Newt as Mao? Florida GOP War

29 January 2012 |permalink | email article

Ron Brownstein’s insightful NationalJournal column, the Return of a Revolutionary, discussed Newt Gingrich as simply not learning on the fly how to play an insurgent. His 2012 revival draws on the skills he honed 30 years ago on Congress’s back benches. The background is useful. There’s a back-to-the-future air about Gingrich’s reemergence as a top-tier Republican candidate many years after he resigned from the House (amid a backlash within his own caucus) after the GOP’s losses in the 1998 midterm election. He doesn’t look the deal-making speaker he once was. But he has staged a remarkable political resurrection by drawing on the skills that made him such an effective insurgent three decades ago. Just as Gingrich was a better guerrilla than he was a speaker—Mao in the caves, rather than Mao in Beijing—his brilliance at polarizing debate might serve him better as a primary candidate than as a general-election nominee, much less as a president, Brownstein wrote.

Despite his major victory in South Carolina Gingrich lost his mojo in two Florida debates last week, giving Mitt Romney a clear shot at victory in the Sunshine State on Tuesday. Gingrich pledged Saturday that he would stay in the nomination fight until the end: “We’re going to the convention.” The Romney team and a shaken Republican establishment are obsessed with portraying Gingrich as erratic, unhinged and too temperamental to be president. But Gingrich reacted to John McCain’s attack on his as “a sign of desperation.” While Gingrich plays up his ties to Ronald Reagan the New York Times reported that while he has mentioned the former president 55 times in debates, a new Romney ad said in his diaries RR mentions Gingrich only once. The attacks have forced the Tea Party’s Sarah Palin, among others, to attack conservative pols and the media, including George Will and Peggy Noonan, who called Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

What They Said

NBC has written to the Romney campaign, demanding that an anti-Gingrich ad that uses footage of Tom Brokaw in opening the Jan. 21, 1997 edition of the “Nightly News,” which reported on the vote cast against Gingrich in the House for ethics violations, be removed. CNN reported the Romney campaign did not ask NBC for permission to use the footage, and Politico said the campaign has the complaint—but Fox News has already aired it.

Fun times as Grover Norquist seems to suggest that letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire, as signed into law by Bush himself, could constitute an impeachable offense for Obama.—Greg Sargent, Plum Line/Washington Post, citing Andrew Sullivan that some conservatives care more about tax cuts for the rich than they do about the Constitution. 

 

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