Former Newt Campaign Staff - Callista Gingrich, "It's All About Her"

As noted before, Newt Gingrich is a thoroughly self-centered and egotistical man. And based on a story in The New Yorker, he may be perfectly matched with his former mistress, now wife Callista Gingrich, who according to a former Gingrich staffer is "the single most self-centered person I’ve run into in politics — it’s all about her." Bizarrely, Callista Gingrich makes quite a show of her Catholicism which is surprising given the fact that per the official Catholic Church teaching, she's an adulterer. Some might think me bitchy for looking at Ms. Gingrich, but given the far right's penchant for maligning Michelle Obama, what's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander. Here are some excerpts from The New Yorker story:

As a couple, the Gingriches are a bit like Jack Sprat and his wife in reverse: he is pudgy and soft-featured, with droopy jowls and hooded eyes, while she is slender, with a sharply angled nose and bright-blue eyes that are always wide open. Her hair is platinum blond and very stiff, with one remarkable lock styled into an immobile, upward swoosh.

Though Callista is central to Gingrich’s life, her public role in his campaign has been largely ornamental. She accompanies him on the trail, smiling behind him at events; in December, she appeared with him in a Christmas video to ask, “Is there anything more inspiring than American towns and neighborhoods brightly lit for the holidays?” But she does not have a stump speech, and though she’s happy to exchange pleasantries with reporters, she has not been granting interviews, with the exception of a brief on-camera conversation with the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Callista Gingrich is a reminder of her husband’s wayward past, which may explain why she is the only one of the Republican candidates’ spouses to keep quiet.

According to current and previous staff members and friends, Mrs. Gingrich wields a great deal of decision-making power. Of the notorious Greek cruise, one former Gingrich strategist told me, “She said, ‘Either go on this vacation or we’re done.’ ” There were rules, he said, about “how many nights he could be away and what time he had to be home for dinner—which led to a huge abuse of private planes which we could not afford. There’s a sense that, I’m not gonna have a third failed marriage.”

[A] former strategist had a different assessment. “She’s the single most self-centered person I’ve run into in politics—it’s all about her. . . . The strategist allowed that the marriage has been good for Newt: “This is the most adult relationship the guy’s ever had.” But he suggested that it hasn’t been good for his campaign. “The core problem was that he was not willing to do the things he’d have to do to run for President. And Callista did not want him to run for President. That’s why he had to buy her so much damn jewelry.”

She does not seem like a forty-five-year-old, or at least not like a forty-five-year-old of this era. She has the style and smile of an astronaut’s wife, even in her downtime. Once, in Cedar Rapids, I happened to run into her in the women’s bathroom at the airport. In her suit and pearls, with her stiff coiffure, she looked as if she had just exited a beauty parlor in 1962.

Callista met Newt Gingrich while she was working for Gunderson, and, after she took a job as a clerk with the House Agriculture Committee, they began their affair. Her parents learned about it only when they returned from a camping trip and found dozens of messages from reporters on their answering machine. . . . At that time, Gingrich was leading the charge against Bill Clinton for his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, an intern more than twenty years his junior. As it happened, Callista was a congressional staffer twenty-three years Gingrich’s junior, the same age as his daughter Jackie.

Many conservative voters, particularly evangelicals, do not want to see just evolution or mellowing, though; they want to see repentance for what they view as profound transgressions. “Initially, my reaction to Newt Gingrich and to Callista is that the third wife doesn’t get to be the First Lady,” Penny Nance, the president of Concerned Women for America, told me.

Jason (Molotov) Mitchell, a Christian television producer who has linked Obama to Nazism, released a video in which he accused Gingrich—“the Kim Kardashian of the G.O.P.”—of being “the walking, talking definition of untrustworthy,” sneered at Callista for being “quite the missionary,” and asserted that “Newt and Callista are the last role models we want our sons and daughters looking up to.”

Callista was at his side, wearing a bright-red skirt suit and pearls, nodding in approval as her husband said the same things he’d been saying all week: That he wanted to give Americans “paychecks, not food stamps.” That he would be the second coming of Ronald Reagan. That he would change “the entire pattern of how Washington operates.” Callista watched and smiled and listened, the things she has to do the most these days. On the campaign bus, asked if her mind ever wanders at these events, she had replied, “No,” with a cheeky smile. “I hang on his every word.”