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Townhall...
The End of a
Surprisingly Good Political Career
by Michael Barone
06/13/2011
Exit Newt Gingrich. Well, not quite yet, officially. On his Facebook
page, Gingrich says he will endure “the rigors of campaigning for
public office” and “will carry the message of American renewal to every
part of this great land, whatever it takes.”
Without, however, the assistance of his 16 top campaign aides, some of
whom had been with him for years, who resigned en masse last Thursday.
They wanted him to spend more time on personal campaigning. He and his
wife, Callista, figured they could do a lot of their campaigning and
fundraising over the Internet.
This is not the first time that political allies have turned on
Gingrich. Most of his fellow House Republican leaders tried to mount a
coup to overthrow him in July 1997, in his third year as speaker of the
House; he survived, but not for long. Thus, he has twice shown that he
can inspire ties of great loyalty -- and can do things that make those
ties snap and recoil against him.
Gingrich may keep campaigning -- at the Republican Jewish Coalition on
Sunday and at a debate in New Hampshire on Monday night -- but his
campaign is effectively over, just a month after he declared he was
running.
In 30 days, he careened from one disaster to another, denouncing House
Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan as “right-wing
social engineering” on the Sunday after announcing, later taking a
two-week vacation on a cruise in Greece and Turkey.
There is plenty being written about Gingrich’s flaws. His personal life
has not been entirely admirable, to say the least. He is prone to
hyperbole, to making outrageous statements he cannot defend, to
shifting positions without informing allies. He spreads himself too
thin, writing counterfactual histories of the Civil War and World War
II, making documentaries on subjects such as Pope John Paul II’s 1979
visit to Poland, setting up one organization after another.
But in the long run, the most interesting things about Newt Gingrich
are not his flaws, but his strengths. What enabled this Army brat with
no real hometown to become a major political figure who did much to
shape American public policy?
It certainly was not connections to any particular political group.
Gingrich graduated from good universities, but he is essentially an
autodidact, a self-educated loner. He has long been credited with
having new ideas, but looking back on his nearly 40-year political
career -- he first ran for Congress in Georgia in 1974 -- I think his
keenest insights were not about public policy, but about political
possibilities.
He foresaw that Republicans could win congressional races in the
small-town South and worked hard to prove it, losing first in the
Watergate year and then in 1976, when Jimmy Carter swept Georgia,
before he beat a conservative Democrat in 1978.
I remember that starting in 1984, he was predicting that Republicans
could win a majority in the House. He was wrong then, but he was right
in 1994 and he was right about the reasons all along. He saw that
Republicans would win most Southern seats and that talented young
Democrats elected in the Vietnam/Watergate years would in time retire
or be defeated.
He coached politically clueless Republican candidates with the high
tech of the day -- hours of Newt on audiotape -- and bucked the Bush 41
White House and House Republican leader in opposing a tax increase in
1990.
As speaker, Gingrich had more policy successes than his current
detractors recall. He held federal spending essentially static for a
year, setting the budget on a path to surpluses; passed a landmark
welfare reform act; and set in motion a Medicare reform commission that
recommended premium support, the main feature of Ryan’s proposal.
Through all this, Gingrich always was searching for ideas that
commanded 70 percent support. He understood that dovish Democrats’
disdain for American exceptionalism was a grave political liability and
sought to exploit it. But after his first moments in the spotlight as
speaker, he turned off voters. I think he reminded them of the
high-school nerd/egghead whom all the other kids disliked.
Gingrich turns 68 next week; this was obviously the last year he could
run for president. His chances were never great and now seem
nonexistent. But we shouldn’t forget what this man, with his unusual
gifts and despite glaring flaws, managed to accomplish against great
odds.
Read it at Townhall
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