Most Democrats are elated. Gingrich seems to them a weaker opponent for President Barack Obama than Romney would be. They’re rooting for him. But unbridled words have an unexpected currency right now. And one ill-timed, major economic relapse could give the general-election advantage to any Republican nominee, including Gingrich, whose bombast would then get the loudest microphone in the world.
By FRANK BRUNI
New York Times News Service
Not long ago, a veteran Republican strategist told me that a politician could succeed with his zipper down, but not with his words unbridled.
He was talking about Newt Gingrich, and was saying that Gingrich’s philandering and three marriages weren’t going to be his real problem, given how many men in government had been forgiven for messy sexual pasts. His greater liabilities were his wildly mixed messages, gross overstatements and insistence on inserting himself into every key moment of the late 20th century. Gingrich was supposed to bloviate his way into oblivion.
Instead he got a 12-point victory in South Carolina and a credible shot at the GOP nomination. Grandiosity, it turns out, is good. In fact he has doubled down on it. Although under fire since his previous surge two months ago for all his self-aggrandizing exaggerations, he hasn’t grown careful or bashful. Neither has the team around him.
In a recent debate, Gingrich characterized the end of his congressional career after the 1998 midterms as wholly volitional, making his exit sound like a self-sacrificing blaze of glory rather than the acrimonious firestorm it was. With Gingrich, the distance between reality and rhetoric isn’t shrinking but growing, and the incongruities mount. He has lately fallen in love with his rants against “the elites,” and casts himself as their most determined foe, but I can’t for the life of me figure out a definition of elite that doesn’t include him. Are the elites those hyper-educated intellectuals who use big words? Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history from a prestigious private university, Tulane, and when it suits him, he plays Cerebellum in Chief with nonpareil diction and derision.
Are the elites rich people with fancy ZIP codes? He and his third wife, Callista, made more than $3.1 million in 2010 and have an estimated net worth in excess of $6.5 million. Since 2000 they have lived in the posh enclave of McLean, Va., not Appalachia, and have personally stimulated the economy with expenditures at Tiffany, not Zales.
He lashes out against secularists and trumpets his and Callista’s Roman Catholicism, though the two of them lived for six years in explicit defiance of its tenets.
In contesting his second wife’s claim on ABC’s “Nightline” that he had requested an open marriage, he accused the news media of a special anti-Republican zeal, conveniently forgetting how that same media — with his gleeful encouragement — pounced on the moral failings of President Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
He rails that the media can’t be trusted, then readily cites any dispatch that cuts in his favor as unassailable truth. He did this Monday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” invoking a New York Times article from 2008 as part of his defense against Romney’s charge that he has lobbied lawmakers.
He had initially been slated to appear on ABC on Sunday, on “This Week,” but canceled after the network’s “Nightline” report. He did competing networks’ Sunday shows instead. By Monday, though, he was ready to heed the siren call of George Stephanopoulos, his pique with ABC as transitory as his ire at CNN’s John King last week was inflated. It’s all one hyperbolic — and, in its way, brilliant — performance.
For a Republican electorate looking for heat, he delivers gust upon gust of hot air. Romney manages only a tepid breeze.
“I have emotion and passion,” Romney told the anchor Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, in a voice that communicated neither. Twice more he mentioned passion, as if willing it into his bones.
Wallace played a clip of Gingrich’s South Carolina victory speech, noting how fiercely angry at the state of the country Gingrich seemed. Romney said that he himself was “very upset.”
Most Democrats are elated. Gingrich seems to them a weaker opponent for President Barack Obama than Romney would be. They’re rooting for him. But unbridled words have an unexpected currency right now. And one ill-timed, major economic relapse could give the general-election advantage to any Republican nominee, including Gingrich, whose bombast would then get the loudest microphone in the world.