Newt Gingrich: Trivial Issues Warrior

With Newt Gingrish busy pandering to the Christianist and Tea Party base of the Republican Party, it's worthwhile to see what the few remaining rational conservatives are saying. One such individual is David Frum who has been largely exiled from the GOP because he doesn't drink enough Kool-Aid to please the crazies and has a habit of speaking out against idiocy. In a column yesterday in the Daily Beast, Frum looks at Newt Gingrich - someone he obviously dislikes and sees as unfit for the presidency. Here are some highlights:

In my column for CNN, I discuss the problems with Newt Gingrich's leadership style:

A classic display of the Gingrich method was the memo he circulated to elite Republicans in the fall of 2004. (Gingrich is about as much a Washington "outsider" as the maitre d' at Cafe Milano.)

"There is a temporary narrow partisan division among Americans, but there is no narrow values division. On a wide number of issues Americans average about four to one in favor of Center-Right values. In one set of 34 issues the American people averaged 77% on one side and 17% on the other side.


To drive home the supposed values separation between the Kerry ticket and the nation, Gingrich urged the Bush ticket to focus attacks on a series of issues that highlighted that supposed 4:1 values divide, including:

"1. A work requirement for welfare: 87% of Americans say yes, 5% no. John Kerry and the Senate Democrats have blocked the bill for three years.

2. Government should help faith-based initiatives help the poor: 72% of Americans agree, 26% disagree; Kerry is with the 26%.

3. U.S. interests are more important than international organizations: 73-24; Kerry's positions favor the 24%.

4. Violent attackers of pregnant women who kill the baby should be prosecuted for killing the baby: 84% of Americans say yes, 9% no. Kerry voted no.

5. Children should be allowed to pray at school: 78% of Americans agree; Kerry is against it.

Looking back on that Gingrich platform from the perspective of eight years later, it's striking how utterly irrelevant those five highlighted points were to the largest problems of the time. It does not address the inflating housing bubble and the lax financial regulations that would wreak such disaster in the years ahead. It does not address stagnating incomes or rising health costs. It does not address Iraq or Iran or the war in Afghanistan.

[T]o Gingrich, such substantive issues were not the stuff of campaign politics. Campaign politics was about finding ways to define your opponent as alien, hostile and dangerous. The definition need not correspond to any actual real-world problem.

You see the Gingrich method at work again in his famous comment to a reporter about his view of the Obama presidency: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together" his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president

But here's a problem with Gingrich-style politics. It does not long survive the encounter with real-world voter concerns. The pollsters who generate those 70% numbers are creating a statistical artifact, not a workable political majority. In his pursuit of a governing majority, Gingrich has chased phantoms: In that 1983 speech about liberals and space, for example, Gingrich actually cited the popularity of the "Star Wars" movies as evidence that space exploration could be a winning issue for Republicans. The person most deluded by Gingrich's politics of cultural division has always been Gingrich himself.

For all the momentum supposedly unleashed by his win in the Republican South Carolina primary, Gingrich remains one of the very most disliked figures in national politics. . .

Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.

The reaction to Gingrich's poll surge in December was panic among senior Republicans, and the panic is only intensifying now. It's striking that almost none of Gingrich's former colleagues in the House has endorsed him for president. Striking that nobody associated with a past Republican presidential association has done so.

He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists -- and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin -- but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide.

I believe that Frum is 100% on point. Which, of course, means that his reasoned analysis will be almost utterly ignored within the Christianist/Tea Party ranks.