Like a crazed and angry badger with one foot caught in a trap, Newt Gingrich is lashing out in all direction during a frenzied last, desperate tour across Florida and, in doing so, is becoming a grave danger to the republican party he purports to want to lead. He is sinking in the polls faster than the Costa Concordia as Mitt’s Super PAC avalanche has him buried up to his neck in a host of negative ads mostly consisting of his own words come back to haunt him. Newt’s smartest-guy-in-the-room debate shtick has backfired badly and he finds himself in need of an electoral miracle as the polls open today across what may turn out to be his swampy Waterloo.
Newt and his confederacy of dunces – Mike Reagan, Sarah Palin, Herman Cain – are all trying to make the case that a guy who has made a career out of being a corporate bag man in Washington is the avenging outsider who will lance the poisonous boil of Washington corruption. A more ludicrous argument can scarcely be imagined. He has unironically wrapped himself in the cheap, made-in-China American flags favored by the tea party and is promising to return to America’s traditional promise of “exceptionalism”, while fomenting World War Three in the Middle East, building a colony on the moon, stripping the government down to an every-man-for-himself minimum and establishing christianity as the American version of the hated Sharia Law he and his supporters so fear. Wow…
It’s not surprising really – Newt has always been first in line for the circular firing squad and is legendary for being the life of the party for a while but the one guy who will eventually want to strip naked and go set fire to the Dean’s office at three in the morning. He can’t see where the line is and, moreover, in his over-zealous enthusiasm, doesn’t even want to know where it is. His accusations against Obama are so over the top they will become his epithets; he’s an anti-Christian socialist elitist Alinsky-ite. Romney has gone from a Massachusetts moderate to a “pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-taxes liberal” . Typical Newt; he’s a very creative name caller and back row insult shouter. The problem is, while that may appeal to that thin slice of the electorate that is still enraged and sees red every time Obama’s name is mentioned, at this point the majority of even republican primary voters are rolling their eyes and pulling the lever for Romney – the latest polls put him up by double digits and pulling away.
In Werner Herzog’s masterpiece, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, the half-mad main character is on a hopeless quest to find the lost city of El Dorado in the South American jungle and slowly goes completely insane as the expedition dwindles through death and disaster, ruling over a smaller and smaller group of slowly starving and hallucinating men, until only he is left. Hmmm…catch my meaning there, Newt? In Vietnam War era political double speak, you’re going to destroy the village in order to try and save it.
This is, of course, monumentally misguided but Gingrich can’t help himself – this is who he is. This is why the republican establishment is largely backing Romney. They may be holding their collective noses while doing so, and they may have abandoned their hope of winning the presidency behind Mitt, but damned if they’re going to have Newt lead them over a cliff and cause a disaster all the way down to mayoral races. It’s being reported this morning that Newt – in a fresh blast of overwrought hyperbole - has his campaign “robo-calls” claiming Mitt “forced holocaust survivors to eat non-kosher food” , an angle that perhaps could only work in a state like Florida and reminds of nothing so much as a World Weekly News headline, like “Bigfoot stole my wife!!!”.
Well, go down swinging, Newt. You gotta be you. But this summer, while you and your notorious-but-forgiven ex-mistress sit on the porch of your 5,000 square foot mansion in Virginia sipping sweet tea, think about this; if you could have just stifled your looney alter ego for 12 short months, you might well have won the nomination. We’ll save a seat on the next flight to the moon for a second honeymoon…
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