Newt and Mitt: A Donnybrook Ahead

05 December 2011 |permalink | email article

If Mitt Romney is, as the New York Times Magazine this week describes him as all-business man, the world’s most boring superhero, Newt Gingrich is his polar opposite who has risen from the dead. He’s ahead in Iowa—but with little organization has yet to prove he can turn out Republican voters on his own. Politico’s headline: The return of Bad Newt—letting his healthy ego roam free again, littering the campaign trial with grand pronouncements about his celebrity, his significant political history and his ability to transform America,  But, as one veteran GOP strategist said, Gingrich has two modes— attack and brag. Last week he told Sean Hannity he helped lead the effort to defeat communism in Congress, only to then tell ABC News “I’m going to be the nominee.” Even descriptions of Callista, his third wife, reek of aggrandizement: “She actually describes herself as being a cross between Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush with a slight bit of Jackie Kennedy tossed in.” Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said “He’s been ‘Charming Newt’ recently. But the last couple of days have been a reminder of his other side.”

Solving the Jail Crisis

Last October Lee Baca, the Los Angeles County Sheriff, as a Los Angeles Times editorial noted, was more outraged by a federal investigation into the jails than the allegations of inmate abuse and deputy misconduct that triggered it. Since then he’s backed away from accusing the FBI of misconduct, blaming his command staff for keeping him in the dark, yet refusing to discipline anyone for it. An effort by a retired 32-year veteran to talk with Baca twice in 2010 about the problem met with little success, and now it appears the sheriff is blaming the top commander for not fixing the problem when, in fact, he was told the jail culture could not be changed. The Times has raised the question about whether the sheriff is capable of running, or reforming, the nation’s largest jail system. Baca once again is traveling in the Middle East, weighing terrorist threats as the world’s sheriff. Controversial Undersheriff Paul Tanaka, with a history of tight control over jails and the department, is in charge.

Quotable

Maureen Dowd, doubling down on Gringrich’s insensitive Dickensian remarks recently made at Harvard, where he said “it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid,” adding that 9-year-olds could work as school janitors. Added Dowd: Has he not heard of the working poor? The problem isn’t that these kids aren’t working: it’s that they don’t have time with their parents, who often toil night and day. 


 

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