Mark America

Making Newt into the Devil

In light of Newt Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, two new themes have emerged that I am certain we will hear and read in the news throughout the the remainder of the week, and they’re both constructed to diminish Gingrich.  The first is that his personal favorability is low, and that people generally don’t have a positive impression of Gingrich, but the second is important only to those who are inside the Washington DC cloakrooms, who are not happy that Gingrich might win the primaries, and possibly win the Republican nomination. Plans have begun to hatch all over Washington DC on how to derail Gingrich, particularly if he does well in Florida, and you can count on the GOP’s establishment types to be hustled before the cameras with fresh endorsements of Mitt Romney. The insiders just don’t like Newt, and they don’t think he can defeat Obama, but more, they don’t like the fact that he may undo some of their favorite things if he were to win not only the nomination, but also the general election.  The hew and cry will go out as the establishment will say “Newt must now be stopped!”

It’s bad enough that they have concocted a theme regarding Newt’s “unreliability” and “zany” behavior, a charge often made of his public expressions of ideas that may be off-key, novel, or simply outside the conventional wisdom.  Now they are going to press forward with the idea that because people don’t like him, on a personal level, that prevents him from rising to electoral viability.  These are the same people who can’t wait to tell you how well-liked President Obama has been throughout his presidency. I can imagine the Gingrich retort, and it should be simply this: “People like to point out that my personal favorability is low, and that Barack Obama’s is high, but these same people fail to mention that the well-liked President is leading us off a cliff.  Does the elite media want the American people to believe that they should choose well-liked but incompetent over competent but not so well-liked?  This is typical of how out of touch Washington DC’s elites are with the real world Americans face.” Or something like that.

On the matter of the Washington elite not liking Gingrich, it’s very nearly the best selling point about Gingrich that you could raise in this election. In a similar fashion, I expect this theme to be destroyed as quickly as it is set up, but that won’t change the fact that behind the scenes, the elite in the GOP will continue to work to undermine him as best they can. The insiders took a bit of a drubbing in South Carolina when you consider the other scorecard, so now they will focus on the notion of Gingrich “electability.”

In the South Carolina primary, there were some winners and losers not tallied on the screen, but you should know them just the same. Among the not-so-obvious losers were Governors Chris Christie and Nikki Haley, whose endorsements seemed not to have made much difference to voters.  The biggest unlisted winner was former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose push to vote for Gingrich probably made the turnaround happen earlier this week. The other big winner from the Gingrich victory was Governor Rick Perry, whose endorsement of Newt came at just the right time to sustain him through dark hours. The last of the unlisted big winners was the Tea Party, which rallied for Newt, and this accounted for the boots on the ground that pushed him over the top.  Clearly, the Tea Party’s loyalties run more deeply to Sarah Palin and Newt Gingirch, than to Nikki Haley and Mitt Romney.  It’s a force with which the establishment has yet to effectively reckon.

Of course, as I reported on Friday, there is other blow-back for which we have yet to account, and it may yet show up in the form of some chicanery if Romney continues to falter in Florida.  It now seems that after some pressure was applied, Romney is back on for both of the debates scheduled next week in Florida, but if Gingrich should prevail in Florida as in South Carolina, you can expect the stuff to hit the fan among the establishment wing of the Republican party.  They might fetch out somebody else altogether, and you might see all sorts of infighting erupt.  Gingrich was never well-liked among DC insiders primarily because he had a tendency to foment real passion, a sort of a “loose cannon,” because they see him as an obstacle to business as usual.

Now, it’s not entirely fair to consider Gingrich an outsider, but he was never part of Washington’s “in crowd,” so if he manages to pull off a win in Florida, there will be bedlam in the party.  A Gingrich victory in Florida just might be the catalyst for a catastrophic boil-over within the party that has only been on simmer for the last several months.  It may just be the medicine we need to shake their endless grip loose from things, and possibly bring true reform to the party.  Myself, if it shakes up the party, I am prepared to endure it, and if a Gingrich win in Florida will make that happen, I will be only too happy if the voters there instigate this battle.  It’s something the party has needed for a generation, really since the exit of Reagan, and the word has gone out that Jeb Bush may not endorse Romney now after all, instead deciding to remain neutral.  That may be the best indicator yet that things are going to get nasty in the GOP, because it means the Bush clan may be preparing to dump a new ringer into the fight.

All things taken together, Saturday’s events in South Carolina have re-shaped this race, and that’s a good thing for the Republican party.  A little revolution is good now and then, but the prospect of a Gingrich presidency is more than the establishment GOP can stomach, so the long knives will now come out from every corner.  It’s also true that the left lives in terror of a debate stage with Gingrich facing Obama, and they will now push any theme at all to convince you to choose another direction.  They and the GOP establishment will become allies because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” in their usual expedient manner.  Bank on it.