Politico...
Conservative
pundits turn down Newt
December 10, 2011
In
the days since Gingrich leaped to
the forefront of the Republican presidential race, the nation’s most
prominent
right-leaning commentators — many of whom have spent the last year
pining for
alternatives to Mitt Romney — have rendered a swift and caustic
judgment on
their party’s latest out-of-right-field challenger.
In
columns dripping with disdain,
they’ve argued that Gingrich isn’t just undesirable as an opponent for
Romney —
he’s probably not fit for the presidency altogether.
“He
has every negative character trait
that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism,
self-righteousness,
self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in
Republican form,”
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Friday. “It doesn’t matter
if a
person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn’t have the
right
temperament and character, stay away.”
Brooks,
an on-and-off Barack Obama
admirer and no hardcore ideologue, gave this biting assessment of
Gingrich’s
policy instincts: “Gingrich loves government more than I do.”
Those
are themes that other columnists
have developed for more than a week now, recalling Gingrich’s rocky
speakership
and describing him as an undisciplined, ideologically unreliable
egomaniac who
likely would lose the general election.
Ramesh
Ponnuru, the National Review
editor who recently announced his support for Romney, described the
consensus
on Gingrich as overwhelming.
“The
people who know Gingrich best —
the ones who worked for him, or worked with him, or watched him closely
as
journalists in the 1990s — have almost all concluded that he is a bad
fit for
the presidency,” Ponnuru said in an email. “That judgment is shared by
conservative and moderate congressmen, by people who support Romney and
people
who want an alternative to him. The common denominator is alarm at what
Gingrich would do to the Republican party as nominee and to the country
as
president.”
No
one has criticized Gingrich more
acidly or consistently than George Will, the conservative commentator
who said
on ABC’s “This Week” that Gingrich “embodies almost everything
disagreeable
about modern Washington” and called him a “rental politician.”
“There
is almost artistic vulgarity in
Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting
from such
government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages,” Will wrote in The
Washington Post. “His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and
logic
allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for
services
as a ‘historian’), to say, ‘If you want to put people in jail,’ look at
‘the
politicians who profited from’ Washington’s environment.”
Asked
about one of Will’s rhetorical
cannon blasts last month in New Hampshire, Gingrich told POLITICO
reporter:
“Poor George.”
The
chilly response to Gingrich isn’t
entirely surprising. Elites tend to favor substantive,
temperate-sounding
politicians — such as the 2012 wish-list candidates Mitch Daniels and
Paul Ryan
— over flamboyant activist favorites.
But
Gingrich is also not Herman Cain —
a crowd-pleasing political novice who makes no claim to understanding
government. He’s a self-branded “big ideas” guy whose Washington career
stretches more than three decades and has more than passing familiarity
with
the Beltway’s smart set.
And
yet, even opinion organs that have
actively resisted Romney’s slow grind to the GOP have turned away from
Gingrich. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has criticized
Romney repeatedly
this year, disparaged Gingrich just as he was emerging as the former
Massachusetts governor’s strongest rival.
“In
Mr. Gingrich’s telling, his ideas
are bold and even radical, but the irony is that they’re often much
less
revolutionary than his rhetoric suggests,” the paper’s editorial page
opined
Thursday, criticizing Gingrich’s plans for reforming Medicare.
“The
contradictions of Mr. Gingrich’s
entitlement plan reveal part of his political character, which is that
his
policies often don’t match the high-decibel, sometimes grandiose nature
of his
rhetoric,” the powerful conservative editorial page wrote. “He might
achieve
more if he spoke more softly and carried a bigger stick.”
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