If the 2012 GOP nomination process was an actual horse-race, the competition would not have reached the first turn yet. That happens in January, when Iowa and New Hampshire Republicans get first crack at picking the field. We’d have seen surges from Trump, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain right out of the gate — with all of them running out of gas before the first turn. What does that tell you?
Today’s favorite is Newt Gingrich, who leads Romney by a nose. Yes, that’s the Newt Gingrich who pushed the impeachment of Bill Clinton only to resign amid revelations of his own peccadilloes. Remember his staff resigning en masse a few months ago because he spent too much time pitching his books and video projects and not enough campaigning? Remember him walking back his own quotes on the Ryan Plan in May? Remember adult entertainment-gate and Tiffany-gate?
Because this woman chooses not to recall any of that:
Lillie Anderson sums up what’s happening to Newt Gingrich’s campaign: reconsideration.
Anderson, 76, spoke at a forum at GuideOne Insurance today in West Des Moines and told the former U.S. House speaker that she admires him for shying away from attacking his Republican peers and that she is now leaning towards supporting him.
“He was just one of the people to me. I didn’t have any special interest in him,” Anderson, a Des Moines resident, said of her thoughts earlier this year of Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign. “But now it just seems that he’s about ‘Oh, save us.’”
‘Oh, save us’ — from what? From the dangerous Kenyan anticolonialism of Gingrich’s wet dreams? From the rising threat of paganism? From atheism and radical Islam? From an electromagnetic pulse? From gay-married gay fascists? From Obamacare “death panels“? No one asked Ms. Anderson to clarify which particular bogeyman is her Emmanuel Goldstein, but it doesn’t really matter because (A) they’re all in it together, and (B) Gingrich will ‘save us:’
“We’re very close … It’s better than when I was at 4 [percent],” Gingrich said at GuideOne Insurance company. “Look, this is the most volatile race in my lifetime. I don’t know of any race like this, maybe if go back to 1940 when Wendell Wilke came out of nowhere at the very end. But this is a wild race. Who know what the polls are going to be two months from now? I’m not going to tell you that I’m on the way. The American people are really deeply concerned about our country. They have a real sense that something has to happen, and I think they’re going to keep pushing until they find somebody who can take the pressure and can withstand it.”
Newt might as well have said “until they can find someone who isn’t Mitt Romney,” because that is what’s really going on here. Your modern Republican Party is divided into two factions: the 55% who desperately want to shut up about gay marriage and abortion, and the 45% who cannot shut up about gay marriage and abortion. Romney is seen as the nuanced milquetoast; one by one, his competitors have tried to outrun him to the right. All have lost their footing, and I don’t see any reason why Newt should be different.
Which is not to say that I hope he fails. On the contrary, in many ways Gingrich may be the perfect GOP candidate, as he embodies the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement (see Ms. Anderson above). As I said regarding Herman Cain the week before his flameout, Gingrich will do just fine for a nominee.
