National Review Online came out with this scathing piece against a Newt Gingrich candidacy. This is a big deal, as National Review is arguably the most respected and influential conservative outlet in America.
National Review adds on to a long list of conservative icons who are staunchly against a Gingrich candidacy…
- Ann Coulter has written numerous articles lambasting the former speaker.
- Charles Krauthammer believes he’s undisciplined and an unserious candidate (at least he thought).
- Michael Savage has offered Newt $1 million to drop out of the race.
- Glenn Beck says he might vote for Ron Paul as a 3rd party candidate.
- Bill Bennett has been critical of Newt for months.
- George Will wrote a harsh piece about Newt in the Washington Post.
This is a very diverse group of conservatives.
Some of you will surely say, “Who cares what Glenn Beck and Michael Savage say? They’re crazy!” Perhaps.
Others might say, “Who cares what George Will, Charles Krauthammer or Bill Bennett say? They’re Washington Insider/ Establishment types!” Perhaps.
And of course, you can’t really pigeon hole Ann Coulter. She’s all over the place. But you can’t deny that she’s very influential, smart and conservative.
So the big question…why do they all hate Newt?
I have written about my opinion that Newt would be a great President…But the fact that so many influential and respected conservatives dislike Newt, I have to admit, is a serious problem.
What do you think?
What do I think ?
I think that the commies are laughing. Each candidate and pundit is giving them the materials that they will need to attack any GOP candidate to the Presidency.
We are playing the old games of politics against an enemy that we DEEPLY misunderstand.
Its a fundamental conservative value to not take any unnecessary risks.
You need two things to win this election.
You need the Republican base that voted for McCain to vote for our guy this time and you need to get a fair amount of the folks on the edge of the Democrat base and outside of it who voted for Obama last time to switch.
Here is how I score it:
Newt is radioactive to Democrats and Independents. He has some portion of Republicans and a growing body of dissidents. The Geiger counter is ticking and trending upwards.
Romney is acceptable to many Democrats and Independents. He is acceptable to a large portion of Republicans and has a receding body of dissidents. He has been hit with everything and he just keeps on ticking. Apparently his training as a missionary getting doors slammed in his face for two years has provided the right kind of temper to his mettle. In my opinion, Romney shows a lot of character, over and over again. Regrettably, so does Newt, only its not the kind of character I want to see in the Chief Executive of this country.
Romney can win against Obama in the general election because he can be a unifying force of the wide swath of Americans in the middle of the country against the Coastal Democrats who currently occupy the government( yes, I said that on purpose. Lets use their gutter protest against them folks!). Romney can win because while other ‘flash in the pan’ candidates haven’t done the work to prepare grass roots state political organizations by not being able to organize or execute a plan in these states. Romney has a strong organization working in Iowa, New Hampshire and so on. He’s ready to battle beyond the primary season. Newt, who is asking to be the counties Chief Executive, has dropped the ball on even getting registered as a candidate in several states and cant seem to get a team working in Iowa, which is sort of important right now. Try to remember, it wont get easier after the primaries, it will get worse. You better have your act together before the big show comes. Newt is improving his way around. To me, this does not inspire confidence.
You cant phone this in from the podium, Newt. You have to plan, and you have to execute to that plan. You have to hire people and fire people to make that plan happen. Day after day with deliberation.
Basic Political Rule #451: If you cant run your own campaign, you cant run the country. Watching how someone runs a campaign is a good test of how they will run their administration. Newt is good on the speechifiyng and I salute him for that, but the execution part? track record is a little spotty, both in office and out.
In my opinion, Newt will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and the result of us voting for a “feel good” candidate will be to saddle us with 4 more years of an “occupying” political force.
Try and understand that we will be lucky even to make it to next year. I don’t hold out hope that we can make another 4 if we lose the election next year. The situation we face in this Republic is dire.
Is Romney perfect? I ask you, what candidate is or ever was? Don’t let your wish for “the perfect conservative candidate” be the enemy of “the good conservative” candidate. Remember that whomever you pick has to be seen as good not just to you, but to people who voted in a very big opposite direction last time.
In the words of that great 20th century philosopher Grace Jones:
“I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for you”.
I like them both and think they both can win.
Romney has never implemented a conservative plan. His legislative accomplishments are liberal ones. Newt is the only politician since RR to lead and implement a conservative plan. The case is closed on who is more conservative and who is more qualified.
But the real issue is who can win. You have repeated the talking points of the Romneyites (which are the same as those of the anti-Gingrich marxists). But for discussion, let’s just say the attacks are coming from well-meaning republicans who believe their own spin. Why should we believe it? Did they beat Obama? Did they beat Clinton? They did get Dubya elected but he wasn’t exactly RR re-incarnated, and Gore and Kerry were AWFUL candidates. But let’s discount Dubya’s inability or disinterest in reversing progressivism, and just count wins. Romney’s boys have led us to 2 victories in the last 5 presidential elections, including a defeat to a laughingly unqualified college sophomore. Plus they lost the Congress in 2006 and 2008. Why should we believe them about anything?
Gingrich led the effort to overturn decades of democratic control of the House. And he held the gains until he was crippled by his enemies, many of whom were Republican operatives.
I’m not at all certain whether Newt or Mitt is more electable, but one thing I am certain about is that the smart guys from the RomneyMcCainDole camp don’t have a good track record and haven’t done shit for the country other than playing a rear-guard action against the marxists.
Romneys never ending fight as Governor to keep same sex marriage out of Massachusetts seems pretty conservative to me. It would have been easy to adapt to a moderate line but instead, he chose not to do that and instead worked at every turn to stop it. A reminder, he was Governor, not dictator. He has only the executive branch and no support in the legislature. To work in that environment, it takes leadership. The other side did everything they could to stop him at every turn. He stood his ground and yes, on occasion, he even won some ground.
This is the state who’s political machine and power culture brought us Barney Frank, Whitey Bulger and John Connolly(FBI). That he did what he did in an east coast state with a heavily democratic legislature seems nothing short of heroic to me. Instead of being spurned as a lightweight he should be thanked for his courage.
I agree with your point that Romney’s record has to be understood in the context of the state where he was elected governor. And I also believe he is a conservative person, not a liberal one. Similarly, I discount many of Newt’s “sins” because he was making legislative sausage and later trying to find ways to apply conservative principles to the issues of the day.
But Newt’s record as a conservative is unparalleled, since he is really the only federal politician in the country who was at the wheel when significant conservative change was enacted.
Again, I think they are both good candidates and continue to watch the ebb and flow to make my own deterination about who is the more electable. I still lean to Gingrich but it’s clear that the blows are beginning to take a toll.
They hate Newt because he’s our American Churchill–by that I don’t mean a great statesman and national leader in a desperate situation–although he might become that if elected. Rather, I mean he’s where Winston was in the late 1930s, dismissed as a loon, or a book-writing know-it-all who only feathered his own nest, and so on.
Winston Churchill wrote a lot of books and kept himself in the news as a potential political player, and Gingrich has done the same. NONE of these others can manage that in the so many creative ways that Churchill and Gingrich have done (though Perry wrote a book, and though Mitt claims to have done so, too). Gingrich is polysided, and most of our politicians simply aren’t.
They’re envious. And envy is the one sin that has no pleasure whatever.
What dumbfounds me is why these establishment Repubs go for Romney, who seems the perfect used car salesman. If any of our major political players are true mountebanks, it is Ken-doll Romney. I am amazed they can’t see that. The people of Mass didn’t want him back, and he’s never really won any other big election. He is an electoral loser.
So, we’ll see. Gingrich either wins it or Mitt does. Gingrich has a chance to win the national by talking brilliantly, and avoiding spoken-word mistakes. Mitt and the Bamster would just read their telepromters, and in that contest, Bam would win.
The only good to come out of a Romney nomination (and his w/o question subsequent loss to Obama) would mean the end of the Republican Party. One way or another, it would be dead.
Unfortunately, so might the United States of America as we knew her.
An Préachán
It seems to me that many of the “conservative icons” have reasons for trashing Newt. I personally find Newt interesting and I enjoy his constant stream of ideas to think about. However, step back and see it from your local friendly independent buddy, liberal relation (since they’re usually not nice or friendly), or moderate neighbor’s perspective, and you can see why conservative icons do NOT want Newt. The Democrats and Obama would eat him up 24/7 minus the few hours Newt could devour Obama on television. The media would salvage what was left of Obama and twist it all on Newt. Newt is truly a time bomb. The reasonable non-conservative people I know would never, ever vote for Newt. They probably would for Romney, possibly others, likely not Perry (I like Perry, also, just saying people I know wouldn’t vote for him). The Newt smears write themselves. The opposition research would be effortless. To GOP voters, yeah, yeah, they know Newt and will over look all the fodder of his seriously huge baggage, but most non-conservatives don’t know Newt and his baggage would be new and not something they would over look. I truly think the “conservative icons” really, really, really want Obama defeated (like I do) and it’s insane to think that non-conservative will go for Newt. They won’t. And the conservative vote isn’t enough alone to beat Obama.
So your theory is that they will treat Romney with kid gloves.
Right.
Of course, at the moment, they are treating Romeny with kid gloves. You might ask yourself why.
duh, of course I’m not suggesting Romney will be treated with kid gloves- no one will be. Newt has tremendous baggage that not one other candidate has, between his personal life, political life, and financial life- heaven forbid something new comes to light about his academic life. I like the guy, but it won’t take more than a brain stem worth of intelligence to make a case against him, which is about the intelligence of liberals anyway.
I think they don’t like the fact that Newt hasn’t ever toed the line, be it the establishment line or their own version of the conservative line. Couple that with the fact that by going his own way, Newt was actually able to get stuff done, whereas all of his critics are either paper warriors or politicians who are great at talking about but not at doing things, and you have the grounds for hatred.
All of the critics (like everybody else) has their own turf to defend, and Newt, the most eclectic American politician doesn’t reside on any single area of turf. And he is better at talking that any of them, even though that isn’t really his vocation.
Newt is probably the best political thinker of his generation, at least on the conservative side of the ledger. Paul Ryan may challenge, but he really hasn’t done anything yet. Mark Levin is a genius in his own way, and wonderful at articulating principles, but he diminishes his impact with his angry-man inflexible termperment. Dubya wasn’t really a big political thinker, and he wasn’t able to change the political climate. Karl Rove is just a widgets guy, not a philosopher or a shaker and mover. Maybe Rush is probably the most influential conservative of the last 20 years, but Gingrich was in the bowels of Washington and was able to get big things done.
There’s a lot of jealousy in the anger against Newt.
His entire campaign staff walked out on him, the NRO editorial board said no, he was censored by an overwhelming margin and made to pay an ethics fine, he is brand damaged and he attacks in all directions…and SUPPORTS in all directions.
The criticisms are not based on leftist talking points. And…they are not easily dismissed.
And…it does us absolutely not a lick of good to dismiss them out of hand. We cannot afford to lose this election.
He makes for great political theater. We need fiscal stability and a serious adult at the helm. I am all for taking the fight to Obama (where Romney seems weak, timid and limp-wristed). But not at the price of losing.
My guys are not in the race. I think this primary season has been a disaster so far. But, the criticisms of Newt seem very real to me….many of them, anyway. And deserve a close inspection.
fyi, Newt has said that the campaign staff who walked out were not his old line advisors but new hires who wanted him to run a conventional campaign (which he did not have the money to run). He has said that his oldest advisors are still with him.
Proreason has excellent vignettes of the Conservative thinkers, talk show hosts and pundits, thanks for that. And cfbleachers is quite balanced and wise, and certainly has Romney pegged.
And Frank Martin has a lot of intelligent political points, too. But as I said earlier, does Romney have the electoral record to make any of us believe he will win a fight against Bam?
But we’re all of us asking the question, what in God’s name do we do?
I don’t know, but what Ben Franklin is supposed to have said back in 1776 is right on target today for those of us who love the America of the self-supporting individual, the rule of law, and classical liberalism: either we hang together, or we’ll all hang separately.
The scaffold is long-past being finished. The hangman only waits for four more years.
An Préachán
I don’t want Newt because the Newt of 1994 and 1995 became the Newt of 1998. I think it was all about Newt then and I think he would be loyal to himself first now. I’m no Romney fanatic, but a governor makes a better candidate than a senator or congressman every time it’s tried.