Newt Gingrich: The GOP's Slump Buster?

Republicans begin their love affair with a man who knows more than the average congressman about that very subject.

The latest Quinnipiac poll of the contenders for the Republican presidential nomination has Newt Gingrich leading the motley crew of former governors, congresspeople, and pizza magnates that make up the GOP's hopes for the White House. After having just about every candidate ride to the top at some point in the campaign (except for poor but remarkably likable Buddy Roemer), it was really kind of inevitable that the Newtster would end up there as well. John Farmer of the Newark Star-Ledger has seven reasons as to why Newt, whose original campaign staff all quit back in June figuring they were aboard a sinking ship, is now the man to beat: "Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney." Gingrich has relied on his unparalleled electoral experience – it's tough to spend three decades in Congress and not learn a thing or two – to know when to fold them, so to speak, refusing to get into the playing-to-the-base tactics that both propelled and sunk the hopes of Cain, Bachmann, and Perry. And while he "comes bearing more personal baggage than an intercontinental jet airliner," notes Gingrich, he has the conservative bona fides that the far more bland and centrist Romney lacks, and could turn out to be "the anti-Romney GOP conservatives seem to want — the Great Right Hope." We guess that at this point, all that someone needs to be a "Great Right Hope" is the ability to string together a complete sentence, find Libya on a map, and not have the last name "Romney". In that case, Newt's the man.

And what of that personal baggage? Over at Politico, Gingrich's longtime congressional foe, former Democratic caucus chair Martin Frost, enlightens us to all his delightful personality quirks (or moral failings, whatever you want to call them). Chief among them is that he's onto his third marriage, which began as an extramarital affair in the 1990s as Newt was railing day in and day out about Bill Clinton's dalliances in the Oval Office. Then there's his dealings with Freddie Mac, which paid Newt nearly $2 million before the housing crisis hit for unspecified consultation, his near-suicidal decision to shut down the federal government in 1995, tax transgressions that led to him resigning from Congress ... on and on it goes. Gingrich does have obvious strengths, writes Frost, notably that "he has thought a great deal about national issues and can discuss them intelligently," which gives him a leg up over the rest of the field. But let's just say that amending the tax code isn't exactly the first thing that will pop into the average voter's mind when they hear the name "Newt Gingrich."

The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who runs their conservative-leaning Right Turn blog, figures that Gingrich is more likely to be undone by two more subtle flaws: "An impulsiveness that convinces him every loopy idea that comes into his head is pure gold and a complete lack of honesty in coming clean (as in the Freddie Mac episode, when he insists he wasn’t 'lobbying')." A case in point was Newt's curious decision last week to expound on the virtues of scrapping the country's child labour laws that prevent "children in the poorest neighbourhoods" from "earning money." After the weekend, Newt's tone had softened, saying he just wanted kids to be "empowered to succeed." Rubin asks us to "imagine now an entire general election campaign of this sort of thing. President Obama would not need to leave the White House. His entire ad campaign would simply be clips of Gingrich saying very dumb things and then trying to say he didn’t mean it. Are Republicans really going to give him that luxury?" Our guess is no, and that Mitt Romney continues his bland-a-thon all the way to the nomination once Newt follows the trajectory of every flash-in-the-pan Republican we've seen so far in 2011.