Centroids :
It would seem to be time for a post mortem for Newt Gingrich.
At the moment the odds against Newt regaining any traction whatsoever
in the remaining GOP primary contests should be set at about 1000 : 1.
The following article pretty much says it all. Louisiana finished off
Gingrich.
All he managed in the state was 16 %. Had he won either Mississippi or
Alabama
matters might have been different, but if cows had wings they could fly,
and things simply are not that way in the world we live in.
Just one qualification, some kind of serious "event" could change
everyone's calculus.
An Israeli strike on Iran , for example. since it might very well ignite
the Mid East
and inspire massive backlash in Dar al-Islam. Something like that, or any
other
major revolt of the Muslim masses and Newt would be relevant again, since,
after all, he is the only candidate who knows diddle about the subject.
Granted,
he doesn't know all that much, objectively, but compared to all the
others,
including Obama, ironically, Newt knows a heck of a lot more.
But short of such a development it does look like Newt had his last hurrah,
in Natchez, Biloxi, Montgomery, Mobile, etc, and now the circus must fold
its tents and leave town. As the article says, expect some final action in
Wisconsin,
and conceivably Newt might soldier on until Texas, but smart money is on
his finally suspending his campaign.
It must be said that I expected a better-run campaign on the part of
Gingrich.
But apparently he "winged it" most of the way, relying on his grandson's
advice
prior to making major decisions. Not that we should take his claims to this
effect
all that seriously, but who knows ? Jimmy Carter made similar claims
and in his case he was dead serious. At that, the way Newt's campaign
unfolded maybe he was taking advice from his grandson. Something
has to explain the amateurish way he went about seeking election.
Newt is smart as hell. Yet the campaign he ran was unimaginative, "typical
politician"
style politics, and with a surfeit of bombast. To say that I am
disappointed would be
an understatement. At a minimum I expected another "Mo Udall" campaign,
in reference to 1976 when Udall came close, again and again, in the contest
against Jimmy Carter in the Democratic primaries. Mo was very good,
just not quite good enough. Instead, not an original observation,
Newt is on the verge of becoming another Harold Stassen, someone
who didn't know when to quit and went from being one of America's
leading "elder statesmen" to someone no-one could take seriously.
Ron Paul , as much as I dislike the man, at least has a rationale, he is
trying to build a movement. He never expected to win the nomination,
at least this is his spiel after doing no better than a couple of close
second place
finishes. But every other contest and he has been stuck at 15 %, or less,
about 5 % in conservative states. Regardless, he motivated hundreds of
thousands of people to take his cause seriously.
Newt could have sought to lead a movement. He chose not to, however,
and instead has been happy to play the part of party politician,
no movement, just more of the same kind of politics that
became yesterday's news, long ago, and which only serves
establishment political interests.
The best anyone can now say is that is was "fun" while it lasted.
But Newt's hour is effectively over..........
Unless there is a Muslim uprising in the Mid East.
Unless Rick or Mitt says something so odious that one or the other commits
political suicide.
Unless an Obama scandal of some kind surfaces.
Etc.
And there is the rub. Something like this, however unlikely,
is always a possibility.
But looking at the situation as it currently exists,
Newt is toast.
My humble opinion
Billy
================================
The New Republic
The Sad End of the Gingrich Campaign
* _
Walter Shapiro
_
(http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/101976/newt-gingrich-presidential-campaign-eulogy#)
* March 24, 2012
"At an age when most young men are focused on playing sports and meeting
girls, Newt was fantasizing about saving the world.”
—Steven M. Gillon, _The Pact_
(http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryAmerican/Since1945/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTMyMjc4MQ==)
, 2008
Despite Newt Gingrich’s best efforts, it looks like the world is going to
have to save itself. A humiliating third-place finish in Saturday’s
Louisiana primary should have extinguished the last embers of Gingrich’s
wildfire
dream of a second-ballot victory at the GOP Convention. Any Newtonian
fantasy about stopping Mitt Romney in Tampa requires the former House speaker
to
continue to accumulate convention delegates. But Gingrich—after winning a
combined 9 percent of the vote in Louisiana and the prior Illinois primary—
is now in the goose-egg phase of his descent into irrelevance.
How hard it must be for Gingrich at 68 to accept that his active political
career is over for good. So Newt and Callista, according to a schedule
released by the campaign Sunday, will be holding Wisconsin rallies at the end
of the week in advance of the April 3 primary. It undoubtedly will be
Potemkin Village Politics—scant crowds, minimal press coverage, but with the
purported trappings of a presidential campaign. Since, according to Politico,
Gingrich has begun _paying off vocal campaign creditors_
(http://www.politico.com//blogs/burns-haberman/2012/03/newt-begins-paying-off-debts-118366.html)
, there should be enough money left for a Wisconsin weekend in
presidential primary fantasy camp.
The dream, as Gingrich has told it, began with a 15-year-old boy’s tour of
World War I battlefields in 1958. It was at Verdun that Gingrich probably
got his first inkling that his historical role would be to rescue America
from the fate of Old Europe. What we do know for sure is that the 1994
Capitol takeover ignited Gingrich’s White House dreams. In the House speaker’s
office, Gingrich began actively plotting a 2000 campaign. A breakthrough
Republican House victory in 1998 would set things up—and that was all but
guaranteed, since historical cycles dictate that a president’s party always
loses seats in the sixth year of his term. But then came Monica Lewinsky,
impeachment fever (which Gingrich was late to develop), a 1998 GOP electoral
setback, and Newt’s embarrassing resignation as House speaker one step ahead
of a Republican revolt.
So like other world-class historical figures (FDR after polio, Winston
Churchill on the back benches of Parliament, Richard Nixon after his last press
conference), Gingrich made the best of his time in the wilderness. There
were books, speeches, movies, consulting fees for historical wisdom and, of
course, a third marriage. But 2012 was to be his year of redemption. Of
course, when Gingrich declared his candidacy in May 2011, he was _ridiculed in
the press_
(http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/88077/newt-gingrich-republican-president-primary-win)
for being a failed politician (like Rick
Santorum), who was cluttering up the presidential field and preventing serious
candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman from getting a clean shot at
Romney. And that was before the Greek cruise with Callista and the
resignation of most of his campaign staff.
Gingrich’s long Harold Stassen-esque good-bye from the 2012 campaign has
already obscured memories of how stunningly close Newt came to dethroning
Mitt as the king of inevitability. Resurrected through compelling debate
performances, Gingrich led all the _Iowa pre-caucus polls_
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/ia/iowa_republican_presidential_primary-15
88.html#polls) for a month during the late fall. What deflated Gingrich
in Iowa was his own puffed-up sense of entitlement as much as the pro-Romney
super PAC attack ads.
After all the political obituaries had been filed and forgotten, Gingrich
then came roaring out of nowhere to win the South Carolina primary by a
double-digit margin. This was a triumph that had less to do with geography or
demographics than Gingrich’s persuasive argument that he was the only
Republican who could beat Barack Obama in a debate. Interviewing voters at a
polling place in Bluffton, near Hilton Head, I repeatedly heard admiring
references to Gingrich’s boast that he would allow Obama to bring a
teleprompter
to the presidential debates. According to the _South Carolina exit polls_
(http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/primaries/epolls/sc) , Gingrich won more
than half the votes of Republicans who said that their top priority was
defeating Obama.
But after he crashed and burned in the Florida primary, Gingrich learned
that there are no third acts in American lives. He tried to be the Southern
candidate, but finished a close second behind Rick Santorum in Mississippi
and Alabama. Then Newt tried to repeat in Louisiana his one-state-at-a-time
strategy that had worked so well in Georgia. Not only did Newt win just 16
percent of the vote, but _his wipeout_
(http://www.cnn.com/election/2012/primaries/epolls/sc) was consistent across
all demographic and ideological
categories, according to the Louisiana exit polls. What this means is that
(unlike Romney with upper-income Republicans and Santorum with evangelicals)
there is no identifiable Gingrich constituency in the GOP.
With more than 130 delegates (although all GOP delegate calculations are
murky), Gingrich would, in theory, have a role at a contested Republican
Convention. Morley Winograd, an architect of the Democratic Party’s arcane
delegate rules and a veteran of the contested Kennedy vs. Carter 1980
Convention, suggested in an _insightful column_
(http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Morley_Winograd_C3BD4A34-32A1-46A7-B8FF-5444D2E8BFD0.html)
in Politico that
Santorum and Gingrich should join forces in a last-ditch stop-Romney
coalition. With almost all future GOP primaries winner-take-all by
congressional
district, Winograd theorized that the anti-Mitt candidates could divvy up
the districts based on their comparative strength against Romney. There’s
only one problem: It is hard to identify a spot on the remaining primary map
where Gingrich would be a stronger challenger than Santorum.
So it ends for Gingrich without even a whimper. He will go through the
motions of campaigning while visiting zoos (I suspect the _Milwaukee County
Zoo_ (http://www.milwaukeezoo.org/) will merit a pre-primary visit) and
dining in plush hotel restaurants with Callista. When the primaries are
finally
over, Gingrich may even be given a brief prime-time slot at the Tampa
Convention if he effusively endorses the nominee and pledges not to _gush
about
beach volleyball_
(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/n/newt_gingrich.html) as he did at
the 1996 GOP Convention.
But the dream that has defined Newt Gingrich’s life for more than a half
century ended Saturday without fanfare in the Louisiana bayous. It has been a
long journey from Verdun to being done.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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