Get Off My Lawn - Newt, the Hungry Pontificator

If you dared look at the dais of last night’s Republican debate—that grim police lineup of the dishonest, oleaginous, and slightly mad—you would be excused from thinking that there is, to crib from Adam Smith, an invisible and slightly irrational hand at work this primary season, guiding the absolute worst candidate towards nomination. Newt Gingrich, the “career politician” (remember, politics is the only profession in which excessive amounts of experience is considered damaging), arrived with more political and personal baggage than any candidate since Herman Cain, yet exists as serious challenger to Mitt Romney, a politician with the folksiness and charisma of an Albanian bureaucrat.

Listen to the more alarmist predictions about what tragedies will soon befall America, then cut back to our saviors: If America faces economic doom, if our foundational freedoms are being comprised by a president so radical that he makes Cynthia McKinney look like a Bircher, these four men, ladies and gentlemen, are our sweater-vested bulwark against tyranny. It is Newt Gingrich, according to Newt Gingrich, that stands between collapse and salvation.

Despite his habit of vacillating on important political issues and sleeping with women who are inconveniently not his wife, Gingrich’s supporters, having watched the bar lowered by George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain, believe their man can defeat Obama in debates—he is supposedly skilled in these situations, a notion dispelled effortlessly during last night’s miserable performance—which will assuage voters worried about his ethical and moral lapses. Who will remember the disgrace and ignominy, those cheerful and goofy ads he shot with Nancy Pelosi, when Newt is parrying and thrusting with Obama?

While the scandals compound, Gingrich’s Republican enemies have determined that he shouldn’t be attacked for hypocrisy—the Freddie Mac lobbying, the open marriage request, the collapse of his speakership—but apostasy. Notreligious apostasy, though the former Speaker has declared more religious affiliations than Eldridge Cleaver, but one much more alarming: not expressing sufficient fealty to the Cult of Reagan. Far from being a standard-bearer of Reaganism, as he frequently claims, his Republican opponents have unearthed a series of comments, mostly contemporaneous with Reagan’s presidency, of Newt pooh-poohing the Great Communicator. A sin worse than all of those other sins.

It wasn’t always this way. In 1995, R. Emmett Tyrell, the squeaky-voiced editor of The American Spectator, featured Gingrich, along with Phil Gramm and Dick Armey, on his magazine’s cover, under the distant gaze of Reagan and the headline “He’s Back!” Back in the days of the “Contract with America,” Gingrichism was neo-Reagnism. In a column this week, Tyrell denounced—and Matt Drudge linked—Gingrich as a Clintonian triangulator and a “1960s generation self-promoter,” like the once-detested (and now grudgingly appreciated) Bill Clinton. For Tyrell, author of two justly forgotten books on the Clinton presidency and post-presidency, the comparison is meant as an insult, considering he once accused the 42nd president of being a drug-smuggling sociopath, possibly complicit in the murder of various political enemies.

Drudge also promoted the story (defined generously) that Gingrich, way back in 1964, supported the quixotic campaign of Barry Goldwater—another conservative talisman—despite having claimed in 1988 to have supported the more liberal Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. To the ideological base and obsessive followers of horse race politics, this is all terribly interesting, the necessary metrics for determining Gingrich’s true conservatism. It isn’t, though, the kind of thing that derails a campaign. (It is a measure of America’s innate, but moderate, conservatism that Democrats typically don’t spend campaign season trying to convince voters that they are the most liberal candidate on offer).

If, as seems increasingly unlikely, Gingrich snatches the nomination from Romney, the Obama campaign might want to revisit material passed over by Republican opposition research in favor of these various conservative litmus tests. Readers of Newt.org, where one can find various pronouncements on intergalactic imperialism and the “elite” media conspiracy against Newt, will have seen this red-meat admonition, often heard before the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, that it is “hard work [that] will rebuild the economy.” According to Gingrich, “We have a lot of people who are very spoiled."

While Romney’s attack machine ferret out deviationist comments on Reagan and Goldwater, I offer these comments on the spoiled and lazy, made by former Gingrich campaign chairman Matt Towery in December. During an interview with WYNC’s Brian Lehrer, Towery mentioned casually that he had “employed [Gingrich] for a time. That was a…lovely experience.” The lovely was drawn out; a heavy bit of stage sarcasm. Why, asked Lehrer, are you using that tone of voice? “Well, he didn’t do anything. I couldn’t get him to do anything. He would pontificate and eat, do all this other stuff…come to meetings,” but that was about it. What did you expect of him, Lehrer prodded? “I was trying to get him to work, actually.” It’s probably worth pointing out that Towery was the pro-Gingrich guest.

Newt’s scandals are so numerous—and so serious—that a former campaign chairman’s claim that Gingrich was an exceedingly lazy employee, who feathered his nest while not producing anything of value, is not considered especially noteworthy. It isn’t Jeremiah Wright or Gennifer Flowers. It isn’t an affair—we already know about those—or a drunk-driving arrest. It’s just Newt, the indolent, philandering lobbyist, being Newt. And just remember: his campaign will be sunk by a massive, coordinated media conspiracy of pointy-headed elites, and has nothing to do with his long, checkered history in politics.

Follow Michael Moynihan on Twitter: @mcmoynihan