The Newt Surge: Every Dog Has Its Day—Even the Dead Ones

Three months ago, Newt Gingrich looked like roadkill. Most of his campaign staff had quit, his money had run out, and his poll ratings were in the low single digits. When the conservative National Review polled its readers on whether he deserved a second look, the vast majority said no.

Now the Mouth of the South is back: climbing in the polls, raising money at a much faster rate than he had previously, and, strangest of all to behold, attracting praise from mainstream pundits. “My debate grades: Gingrich A-; Perry B+; Romney B+; Huntsman B; Bachmann B-; Santorum C+; Paul C; Cain C-,” Mark Halperin, of Time magazine, tweeted on Saturday night following the CBS/National Journal debate on foreign policy. Even before the debate, in which he joined Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann in endorsing military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Gingrich was on something of a roll. Two national polls released on Friday, one from CBS the other from McClatchy, both placed him in second place. (In the CBS poll (pdf), Herman Cain was leading; in the McClatchy survey (pdf), Mitt Romney was ahead.) Gingrich’s numbers are also rising in Iowa, South Carolina, and Florida, where three of the first four primaries will be held. At the National Review and other places where right-thinkers gather, Gingrich is now taken seriously again: “I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s leading polls in a week or two,” Rich Lowry, the longtime editor of the magazine, wrote a few days ago.

So what explains the turnaround? In a column for Politico yesterday, Jeff Greenfield, the veteran political analyst who now co-hosts “Need to Know,” a newsmagazine on PBS, gave much of the credit to the candidate himself, writing,

As Gingrich has done in just about every debate, again and again Saturday he was operating at a level of tactical and strategic skill far above his opponents. His eye for the mot juste, for the jab or counter-punch that will please his audience, is unparalleled. Whatever his liabilities as a prospective nominee—and they are legion—Gingrich has climbed back from irrelevancy to contender because he is playing Assassin’s Creed Revelations while his opponents are playing Pong.

That’s one theory, and there’s something to it. As Greenfield points out, Gingrich is expert at sending coded messages to right-wing groups others neglect: the U.N. bashers; the Fed bashers; evangelicals worried about attacks on Christians in Egypt. During last week’s CNBC debate, he even got in a shot at Saul Alinsky, the radical community organizer who died in 1972.

But Gingrich has done this sort of thing all along. Even at his lowest point, in July and August, he never stopped bashing the U.N.-Obama-Pelosi axis, his own version of the Trilateral Commission, and spouting off about his pet theories of everything from health-care reform to military strategy to the Constitution. Over the weekend, I met a woman who said she encountered Gingrich not too long ago at a reception in Hong Kong. What was he doing?, I asked. He was surrounded by a group of people, and he was delivering a peroration on ancient Greek history, she replied. Of course he was. Say what you like about Newt, he’s always been a world-class gasbag.

As a political candidate, on the other hand, he is the same combustible, dislikeable, self-regarding train-wreck-waiting-to-happen that he’s always been. The truth is, his rebound has almost nothing to do with him and almost everything to do with circumstances beyond his control.

As a former assistant professor of history at West Georgia College, and a self-described expert on socialism, Gingrich is doubtless familiar with the quote above from Karl Marx, which comes from “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” Contrary to some accounts, Marx wasn’t a crude economic determinist: he believed in the role of the individual, while pointing out, perfectly correctly, that larger forces, and prior history, determine the scope for individual action.

Since Marx’s time, of course, history has speeded up remorselessly, to the point where in the Republican primary each generation of conservative leadership lasts about a month. In August the new Messiah was Bachmann; in September it was Perry; in October it was Cain. Had any of these folks turned to be serious candidates, Newt would still be on his book tour. Their demise created a huge vacuum that somebody had to fill, and, with more plausible figures such as Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels still refusing to leap in, Gingrich has become the conservative candidate by default.

The probability of him winning the nomination is small. Intrade, the political betting market, currently puts it at 11.6 per cent, which sounds about right. (Romney’s odds of winning are 71.3 per cent.) But that doesn’t mean he can’t mount a semi-serious challenge and makes things interesting. Setting aside the chronic weakness of his conservative opposition, two things are working in his favor.

One is the mood of the country, which mirrors Gingrich’s sourpuss character. According to a new poll of voters in marginal states, from Politico and George Washington University, three in four Americans believe the country is “somewhat” or “strongly” on the wrong track—comfortably the highest figure in the poll’s history—and two in three don’t believe the next generation will be better off economically than the current generation. Romney and others will be competing with Gingrich to blame the President and congressional Democrats for this predicament, but on this subject Gingrich is a step ahead. For a year and a half, he has been rattling on about the threats to America’s soul presented by Obama’s “secular socialist machine,” which just happens to be the subtitle of his latest book.

Then there is the media, which Gingrich likes to berate at every opportunity. In this instance, for once, his interests and those of his media enemies are perfectly aligned. With ten months to go until the Republican National Convention in Tampa, the last thing anybody who is reporting on the campaign wants is a Romney rout. If the Republican front-runner were to sweep Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida with large margins, the whole thing could be more or less wrapped up by the end of January.

To prevent that from happening, you can expect in the coming weeks to read a lot more about Gingrich and his proposals, and you can also expect more assessments like this, from Jeff Greenfield: “Judged simply by the measure of political success, Gingrich has already wrapped up the Performer of the Year award.”

Welcome back, Newt. As a paid-up member of the campaign scrum, I, too, am glad that you will be around for a while to give Romney fits. Just don’t mind if I turn the sound down every now and again when you appear onscreen, and don’t ask me about your leadership skills. Unlike Rick Perry, I have the darndest time forgetting things, such as your statement to Time magazine in December, 1994, when you and your colleagues had just taken control of Congress: “I think we’ll have a good run. My guess is it will last 30 or 40 years.” Within eighteen months, Gingrich had shut down the federal government, resurrected Bill Clinton’s Presidency, been engulfed by scandal, and seen his colleagues plotting to get rid of him.

Let us end as we began, with another crotchety and long-winded ideologue. “Hegel remarks somewhere,” Marx wrote in the first line of “18th Brumaire,” “that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Origin
Source: New Yorker