Maureen Dowd on Callista Gingrich

I love Maureen Dowd when she's on a roll. She can slice and dice hypocrites and underscore the ridiculousness and/or narcissism of the self-important who ought to listen less to their hugely inflated egos. The legends in their own mind crowd, if you will. In today's New York Times column Dowd trains her aim on Callista Gingrich, the latest wife of serial adulterer Newt Gingrich and would be GOP presidential nominee. And she delivers some wonderful zingers that are right on target. In some ways, Newt and Callista seem to deserve each other. Both seem to be the height of hypocrisy as they wear their Catholicism - something new found for Newt - on their sleeves even though the Church's dogma labels them both as adulterers and unfit to receive communion. Here are some column highlights:

IF you want to figure out why Newt Gingrich is still out there grasping for lost power, howling at the moon like King Lear, look to Callista. You can find her anytime standing statue-still on stage next to Newt as he speaks, gazing at him with such frozen attentiveness that she could give a master class to Nancy Reagan.

[T]he 45-year-old Callista has created an entirely new model for a spouse, standing mute in her primary color suits and triple-strand pearls looking at the 68-year-old Newt for the whole event, her platinum carapace inclined deferentially toward his shaggy gray mane.

“She’s a transformational wife,” Alex Castellanos, the Republican strategist, told me. “She’s the wife who makes the candidate think he is destiny’s gift to mankind, born to greater things.” And when a woman who wants to be a Transformational Wife merges with a man who calls himself a Transformational Figure, you can expect a narcissistic blastoff.

Castellanos weaves the common tale of a “great but frustrated” man: “The first wife, and often the second, do not grasp his brilliance or grandeur. The starter wives try to confine him in their small world. But his drive to fulfill his gargantuan potential is too powerful. He rebelliously breaks conventions. “Then he finds the muse who sees him as he sees himself. He is a man of history and belongs to something larger.

The Republican establishment is chasing Newt around the country with a butterfly net. But when he looks into Callista’s bright blue eyes, he’s reminded of his adolescent dreams of exploring galaxies and saving civilization. When Barack is cocky and looks at Michelle, he might see her thinking: “You’re no messiah. Pick up your socks.” But when Newt is cocky and looks at Callista, he sees her thinking: “You are the messiah. We’ll have your socks bronzed.”

In politics, she’s a double-edged spouse. She feeds his ego like a goose destined for pâté, but drains support among some women and some evangelicals who disapprove of a man who keeps trading in wives, even sick ones. At the Texas meeting of evangelicals last month, one of the leaders, James Dobson, questioned whether Callista, “a mistress for eight years,” as he put it, would make a good first lady.

Draped in Tiffany diamonds, Callista is the embodiment of the divide between Gingrich’s public piety and private immorality.

Newt relays that she has described herself as a hybrid of Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy. The campaign does not want to remind voters that the relationship, portrayed as so redemptive, was born in sin and hypocrisy.

There’s always a chance, of course, that Callista is not staring so intently at Newt to make him feel more Napoleonic. Maybe she just doesn’t want to let him out of her sight. As the maxim goes, “When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job opening.”