Quote:

---

He won with a glower. After Newt Gingrich in the Jan. 19 Republican debate fought off a totally reasonable question about an ex-wife’s account of his acknowledged adultery with an attack on “the elite media,” there was little doubt about what would happen. South Carolina is the rawest of GOP states, the political embodiment of the legacy of the man Gingrich was channeling with that stare and orchestrated outrage onstage: Richard Nixon.

He won with a glower. After Newt Gingrich in the Jan. 19 Republican debate fought off a totally reasonable question about an ex-wife’s account of his acknowledged adultery with an attack on “the elite media,” there was little doubt about what would happen. South Carolina is the rawest of GOP states, the political embodiment of the legacy of the man Gingrich was channeling with that stare and orchestrated outrage onstage: Richard Nixon.

His win in South Carolina on Saturday, Gingrich said, was about “something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be in the news media will take seriously: the American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being American and become some kind of other system.”

Nixon was a genius at this kind of politics, speaking up, as he put it in accepting the Republican nomination in Miami in 1968, for “the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.” In his epochal memorandum on “Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority,” Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips spoke of the resentments “the great, ordinary, Lawrence Welkish mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii” felt against the liberal elites who “make their money out of plans, ideas, communication, social upheaval, happenings, excitement,” according to Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. In recently released grand-jury testimony from 1975, Nixon told prosecutors that attacking him “is going to make you much more popular with the Washington press corps, with the Georgetown social set, if you ever go to Georgetown, with the power elite in this country.”

he question now is how far the Nixonian strategy can take Gingrich, who will doubtless continue to invoke the sunnier Reagan while using tactics learned from the darker Nixon. For most candidates, the kind of anger Gingrich is stirring is a good starter but not a good finisher — yet there is another element of the 2012 story with antecedents in 1968 that has yet to play out. “Watching George Romney [father of Mitt Romney] run for the presidency,” said Governor James Rhodes of Ohio, “was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, except that the bid was an undertaking that did not work. We’ll soon see whether there is anything new under the (Florida) sun. http://ideas.time.com/2012/01/23/why-newt-is-like-nixon/#ixzz1kIuAdYRc

---

Quote:

---

"Why liberals oppose a strong American presence in space."

That was the title of the very first speech by Newt Gingrich I ever attended, all the way back in the winter of 1983. The event was the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

The speech hit the two great themes that have characterized Gingrich's career to this day: enthusiasm for grandiose ideas -- wrapped in rancor, division and name-calling.
.....
(For Gingrich) campaign politics was about finding ways to define your opponent as alien, hostile and dangerous. The definition need not correspond to any actual real-world problem.
.....
You see the Gingrich method at work again in his famous comment to a reporter about his view of the Obama presidency:

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together" his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president. I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true. He was authentically dishonest."

Alien. Hostile. Dangerous.

But here's a problem with Gingrich-style politics. It does not long survive the encounter with real-world voter concerns.
.....
Gingrich has chased phantoms: In that 1983 speech about liberals and space, for example, Gingrich actually cited the popularity of the "Star Wars" movies as evidence that space exploration could be a winning issue for Republicans. The person most deluded by Gingrich's politics of cultural division has always been Gingrich himself.

Which is how this politician, so brilliantly adept at manipulating the internal politics of the Republican Party, has fared so badly whenever he steps onto the national stage. For all the momentum supposedly unleashed by his win in the Republican South Carolina primary, Gingrich remains one of the very most disliked figures in national politics, as Josh Marshall reminds readers in this remarkable chart.

Nor is it only Democrats who disapprove. Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.

The reaction to Gingrich's poll surge in December was panic among senior Republicans, and the panic is only intensifying now. It's striking that almost none of Gingrich's former colleagues in the House has endorsed him for president. Striking that nobody associated with a past Republican presidential association has done so.

He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists -- and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin -- but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide. http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/23/opinion/frum-gingrich-enthusiasm/index.h
tml!

Quote:

---

Pretty sure the outrage wasn't manufactured

---

Quote:

---

People who have been around Newt Gingrich a lot have surely seen the scene: There's Gingrich, retinue of followers in tow, just before a big speech, bragging about how he's going to bowl over the crowd, really "wow" them, reveling in his own splendor. He gives off an air of a self-infatuated actor about to take the stage, playing a wholly fictional character rather than being himself. It's all a show. It's all about how to make the audience applaud. It was that same attitude that was on display at last Thursday's debate when he ripped apart John King for asking the question about Marianne Gingrich's allegations, calling King "despicable," only to bound over to King when the debate was over and congratulate him, all smiles, for conducting such a great debate. Gingrich's attack on King was all feigned. It was all for show.

Well, in a lengthy but highly enlightening article last month that I somehow missed until Friday afternoon, Mickey Edwards, former congressman and former chairman of the American Conservative Union, talks about just that same experience of Gingrich playing a role for applause whether he believes what he's saying or not.

Quote:

---

I've always thought that if he had not entered politics, Newt should have gone to Hollywood; he has become unusually adept at adopting personas for public consumption. In that sense he is every bit as good as a Robert DeNiro or a Robert Duvall. He is, above all, an actor. This is why he is so appealing to those who know only what they see on a stage...We all try to shape how people see us, we all want to appear smarter than we may think ourselves to be, pats on the back are always welcome. Newt's self-aggrandizing antics were theater; weird, perhaps, but not anything to be concerned about. So why have so many people who know him now begun to warn about the possibility that he could become president -- and how has that come to pass, anyway? First, as to how this prospect has arisen. Gingrich was a back-bencher in the House, noisy more than productive, but luck intervened to help him realize his ambitions....But to Gingrich, parties -- confrontational parties -- are essential tools to be used to gain, and hold, power. It is power, not wise governance, that exerts the magnetic pull.... But it is now time to turn away from the spectacle of American Gladiator and consider not who we most like to watch -- the entertainer -- and begin to think seriously about the future of the United States. It is not a future we want to enter with a Newt Gingrich in the Oval Office.

---

http://spectator.org/blog Gingrich alone finally figured out that if it’s red meat that’s wanted, you might as well rip chunks of it from the flesh of the unctuous moderators and throw it right at the ravenous studio audience.

---

Quote:

---

Newt Gingrich's best moment in last night's debate was when he responded to a question about his ex-wife's claim that he proposed an "open marriage." He raged, "I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that."

His best moment -- and, naturally, the one most grossly at odds with reality. For Newt to complain about "destructive" allegations is like Kim Kardashian disparaging publicity-seekers. This is the same guy who, as a member of the GOP House leadership in 1990, advised Republican candidates to smear Democrats with such terms as "sick," "bizarre,” "anti-flag," "anti-family," and "traitors."

Gingrich was urging his allies to make "destructive, vicious, negative" claims as a matter of simple strategy. Whether they were remotely true was irrelevant.

Having raised smears to an art form, he now complains when the news media reports the plausible, unflattering claims of his former wife. Which just goes to show that no matter how cynical, shameless and morally bankrupt you think Newt is, he'll always prove that he's even worse. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/chi-newts-phony-out
rage-20120120,0,7128632.story COURSE they ate it up; he knows his audience. Newt's style has always been the same, and he's back at it. He knows how to fire up an audience; he's a master at it. But their reaction only proves how good he is at it, nothing more. As does his winning So. Carolina; he knows "who" So. Carolina is, and he played to them magnificently.

The fact that you bought into it merely shows that you're part of that audience, nothing more.