National Post
PJ: So the GOP offers up a "Fruit Loop" and a Clown?
Newt Gingrich could bring ugly baggage to 2012 presidential race
By Sheldon Alberts
WASHINGTON — When it comes to affairs of the heart, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has never displayed especially good timing — or sensitivity — in making big decisions.
His first wife, Jackie, says Gingrich discussed details of their pending divorce while she was in hospital recovering from uterine cancer. He ditched his second wife, Marianne, in a phone call while she was at a party celebrating her mother’s 84th birthday. And Gingrich carried on a torrid fling with his future third wife, Callista, a congressional staffer 23 years his junior, while leading impeachment proceedings in Congress against Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Now, as he prepares to enter the 2012 White House race, Gingrich must be hoping his instincts for major political moves are more finely honed than those which guided his personal ones.
The 67-year-old former House Speaker plans to launch this week a presidential exploratory committee, aides say, making him the first high-profile GOP candidate to formally test the 2012 waters.
According to Fox News Channel, where Gingrich is employed as a political commentator, the one-time Georgia congressman will make the announcement Thursday in Atlanta.
“For those liberals who think 2010 was the peak — no, 2010 was the appetizer,” Gingrich recently told the Conservative Political Action Committee conference, referring to Republican gains in last November’s midterm elections. “2012 is the entree.”
Gingrich comes to the Republican race with a reputation in Washington circles as an “ideas man” who is committed to beating President Barack Obama on policy, not personality.
He shot to national prominence following the “Republican revolution” of 1994, when he led the GOP to its first House majority in four decades. His “Contract with America” was a conservative blueprint for smaller government and balanced budgets that sealed his reputation as a leading Republican thinker.
While he has courted Tea Party activists who currently wield significant power within the GOP, political analysts say Gingrich’s personal foibles and past ethics problems pose the biggest obstacles to winning the Republican nomination.
Apart from his two acknowledged affairs and divorces, Gingrich was fined $300,000 by the House in 1997 for lying about his use of tax-exempt foundations for political purposes.
“Gingrich, a history professor earlier in life, mainly has a problem with his own personal and political history. The baggage is pretty heavy, and most people remember it,” Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Postmedia News.
Just last week at an event in Pennsylvania, Gingrich grew perturbed when a Democratic activist questioned him about how he could set the bar for “moral conduct” given his past infidelities.
“I’ve had a life which, on occasion, has had problems. I believe in a forgiving God, and the American people will have to decide whether that’s their primary concern,” Gingrich replied. “If the primary concern of the American people is the future . . . that’s a debate I’ll be happy to have.”
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While Gingrich can boast of passing surplus budgets while Speaker of the House in the 1990s, Sabato says he suffers from a “likability deficit” that would make him a tough sell among general election voters.
A recent CNN poll of Republicans voters showed Gingrich trailing possible GOP contenders Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin.
In early-voting states like Iowa and South Carolina — where evangelicals are a dominant force in Republican politics — Gingrich faces a particular challenge convincing voters he is fit to carry the GOP banner in 2012.
“Voters recognize Newt is smart, but they have never warmed up to him,” Sabato says. “He will have to win on his issues and debating ability, and the odds are against him.”
But Matt Lewis, a conservative columnist with Politics Daily, said Gingrich cannot be underestimated.
“First, Gingrich has ideas — and at the end of the day, politics is still about ideas,” Lewis wrote. “Name another (Republican candidate) whose vision turned around his party after decades in the wilderness.”
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Gingrich has nursed presidential ambitions since shortly after he first won election to Congress in 1978.
At one point during his first divorce in 1980, Gingrich told a friend that Jackie, who had been his high-school geometry teacher, was “not young enough or pretty enough” to be married to a president.
He toyed with a White House bid in the 2008 election cycle, but opted to focus instead on public policy advocacy through his American Solutions organization.
Admired in conservative circles for producing extensive treatises on education reform and energy policy, Gingrich’s policy chops are sometimes overshadowed by his appetite for political controversy.
Last September, he drew criticism for saying Obama exhibited “Kenyan, anti-colonial behaviour” as president. In 2009, he apologized for describing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “Latina woman racist.”
Former Canadian ambassador to Washington Frank McKenna also got a mea culpa after Gingrich after falsely claimed in 2005 that “far more of the 9/11 terrorists came across from Canada than from Mexico.”
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