Thursday, March 3, 2011

The Newt-ster


By Alan Caruba

Fox News announced that Newt Gingrich will not be providing his observations on political events and personalities insofar as he is now regarded as running for the presidency.

Newt announced his intentions on Thursday, March 3. Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota is expected to jump in soon enough. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will and my thought at this early stage is that the Republican Party is in desperate need of a candidate who can actually win.

I always had the feeling that Sen. John McCain won the 2008 primary campaign mostly because he wasn’t one of the other candidates, one of whom was Romney. McCain crossed the aisle so often to cooperate with Democrats in the Senate that he must have worn a path there. And then he picked Sarah Palin to be on his ticket as vice president.

Please, let’s not have a repeat of that disaster. At least, in 2012, the novelty of an Afro-American candidate will have dissipated in the wake of every foot-in-mouth statement and insane public policy that a single, sitting President could accumulate halfway through his first and last term in office.

Let me say that Gingrich, intellectually, is head and shoulders above anyone else in the race. In terms of pure brain-power, he has a real grasp of most issues.

The Newt-ster, however, has some problems.

Newt’s current wife, Callista, is his third. He divorced the first two and had, shall we say, some fidelity problems. The real problem for me is an image I cannot shake from my mind, the one of Newt and Nancy Pelosi together on a couch in a television commercial discussing “climate change” and his support for the cap-and-trade scheme that would have been a huge tax on all energy use.

Politicians who get too close to the Giant Green Light of environmentalism tend to get soft in the head over critical issues. To his credit, these days Newt is talking about the need to drill for oil and repeal of the horrid Obamacare Act.

I don’t frankly trust or have much use for any politician who fell for or still speaks about “climate change.” The reason you haven’t heard much about it is that everyone short of Al Gore has disowned the hoax. And Gore even said he thought ethanol was a bad idea!

The Newt-ster arrives at his announcement with a ton of political baggage. While he is forever in the pantheon of Republican heroes for the overthrow of Democrat control of the Congress in 1994 after forty years in the political wilderness and lauded for engineering the overhaul of the federal welfare system.

He was also famously blamed for the 1995 government shutdown. That, however, was Clinton’s decision. The news media hung it on Newt. In 1997 he was censured for ethics violations and his resignation was tendered the following year. Suffice to say, his years as Speaker were difficult and one has to wonder, assuming lessons learned, whether the presidency must be even less kind were he to be elected.

I have little doubt that the Newt-ster could wipe the floor with Barack Obama in any debate. He is articulate, has a strong grasp of history from his days as a professor, and I still don’t think he can win for all the objections cited and for those that will surely jump up and bite him in the months ahead.

I long ago concluded that one has to be somewhat delusional to want to be President. There is a level of egocentricity required that most normal men lack. The Newt-ster wants to be President very badly. He has devoted every day since he first ran for public office to that goal and now, at age 67, he has to go for it or risk being too old later on.

I predict that the Obama-loving mainstream media will chew him up and spit him out. He has been through that inferno and survived, patiently writing books, building a political organization, giving speech at the right places to the right groups, but I think the Republican Party would throw him overboard the minute New Jersey Governor Chris Christie relented and said he would accept the nomination.

I like the Newt-ster. I just don’t want him to run.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

8 comments:

joetote said...

Alan,

i fully agree! The Newt-ster is the best out there at this time but as you say, he can't win. An aside here. His novels and historical publications, him being a history professor are spellbinding. I love everything he puts out historically!

If Christie doesn't relent, I'm not sure who out there could win. Romney is damaged goods as is Huckabee and although I like Palin to a degree, she's in Newt's shoes as far as the vilification factor.

One point you make though rings as a good omen. with any luck (although this administration seems to throw out the race card every chance they get), the race thing should not be a factor. As such, i am really impressed with both Alan West and Herman Cain. My gut says either one of these gentlemen would make a fine President and one thing for sure, both of them have leadership qualities that are sadly lacking in this current administration.

Anonymous said...

Amen to that, Alan!!!

Anonymous said...

Amen to that, Alan!!!

Dave's Daily Day Dream said...

Shall we spend the next many months discussing ONLY the race between Socialist party "D" and the other - "R"?

Will there again be no dialogue as to a third party person? Will issues and track record EVER matter?

How long will it take us to connect the dots from Woodrow to Obama? Lord, I am tired of it all.

Rich Kozlovich said...

Alan,

I don't think he is the best out there, he’s just gives the impression that he is the smartest, although he is the most articulate. Being a university professor makes that easy, because all that he has to do is repeat his lectures and the pro and con arguments from the classroom. This gives him a leg up because he has already developed the intellectual responses to others views.

However, most importantly….. he has demonstrated over and over again that he is nothing more than a self aggrandizing opportunist with the moral fiber of a goat.

Any man who will do to his wives what he did to his wives (and the way he did it) is capable of doing anything to anyone. The emotional bonds between a husband and wife are so fundamental (much like the fundamental bonds between parents and children) that for him to do these things twice demonstrates a fundamental insight to the integrity of the man. And that quality of that integrity is low!

For him to believe he can now run for POTUS makes him as big a delusional ego maniac as Teddy Kennedy was when he tried to run after having murdered Mary Jo Kopechne.

Just a thought.

Rich

Guy in Ohio said...

Newt isn't electable in my opinion, unless Obama melts down. And Obama would have to melt down to the point where anyone who runs against him would beat him. No, we need a much better candidate than Newt, although I agree that he's not a bad guy for the most part....

As far as the media chewing him up, who WOULDN'T they chew up? Face it. Anyone who runs against Obama is going to get raked over the coals. If our candidate doesn't have the love and support of at least 55% of the people, we can forget it, because the media gives any Democrat a five point advantage right out of the gate. It's disgusting, but we have to face that fact.

Right now, Obama's incompetence is our best hope. He's screwing things up so thoroughly, and the economy is so fragile, that the door is wide open for someone to oust him. The question is "who will it be?" I understand that an independent candidate has an uphill battle, but there's always a first time for everything. It's possible than an independent could get enough votes from the disgruntled voters in each party to pull off an upset right now.

All I know for sure is that four more years of this crap isn't an option, so we'd better find someone, and fast ...

J E H said...

....another politician, just what we need. Will America ever elect a statesman? Will America ever elect a Ron Paul? Will America ever nationalize the Federal Reserve? Will America ever limit offshore business expansion? Will America ever re-participate in America...?
Our system needs a complete overhaul. Instead of bailing out the Banks, let's invest in ourselves.

Buzzg said...

He is a smart man and an able speaker, however his strange acceptance of the so-called 'Global Warming' scam baffles me and rings some alarm bells. I wonder what else we don't know.