoff during the latter’s firebrand days atop the College Republicans. “Before his picture appeared on TV and in the newspapers, Newt wouldn’t have known him if he fell across him. He hadn’t seen him in 10 years,” Gingrich’s spokesman, Rick Tyler, tells me.
That this especially rankles Abramoff becomes clear as he rummages through a box of old memorabilia with me. “Here’s [former Republican Texas congressman and House majority leader] Dick Armey,” he tells me. “Here’s Newt. Newt. Newt. [Former president Ronald] Reagan. More Newt. Newt with Grover [Norquist, the Washington conservative Republican Über-strategist and longtime Abramoff friend] this time, and with [Seattle arch-conservative Republican] Rabbi [Daniel] Lapin. But Newt never met me. [Indicted Iran-contra figure and longtime Abramoff friend] Ollie North. Newt. Can’t be Newt … he never met me. Oh, Newt! What’s he doing there? Must be a Newt look-alike. I have more pictures of him than I have of my wife. Newt again! It’s sick! I thought he never met me!”
When you dig into the record, Newt and Jack stared working together over thirty years ago. Some stories have Jack raising money to help Newt and the GOP win in 1994 and Jack was hired as a lobbyist on the basis of his relationship with Newt and other Republicans who came to power almost 20 years ago. They were wingnut caballeros running scam after scam, but when Jack was caught Newt pretended like they never knew each other. Newt’s low profile in 2004-2005 helped him dodged the scandle and now he gets to run for office with this (and many other stories of his life) swept under the rug.
The Professor is a professional grifter and right now he is working overtime to sell the Scarborough meme that he is a conservative hero. He is a brazen con artist at the top of his game and the gracefulness with which he bamboozles the gullible and the greedy is a thing of perverse beauty. It is amazing the grandeur they find climbing up his ass and how they convince themselves that Newt’s shit does not stink.
Perhaps he will get away with it all and become the Republican Nominee for President.
And perhaps the Myans were right and 2012 is the year of the Wingularity.
Cheers
rikyrah
I love that you call out LIttle Leroy for the grifter that he is.
it’s gonna be fun watching the Establishment throw everything they can at him.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
And I expect the throwing to begin in earnest, oh, about by Tuesday.
jheartney
I’ll leave it to Barney Frank to comment:
Linda Featheringill
@jheartney:
Oh, Barney is cute! :-)
Linda Featheringill
I think that Gingrich may have the gift/skill to be a mirror to voters. They look at Gingrich and see themselves. So of course they don’t see everything about Newt. They only see what he shows them, which is what they want to see.
I think a lot of people want politicians to reflect themselves and not be leaders to bigger and better things.
DanielX
Newt is a corrupt, hypocritical, ruthless sonofabitch who believes that the rules that apply to others don’t apply to him (and has said so), because he’s A Man Of Destiny. He knows, probably better than any other active Republican politician, how to reach out and touch the lizard brain in every wingnut by seasoning the red meat he’s tossing according to audience. He will ride the wave as far as it will take him, and he doesn’t care how much damage he causes or who gets hurt in the process. Since he already knows the Republican establishment detests him because he’s fucking things up for Mittens, this applies to them too. If he thinks climbing in bed with the Tea Party will help him achieve his goals, he’ll not only climb in bed but grab the restraints and astroglide (shudder).*
Newt’s Rules: Rule #1. Do Whatever It Takes To Win. Rule #2 and all others: see Rule #1.
*As long as Callista goes along, anyway. Anybody with any sense of self preservation at all would avoid irritating someone with eyes as crazy as that. Ever since I saw the picture of her with the perfect helmet hair, wearing a pint of diamonds and looking seriously medicated I’ve had a song periodically running through my head:
“She’s got…Charlie Manson eyes…”
ChrisNYC
True, but it’s more than Newt. It’s all of them. I googled this week for stories about the 1994 revolution and Gingrich’s fall. Wow, lots of familiar names. Boehner, Armey, Kasich, DeLay. This is one by Jay Carney.
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/07/21/time/gingrich.html
This idea that has been sold that there were these triumphant GOPers (“true conservatives”) in the 1990s and then some different group came in and screwed everything up under GWB and then there is the Tea Party is total nonsense. THEY ARE ALL THE SAME PEOPLE. Newt, like the rest, has been there, slurping up that delicious delicious money the WHOLE time.
I feel like yelling at GOP voters. Look around you — all of your guys are like 70! Stop trying to disconnect them from your party’s past.
PS — I’d love a recommendation for a book about the political inside baseball of the 1994 GOPers, if anyone knows of one.
Frankensteinbeck
No, I’m sorry. You’re wrong about one thing:
He is a brazen con man, but he’s far from the top of his game. He’s in this race out of sheer luck, he’s run his campaign completely randomly, he catapulted to the top only because someone pissed him off enough that he lost control of his temper – which doesn’t take much. He is pretty close to what the hate freaks want, a short-tempered, mildly witty, narcissistic asshole. That’s not deliberate, it’s what his record shows he is. Right now that puts him at the top of the GOP nomination field. Like Sarah Palin, he’s there by luck. His ego is too big for him to run a complicated new scam like a successful run for president. It has been since he became Speaker and decided that made him more powerful than the President.
Mike in NC
They both need to modeling orange jumpsuits today.
General Stuck
to whit, the orbs over at Powerline are polishing the Newtser’s record like an all night car wash.
Never mind that just about every wingnut that was in congress back then recognized Newt’s slippery ethics and overall scurrilous nature, and any number of them have recently gone on record to double down on the anti Newt chorus coming from the GOP elite.
The GOP base is self described at around 60 percent conservative, and the 27 percenters are the percent of the national electorate for both parties combined. Their numbers are well over the 50 percentile within the GOP itself.
They have got themselves in a pickle, but really it is simply the result of the massive fractures that are wide open right now, and have been since Bush, into several ideological camps. The tea tards not only have the numbers in that party, they have most of the anger, that will drive them to the polls more so than not.
I don’t see them nominating Romney, simply on the notion he is the only one that can beat Obama. Passionate partisans, when the rubber meets the road, will go with a candidate that they believe, believes like them. Unless they have either been out of power for a longer time, or someone digs up Ronnie for a makeover.
General Stuck
Powerline link.
ChrisNYC
@Frankensteinbeck: I agree completely. He has one trick — bluster and swagger and then kicked down.
When he was a first year assistant prof, he applied to be head of his department. The next year, he applied to be President of the college. Two years later, he was “removed” from the history department. At which point, he promptly set up an “institute” about modernizing education and tried to sell consulting services to the Department of Ed of Georgia. Same exact m.o. that he would reprise throughout his miserable life.
PhoenixRising
Dennis, I love you. And from that angle, I say: 7th and 6th graders spelled out of the bee my kid didn’t win, last week, by making the mistake you made on ‘scandal’ above.
As I explained to the young’un, this language of ours makes no kind of damn sense and that’s the whole reason there is such a thing. A spelling bee makes no sense in Spanish.
Aside from that nit, can I get an endorsement for referring to Leroy as El Lagarton? it suits him.
JCT
Talk about waves of nausea.
I’m with Barney Frank 100%.
Can you imagine the dossier folks have on that asshole Gingrich?
shortstop
A lot of politicians who impassion voters (for good or bad reasons) seem to have this touch-the-elephant syndrome to various degrees. Obama had a bit of it in 2008. The person who now has a huge case of it, even more than Newt, is Ron Paul.
pseudonymous in nc
@jheartney: The WaPo left out a key part of that story:
Not mentioned: that Frank threatened to out every Republican he knew to be closeted if Gingrich’s little helper didn’t shut the fuck up.
Steeplejack
Off topic, but there’s not an open thread available.
Do I want to touch the elephant known as Angels and Demons? It started on USA at 11:00, and I’ve got the DVR buffering it, but I feel strangely ambivalent. I didn’t see it in the theater, I’ve never read the book, but I’m hearing the call of the night owl and don’t see anything else on.
Villago Delenda Est
@jheartney:
Yeah, FSM is toying with us by dangling the possiblity that Noot will be the nominee, and give Obama more fun in debates than anyone should ever be allowed to have.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Their corpses need to be modeling the jumpsuits.
Their heads need to be displayed on K street on pikes.
Joey Maloney
I’ve always felt that there was one more blind man in the elephant story, the one who said, “hmm, an elephant is mushy and smells terrible”.
Is the elephant syndrome the result of a failed press that is unable to produce an integrated assessment of anything that happened more than ten minutes ago; or a failed citizenry that forgets things almost before they happen?
Xenos
Newt is just a grifter, but ‘you can’t cheat an honest man.’
The Foxite Revanchists choose to be mislead because they like the animal spirits of radicalism more than they like to be told the truth about the real world. There are some serious codependency issues going on here.
wilfred
Gingrich was dead in the water after Iowa. Then Aipac moneybags Adelson jumped in:
“Adelson donated $5 million to another Gingrich PAC on January 7, 2012, in an effort to bolster Gingrich’s faltering bid for the U.S. presidency.[21] Although $20 million had been rumored for the entire campaign, there has been no documentation of this. By the next day American Solutions for Winning the Future had reserved more than $3.4 million in advertising time in South Carolina, and planned to air portions of a movie critical of Romney’s time at Bain Capital, portraying him as being a predatory capitalist.”
That’s how he won SC and will win the nomination. The rest of the commentary is overdetermination, the reverse of the Rumi story.
[edit] Controversies
jheartney
@Villago Delenda Est: Forget Obama, the Newt-POTUS debates would be more fun than WE’RE allowed to have. Or anyway me, without permission from my cardiologist.
DanielX
All true. But Newt is also an intelligent man, when he’s not allowing his emotions to rule him. He’s smart enough to realize that wingnuts will overlook his well documented misdeeds and corruption if 1) they detest his opponents enough and 2) he tells them what they want to hear. As witness South Carolina…ordinarily one might expect that so-called conservative Republicans, as champions of morals and family values, bla bla bla, might be reluctant to vote for a candidate:
who is a well known adulterer
also an all-round corrupt asshole
also a man known for pettiness and temper tantrums (let’s shut down the government cause I didn’t get to ride on Air Force One! Hey, that’s the guy I want with the red telephone.)
Clearly that wasn’t the case, and people shouldn’t underestimate Newton Leroy. The Tea Party IS the Republican Party now, and vice versa. Newt has read the tea leaves, and what they’re telling him is that the Republican establishment is irrelevant to what’s happening with primary voters right now. Romney is the establishment’s anointed candidate, and it’s doing him good whatsoever. The Republican establishment, or what’s left of it, realizes that to win an election you have to at least nod towards convincing a majority of voters that you will govern wisely. The majority of Republican voters do not give a fiddler’s fuck about governing wisely, since they don’t really believe in government as we have known it for the last 80 years or so. What they want is someone who will tell them what they want to hear, and Newt knows what they want to hear. State organization, party apparatus? Newt doesn’t care about all that, because it’s irrelevant to Republican primary voters right now.
Newt thinks on his feet, he thrives on chaos, and he’s having a good, no, great time right now. Pissing off other Republican pols while whipping primary voters into an even hotter rage against compromise and the Kenyan imposter in the Oval Office? Joy.
It’s true that his loosey-goosey style, inattention to detail and more or less complete lack of state level organization may prevent him from winning either the nomination or the general election. But considering where he was after returning from that Greek vacation, or for that matter three months ago, very few people (myself included) would have thought he’d even still be campaigning, much less winning in South Carolina. This is one of those political comebacks for which Washington is so justly famous, and is additional proof – if any was needed – that Newt has got more political lives than ten cats.
Calming Influence
We only know about the blind man who touched Newt’s junk because of the suicide note.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Please don’t make me touch Newt.
bemused senior
I posted this yesterday at the end of a dying thread, but for a foretaste of what a Gingrich-Obama debate might be like, listen to this recording of Obama’s visit to the Republican congressional retreat in early 2010. Good luck with that Lincoln-Douglass stuff, Newt, with or without teleprompters.
BruinKid
Wait, it may be a meme, but I’m not sure it’s really from Scarborough, given what he thinks of Newt.
Xenos
Perhaps the best way to think of the Gingrich surge is as a collective ‘cooling off’ of the wingnut mark.
They know (at a subconscious level, at least) they have already lost the 2012 election, meaning that they have lost permanently. This temper tantrum is a matter of reasserting status and swagger, which Goffman identified as the means the bilked speculator compensates for his bruised ego, and misdirects him from going after the con-men who ruined him.
LosGatosCA
Going down in a politically incorrect, hateful blaze of glory is the dream of every
Talibanwingnut.Gingrich has their ride heading out to Thunder Road for the Duel of Death they know they are going to lose.
bjacques
@Steeplejack:
Don’t do it, Steeplejack. I lasted about 20 minutes into the movie before looking for something else. The Illuminati? Really? How…quaint. Canister of antimatter wahooed from the LHC to use as an atomic whoopee cushion at the Vatican? Why not just buy a nuke from Pakistan? That’s Overplotting. That’s what you get when the Illuminati elect the Nihilists to run things.
Luckily, Eathflight was on, a documentary about migratory birds. And, being filmed in south America, it had the legally-mandated number of capybaras in it. No puffins, alas. I blame government meddling with the BBC.
Schlemizel
@Linda Featheringill:
we’re gonna mis that little gnome – A LOT!
R-Jud
@bjacques:
Austerity, yo. Osborne cut the quangoes, the benefits, and the puffins.
lonesomerobot
Shhhhh. If you keep writing these things about Newt, he might not win the nomination. Save it for the general.
Tone In DC
@bemused senior:
I watch that more often than so of my favorite DVDs. It’s that great. That meeting is positively PRICELESS.
One more thing… Dennis, I enjoy your posts very much.
Please give spell check a try.
pk
If Romney loses Florida, then he has only won one state so far (NH). How can any republican argue for him being the nominee at that point? He couldn’t beat McCain, Santorum or Newt. Can he still win after a Florida defeat? I know nothing about the republican nomination process. Has it happened before that someone has lost 3 out of the first 4 states and still been the nominee?
Viperbuck
I can only hope, pray, and believe that Norman “Man Smart, Woman Smarter” Span’s lyrics are prophetic in this situation and serial staff-boinker N. Leroy proves to be unelectable in a general election as long as the 19th amendment is still in effect.
MoeLarryAndJesus
An elephant is soft and mushy:
http://i45.tinypic.com/2vv42dd.png